School Improvement Network

Classroom Management: The Law of Least Intervention

2012-02-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

This week's free PD 360 video is called "The Law of Least Intervention," and I think you'll find it fascinating.

Sometimes it's tough not to react.

Sometimes it's very difficult not to make an example of some kids.

But that's what they want, isn't it? A lesson that I have had to learn in various teaching capacities is that when a student acts out, it is very often because they want attention. So what do I do? In my mind, I correct the problem. But to the student, they get the attention they were looking for. Perhaps it's not positive attention, but if they are willing to misbehave, then they are probably past the point of only seeking positive interaction. So when I react (read: over-react) to classroom behavior problems, these students have achieved their goal. It's not surprising, then, that I have faced classroom behavior problems in the past.

That being said, we still need to address the problem. Sometimes ignoring the student or not adequately addressing his or her issues only leads to more dramatic misbehavior. So how do you strike the right balance?

There is no universal cure for every student's classroom behavior problems, but there are some principals we can follow. I hope you enjoy Classroom Management: The Law of Least Intervention.

Managing Behavior with Trust: An Assistant Principal Weighs In

2012-02-24T08:00:00.001-07:00

Here's a 3-step process and one highly successful assistant principal's experience in helping students resolve their own behavior issues. Curtis Nightingale, assistant principal at Pratt High School in Pratt, Kansas, returns to the School Improvement blog to weigh in on issues faced by administrators and teachers alike.

I believe the key to handling discipline, i.e. “classroom management,” is all about people skills. Conflict will happen—that is something we cannot control. But how we approach that conflict—that, we can control. Refusing to take it personal and making your students your allies rather than your opponents is the place to start.

Moment Management

If you will approach difficult moments (those moments where you as an educator feel challenged by a student) in very much the same way you approach teachable moments (when things don’t go as planned, yet a good educator will find a way to make even that event a learning experience) you can begin to see them more as a positive challenge rather than a negative one.

Helping them to break down the conflict in terms they can understand and the ability to see the other side is key to moment management. Many teachers do this through norm setting exercises, tribal councils, etc. The principle is the same. Helping them to recognize the roles in the room--the staff’s and theirs--can help them better understand the conflict. In other words, basic citizenship.

Building Relationships on Trust

I will admit, I rarely had discipline issues in my class. In fact, I am not sure I ever sent a student to the office—short of a fight in the hallway, of course. Now, that may be due to the fact that at 6’2” and 245 pounds I had a “calming effect” on my students, but I like to believe it had more to do with the relationship I developed with them.

I attempted to foster a “we” atmosphere in my room. “We” were going to attack the subject at hand and “we” were going to figure it out. At times I may have pretended not to know the answers, and quite frankly there were times I did not have to pretend, but I was attempting to foster a trench mentality…us against the world, the computers, the textbook, the test…you get the idea.

Many of my potential discipline issues were solved within the first few weeks of school just through the development of an actual relationship with my students. Through our give and take they didn’t want to let me down, thus there was never an issue of disrespect, defiance, or refusal to do what I asked. Did I have kids that failed my class? Yes. Did I have kids who served detentions for me? You bet. Did kids get mad at me? I am sure they did, but I also had to bar kids from eating lunch in my room with me…some of those same kids! I am a firm believer that there are days where the only positive adult contact some of our kids will have is that contact they have with us educators. Sad, yes; sobering, even more so.

How I Help Students Get Over It

As an assistant principal, I will get kids in my office for various defiance issues, and these are the steps I would follow:

I always ask them their side first. I validate their viewpoint and then ask them what they believe he teacher’s issues to be.
I may then read them the teacher’s comments and we then begin discussing the issue as if they are watching another student involved in the same situation. As we talk through it, I take away emotion, I take away personal viewpoint because of course we can’t know what a stranger is thinking or feeling. As we move through the exercise, they begin to recognize how the teacher/sub/staff member saw their behavior.
We then look at the policy and I quote them the worst-case scenario consequence. I ask them how they would apply this to our subject in question.

