Monthly Archives: October 2012

World Teacher’s Day

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“Take a stand for teachers!” is the slogan of World Teachers’ Day 2012 (5 October) which UNESCO is celebrating along with its partners, the International Labour Organization, UNDP, UNICEF and Education International (EI).

Taking a stand for the teaching profession means providing adequate training, ongoing professional development, and protection for teachers’ rights.

All over the world, a quality education offers hope and the promise of a better standard of living. However, there can be no quality education without competent and motivated teachers.

On this day, we call for teachers to receive supportive environments, adequate quality training as well as ‘safeguards’ for teachers’ rights and responsibilities…We expect a lot from teachers – they, in turn, are right to expect as much from us. This World Teachers’ Day is an opportunity for all to take a stand.

Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General

Teachers are among the many factors that keep children in school and influence learning. They help students think critically, process information from several sources, work cooperatively, tackle problems and make informed choices.

Why take a stand for teachers? Because the profession is losing status in many parts of the world.. World Teachers’ Day calls attention the need to raise the status of the profession – not only for the benefit of teachers and students, but for society as a whole, to acknowledge the crucial role teachers play in building the future.

World Teacher’s Day

Recently found … 10/05/2012

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  • Engaging students in learning

    tags: Student engagement

    • We have become a nation of test-givers, assessing student performance and knowledge in a way that is largely exempt from any kind of real-life application. As important as standard assessments are, relevant and authentic assessments are even more vital. Educators must give assignments that engage students’ curiosity and imagination instead of those that hold little authenticity and are simply to satisfy answers to a test; when they do, students will rise. They will lean into the issues they face in literature and current issues in the world if given the chance, and it is inspiring to see that, when given an opportunity to voice their opinions and share experiences, they can do just that.

       

      In this kind of atmosphere, compliancy  gives way to engagement and it is here where students find their own voices, where they uncover the seeds of their own stories and where they discover themselves. In an educational system that many deem broken, or at best, in need of a serious makeover, there is an obvious choice we can still make as educators. Every day, we can still choose to find a way to make literacy relevant in our students’ lives. In spite of all we face, making this happen is absolutely teacher-dependent.

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

Recently found … 10/03/2012

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  • Guaranteeing Challenging, Engaging, and Intentional Instruction

    tags: Teacher evaluation instruction instructional strategies

    • As Stanford economist Eric Hanushek (2002) has determined, the difference between a good and bad teacher can translate into as much as one year’s worth of additional learning for a student per year. Highly effective teachers—those in the top fifth of all teachers—help students learn, on average, the equivalent of a year and a half of learning in a single year, while those in the bottom fifth only impart an average of a half year of learning.

      • Hattie concludes that “it is teachers using particular teaching methods, teachers with high expectations for all students, and teachers who have created positive student–teacher relationships that are more likely to have the above average effects on student achievement”. Decades of research suggest that the following teacher behaviors, which serve as the touchstones for this chapter, distinguish highly effective teachers: 

      • Highly effective teachers challenge their students. Good teachers not only have high expectations for all students but also challenge them, providing instruction that develops higher-order thinking skills.
      • Highly effective teachers create positive classroom environments. One of the strongest correlates of effective teaching is the strength of relationships teachers develop with students.
      • Highly effective teachers are intentional about their teaching. Good teachers are clear about what they’re trying to teach and then master a broad repertoire of instructional strategies to help students accomplish their learning goals. They know not only what to do to support student learning but how, when, and why to do it.

    • Hattie found that the top teacher–student relationship variables associated with higher levels of student achievement are as follows: 

    • Nondirectivity (i.e., encouraging student-initiated and -regulated activities)
    • Empathy
    • Warmth
    • Encouragement of higher-order thinking

  • Over the past few years, McREL has collected data from more than 27,000 classroom observations that offer a dismaying glimpse into the level of instruction that appears to be occurring in the nation’s classrooms. In well over half of these observations, student learning reflected the two lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy: remembering (25 percent) and understanding (32 percent). Meanwhile, students were developing the higher-order thinking skills of analysis (9 percent), evaluation (3 percent), and creation (4 percent) in less than one-sixth of the classrooms observed.

     

    Certainly, not all learning can focus on higher-order thinking; teachers must develop students’ ability to recall and understand basic concepts before they can move on to more critical thinking. Nonetheless, the fact that so much of what goes on in classrooms appears to be focused on low-level thinking suggests that high expectations and challenging instruction may be the exception, rather than the norm, for most students.

  • Conveying high expectations and building strong relationships with students, while essential to effective teaching, are still not, by themselves, sufficient: they are but two legs of a three-legged stool. The third leg of this stool is intentional use of instructional strategies. Without all three legs, the stool will not stand. It is not enough for teachers to believe their students can succeed and to show them that they care; they must also know what they’re doing in the classroom. Or to be more precise: they must know why they’re doing what they’re doing in the classroom.
  • nine categories of instructional strategies
  • Identifying Similarities and Differences
  • Summarizing and Note Taking
  • Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
  • Homework and Practice
  • Nonlinguistic Representations
  • Cooperative Learning
  • Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
  • Generating and Testing Hypotheses
  • Questions, Cues, and Advance Organizers

    • four key objectives of effective teaching: 

         

      1. To motivate and focus learning
      2. To introduce new knowledge
      3. To deepen and expand knowledge
      4. To check for understanding and guide learning and reteaching

        5.  

       

    • the touchstones of effective teaching: 

    • Setting high expectations and delivering challenging instruction. Teacher expectations for students have a powerful influence on student achievement. The best teachers see intelligence not as something that is innate to, or fixed within, students but as something that can be nurtured and developed.
    • Fostering engaging learning environments and meaningful relationships with students. Effective teachers are warm demanders, pressing students to achieve at high levels while developing strong, nurturing relationships with them.
    • Intentionally matching instructional strategies to learning goals. The best teachers are clear about what they are trying to teach to students. They consistently monitor student progress toward learning goals and use appropriate teaching strategies to close the gap between what students know and what they are expected to learn.

  • NY Teacher Evaluation Tracker

    Gov. Cuomo’s office has put up an interactive map that gives you the status of each district’s plan.

    tags: Teacher evaluation new york

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