Recently found … 06/18/2014

  • tags: higher education educational reform

    • Under the new plan, employees who complete their freshman and sophomore years at ASU Online would receive a major discount, and the remaining two years would be totally free.
    • Sounds great, right? Not according to Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who said she found it “incredibly problematic” that Starbucks has decided to limit its tuition assistance to a single online university.
    • “ASU Online is a profit venture,” said Goldrick-Rab. “And basically, these two businesses have gotten together and created a monopoly on college ventures for Starbucks employees.”
  • tags: Teacher evaluation

    • “Are the majority of the teachers satisfactory and acceptable? I think the answer yes,” said William Mathis, managing director of the National Education Policy Center at University of Colorado Boulder, which has been critical of test-based teacher evaluation. “Where I think it’s a waste of money is they’re trying to get a degree of precision that they cannot get with the measures they’ve got.”

       

      Proponents of the new evaluations have told Hechinger reporters that they were never meant to identify large numbers of bad teachers. Rather, the evaluations were intended to give teachers feedback and help them improve at their jobs.

       

      Pittsburgh School Superintendent Linda Lane told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that one of the goals of the evaluations was to “grow the practice of staff.”

       

      “In order for kids to grow, we have to grow,” she said.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 05/20/2014

  • tags: psychology cognitive dissonance

    • Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.
    • Dissonance can be reduced in one of three ways
    • First, individuals can change one or more of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs etc. so as to make the relationship between the two elements a consonant one.
    • A second (cognitive) method of reducing dissonance is to acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs.
    • A third way to reduce dissonance is to reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e. beliefs, attitudes).
    • dissonance theory does not state that these modes of dissonance reduction will actually work, only that individuals who are in a state of cognitive dissonance will take steps to reduce the extent of their dissonance. One of the points that dissonance theorists are fond of making is that people will go to all sorts of lengths to reduce dissonance.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 05/17/2014

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 05/08/2014

  • tags: critical thinking brainstorm toolbox

    • Brainstorming is an essential part of critical thinking and a tool that people use to invent an idea, find a solution to a problem, or answer a question.
    • Considering a lot of bad ideas before we get to a good one is how brainstorming works. We start by opening our minds and assuming that a lot of failures will be part of the process.
    • 6 Elements of the Perfect Brainstorm

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 05/05/2014

  • tags: literacy portfolios web tools

    • the effect of good portfolios. They craft a narrative of learning, growth and achievement over time.
    • as our focus in the classroom continues to move toward performance-based assessment, the following four web tools will help you and your students to compose narratives

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 05/01/2014

  • tags: reflection instructional strategies learning

    • The end of a class period may often feel like a time to slow down and regroup before another set of students arrives. An alternate view is that these last moments, which usually occur when ideas have had a chance to marinate, can be a time when quiet thinkers finally articulate their ideas and move toward Freire’s idea of concientizacion. In these moments, students can deepen their own learning, and entire groups can share ideas and make meaning of content. Additionally, the time when a large piece of work is submitted is an important opportunity for students to articulate their own learning and self-evaluate in order to improve learning and the quality of their work for the future.
  • tags: educational reform teaching

    • A Third Way poll found that the perception of the teaching profession is particularly dismal among high-achieving undergraduate students: not only do Millennials believe that the profession has become less prestigious over the last few years, these students also view teaching to be out of line with the tenets they most value in a career.

       

      This report proposes 5 big policy shifts at the national level to modernize the teaching profession, from creating a national standard for teaching practice and refusing to subsidize teacher prep programs whose graduates don’t make the grade, to providing immediate student loan relief to teachers, paying and promoting them like professionals, and transitioning them to a modern, portable retirement system.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 04/29/2014

  • tags: instructional strategies note-taking

    • Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking  is less effective than longhand note taking for learning.
    • The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they  may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students  who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.