The next time I deal with this student, the exercise is much more concise, because I have built both trust and a relationship already. And I have done this with one visit of most often less than 5 – 10 minutes. As a teacher I had them for 85 minutes every other day, all year/semester long.

If handled appropriately, imagine the relationship that could be developed with that amount of time!

Encouraging Entrepreneurial Behaviour at an Early Age

2012-02-23T08:00:00.001-07:00

Here's a guest post that Isaac floated my way, and I must admit, I'm not sure that I agree with him. But rather than censor articles that I don't agree with, I'd like to see what you think. Are math, science, and logic the most essential skills to develop for entrepreneurs? Do children need to develop social behavior in order to succeed? As a creative guy (I'm a writer) who is also quite quirky (I repeat, I'm a writer), I'm inclined to disagree. What do you think?

Success at being an entrepreneur is all about innovation. Being able to see things in a new light by taking a more efficient road leads to a more productive society. This is why it is important to develop entrepreneurial skills at a young age to encourage growth in this area. The more young business people we have in the world, the better off and more efficient society will be as a whole.

People are becoming billionaires at younger ages than ever. The developers of Google were college students when they first came up with the idea for the search engine. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, was a young student at Harvard when he created his revolutionary social media site. Also young entrepreneurs were the makers of YouTube; a new platform for sharing videos online. These new ideas and developments came from minds of the youth and were successfully transformed into very profitable business ventures.

One of the biggest reasons it is possible for young people to be successful in the world of entrepreneurship is because persons are becoming competent with computers at earlier stages in life. Understanding technology is vital for many reasons. It allows for the transition of good thoughts into stellar products. Computers are one of the fastest changing technologies and innovation with software and programs allows for tailoring to fit a niche market. A young entrepreneur will need to be competent with computers to be successful. For this reason, instill a thirst for knowledge in the virtual world and a better society will rise because of it.

Similarly, it is important for young people to have a sound sense of logic. Computers are a manifestation of logic and are capable of only answering yes or no questions. However, asking the right questions enables programs to do incredible things. Math and science are also based in logic and person with good skills this area will have a leg up in the world of business. Young entrepreneurial people will need solid math and logic skills to achieve their life goals.

All of these skills must start developing as soon as possible. This starts with great teachers and instruction. Children with potential usually have early signs of their precociousness. Watch for keen insight, strength in math and science, and a willingness to learn not just for school but also for the love of knowledge. Encourage after school programs that develop logic and reason. Also, stimulating games like chess or bridge are a great way to further increase these skills.

Becoming a young entrepreneur will not be without its difficulties. One of the most priceless assets is life lessons. Many people who begin their business venture will run into situations they have not previously encountered. This is why it is also vital to have good relationships with other business minded people and mentors to encourage a person when faced with a difficult situation. Networking is the key to any successful venture. Knowing when and who to ask for help are essential.

This is why social development is also an important behaviour to develop at an early age. A closed off child who does not like to play with others may show tendencies to isolate in later stages of life. Encourage kids to have strong relationships with friends and family. Engage in conversations with children. One of the biggest mistakes parents can make is being overly dictatorial and not listening to what a child has to say. Instead of exclusively telling a child what to do, ask them what they think or what they have learned. A business person will need to lead; not to follow. Confidence will build in kids who are routinely allowed to express themselves and can do so in an interesting way.

Developing social skills later in life is also important in the world of business. Many people judge a person not only on content but also on professional appearance as well. Take speech classes to gain confidence when speaking in front of large groups. Business etiquette courses are also available. This will allow for young people to become competent and strong minded. First establishing connections and networking with other businesses requires confidence and an ability to present one's ideas not only in a logical manner but in a convincing way as well.

Isaac is a keen business blogger whose favourite writing subjects are successful entrepreneurship, automatic enrollment and social media.

Tier Two Supports: Interventions for At-Risk Students

2012-02-21T08:55:00.004-07:00

Emaley McCulloch from A utism Training Solutions will be giving a free webinar on February 29 as part of the monthly free PD theme here at School Improvement Network. Emaley is writing a few blog posts to help you understand her webinar topic, Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports.

And here's a hint for ya--it's not just for children with autism, and it's essential for classroom management. Enjoy!

image courtesy of fabianramirez.com

Do you usually have students in your class that need that extra nudge, reminder or encouragement? You know, those students that you usually put right in from of your desk so you can keep a good eye on them? These students often fall into the category of tier two on the Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) continuum.

As you may recall, the continuum of positive behavior supports has three tiers. PBIS expects 90% of students to respond effectively to tier-three interventions but about 10-15% of students will fall into an at-risk category that may need additional support and intervention. So if you have a class of 20 students, two or three of your students may need tier-two interventions. These interventions are often delivered in small groups (e.g. group speech sessions, small group reading instruction, ESL groups, social skills groups etc.). The purpose of tier- two interventions is to be proactive and to prevent the student from falling further behind his peers academically, behaviorally and socially.

Here are some evidenced-based tier-two interventions.

Cuing and Group Social Skills Instruction

Students who have difficulty learning in a group setting (e.g. students who talk out of turn, don’t pay attention, disrupt others) can work on appropriate classroom behaviors in a small group. The small group sessions focus on enhancing listening skills and impulse control. The student’s goals are clearly given and stated in positive terms (e.g. raise your hand to talk). The teacher uses a cueing procedure that requires the group to self evaluate their progress on reaching the goals. Students receive positive reinforcement for performing identified behavior.

Behavior Education Program

The Behavior Education Program (BEP) is a behavioral intervention for at risk students that requires that they monitor their behaviors by doing a daily check-in, checkout systems. Students attend daily meetings with an adult before and after school to review goals and monitor their progress. Students are also required to check-in with teachers immediately after class to receive immediate feedback and a daily performance report from the teacher. The report is sent home for the parent to sign and the student receives positive reinforcement for appropriate social skills.

BEP Overview:
http://www.nhcebis.seresc.net/document/filename/61/NHBEPTraining.Hawken.pdf

BEP Forms:
http://www.nhcebis.seresc.net/behavior_education_program(bep)

Practical Functional Behavior Assessments (FBA)

The primary goal of an FBA is to guide the development of effective positive interventions based on the functions of behavior (e.g. escape, attention, access to items, access to self stimulation) (Horner, 1994) Interventions based on the FBA result in significant change in student behavior (Carr et al.., 1999; Ingram, Lewis-Palmer, & Sugai, 2005) Practical FBAs involve simple and realistic team-driven assessment and intervention strategies. Trained school-based personnel can do it.
The steps of a Practical FBA are:

Identify that an FBA needs to be done
Make an observable and measurable definition of the problem behavior
Gather information on the behavior
Prioritize what behavior needs attention first
Collect data on the antecedents and consequences of the problem behavior in several environments
Make a functional hypothesis of what the function(s) is/are, the triggers and what is supporting the behavior.
Last BUT NOT LEAST, create a plan that utilizes proactive procedures, teaches replacement behavior and outlines how everyone will respond to the behavior.

Here is a video about an FBA and what steps it takes to do one.

http://www.autismtrainingsolutions.com/fba-toolkit-excercise-1

Here is an FBA Toolkit
http://www.autismtrainingsolutions.com/content/fba-tool-kit

Learn more about positive behavior intervention and supports (PBIS) at Emaley's free webinar on February 29!

Students Want Discipline (they just don't know how to say it)

2012-02-17T08:00:00.004-07:00

As a former street cop and narcotics detective, Curtis Nightingale is no ordinary administrator. Nightingale is now an assistant principal in Pratt, Kansas, who is armed with an arsenal of child behavior strategies from his previous line of work. This is a peer who knows firsthand how to help children find themselves.

Children truly want discipline in their lives.

I know, this statement seems overly optimistic, but I honestly believe this to be true. While to us “discipline” means expectations and consequences, to students “discipline” means structure, attention, and connection. Many of our students lack this type of construct in their home lives. Whether through a single-‐parent working

situation, poor parenting skills, or the dreaded friend-‐parent relationship, many children lack, yet need and want boundaries.

Armed with this philosophy, how do we as educators approach setting and enforcing realistic boundaries with some of the most difficult students we have in class? I believe the answer lies in our ability to be firm, fair and consistent while making sure they know we care through the “connection” or relationships we build with them.

Pratt High School

Now, before you think I am one of those bleeding heart, mamsy-‐pamsy guys I will tell you that education is a second career field for me; my first was in law enforcement. Whether as a street cop, a narcotics detective, or later as an administrator I found out fairly quickly that you would not get far in that profession without an ability to build relationships quickly. The ability to separate the person from the conduct, and to not judge was as much a survival tool as it was an investigative one. When I traded in the handcuffs for the detention list, I found that many of these same instincts were applicable. The ability to identify with what is going on with a student before you lay into them for missing a detention or being rude to a staff member is important.

Let me emphasize, I am not condoning the behavior at all. In fact, if you lay the groundwork correctly they will actually explain to you how wrong their conduct was and more often than not choose a far more aggressive consequence than the one you had in mind—you will actually have to negotiate them down from their stiff penalty to your own. Done correctly, they may even thank you for the detention/suspension they end up with. But before we get there, how can we minimize those conversations? It is as simple as moment management.

A friend and colleague of mine developed a fantastic discipline/facility management system that he literally travels the country sharing and training educators in. And although I have never taken his course, he and I were discussing classroom management one time and he said something to me that really rang true to my own philosophy. To paraphrase him, he mentioned instead of trying to think of managing an entire class, or an entire day, if teachers could just learn to manage those critical moments it could drastically reduce not only their stress levels, but also their classroom behavior issues as well. Critical moments…you know the ones. You give an instruction; Johnny challenges you…this is a moment.

In our next installment we will discuss ways we can approach these difficult moments and maintain composure while still addressing he behavior and showing the student that rather than it being him/her versus you, it is actually you and the student versus the behavior.

Don't miss the free webinar on February 29th at 1:00 p.m. EST with Autism Training Solutions! Child behavior expert Emaley McCulloch will present "Training Educators to Do Behavior Assessments." By the end of the webinar, participants will be able to:

Define and understand a range of student behaviors, and recognize why students are acting out
Determine the psychological and situational motivations behind student behavior
Use new understanding to better manage the classroom environment

3-Minute Classroom Management

2012-02-15T08:12:00.002-07:00

Robert O'Brien is an exceptional principal in Spencer, MA. He shares an experience here that helped one of his teachers regain control of a particularly unruly classroom. His experience is as illuminating as it is simple.

During my first year as an administrator, I was assigned to observe a new teacher to our high school. Her resume, recommendations, and job history made her appear to be the perfect candidate. However, when classes started, students from her class began to trickle to the office, either being “thrown out” or leaving of their own accord. I was instructed to investigate.

She had been a teacher for approximately five years—why was she having so much trouble?

I entered the class early and watched students come in, many after the bell. She stayed seated at her desk, and waited for the students to take their seats. This was a grade eleven American Literature class, a graduation requirement. The students jostled, slowly becoming aware that the assistant principal was in their classroom, and finally settled down.

After an agonizingly long attendance called, the teacher began the lesson, still sitting behind her desk, told the students to go to a table at the front of the classroom. There where five stacks of papers; the students were instructed to take one page from each pile, staple them together, and return to their desks. What ensued was chaos. All the students approached the table at the same times, the papers soon became a pile of disarray, and pushing and shoving broke out over the staplers.

I sat quietly, now knowing why she had so much difficulty.

Even before the class started, effective teachers have things in order. If a class is working on a five page packet, they are ready to go before class starts. An activator is placed on the board, with the expectation that the students begin working as soon as they walk into class. The teacher should meet the students at the door, offering words of encouragement and appropriate salutation while watching both the hallway and her classroom. When the bell rings, she stands among the students, using her personal space to prevent any disruptions. Attendance can be taken with an old fashioned seating chart. And never, ever have the students collate their own papers. The class is orderly and student are learning. The teacher is stress free and the students are on task.

What a difference three minutes can make.

Define and understand a range of student behaviors, and recognize why students are acting out
Determine the psychological and situational motivations behind student behavior
Use new understanding to better manage the classroom environment

Potential and Pitfalls of Students with Tech

2012-02-14T10:29:00.004-07:00

We can't help it--our students all have access to technology that we never even dreamed of. As schools as classes move toward embracing students with iPads and other gadgets, a reflective individual known as Jessica S. emailed me with her thoughts.

I hope you enjoy this guest post!

Everywhere you turn technology appears to have firmly entrenched itself in most of our everyday conveniences. While some of these technological advantages are seemingly benign and geared to help us streamline tedious or time-consuming tasks, technology also manages to create situations that can be potentially detrimental or hazardous. To what extent is largely determined by the user who is typically able to gauge these risks and make educated decisions regarding his or her use of them. However, for young kids making these decisions it is not as easy for them to determine how much is too much of a good thing.

Parents Guidance: A Double-Edged Sword

Determining what technologies are appropriate for young children is obviously a task designated for parents and guardians but there is a problematic reality present in these guiding decisions. Children and young adults are typically better versed in new technology than the parents and adults in their life.

Unlike older adults or even adults from just the next generation, children are often born into technology, exposed from a very early age to some of the most technologically advanced gadgets available on the market. Unfortunately kids are not going on the internet to compare car insurance rates or researching additional disability insurance protection, they are going on to the internet to connect to the outside world. The internet now provides an important facet of socialization and context for the world around them.

How then can parents begin to conceive of what technologies are appropriate when they themselves may have a very basic or inadequate understanding of them? Parents and guardians can begin by asking themselves these basic questions:

How comfortable or knowledgeable am I in monitoring what my kids look at or have access to online?
Do I have the ability or know-how to restrict my children’s phone calls or text messages?
Do I know enough about laptops, computers, smart phones, or other gadgets to determine my children’s appropriate use of them?

If the answer to these questions is “no” parents and guardians have a difficult decision to make.

The Real Risk to Children

So what kind of risks are children really facing in today’s technologically savvy world? Most of the time we think the risks are from sexually inappropriate materials but the truth is the real risk to children is far greater and may come from a source much closer to home.

Children at Risk in Multiple Ways

Cyberbullying via chat rooms, texting, and social networking sites
Viruses and malware designed to extract sensitive information from your computer
Exploitation or manipulation by “friends,” adults, or strangers
Financial exploitation or theft if they have access to finances
Exposure to pornography, violence, and inappropriate materials
Exploitation by radical “social groups,” cults, or trendy fads
Access to incorrect and potentially harmful information especially in regards to anorexia, bulimia, and self-mutilation

Allowing Access to today’s Technology

Fortunately, parents and guardians do not have to despair. Many resources, programs, and educational material exist for those looking to make sure their kids can access today’s technology safely and in an appropriate way.

Resources include

Kid’s Health.org offers a guide to “internet safety”
Common Sense Media.com hosts an excellent database of informational videos and articles on being cyber smart
Safe Kids.com offers “A Parent’s Guide to Facebook”

These resources are just a few of the online guides and services available to parents and guardians. But the really effective response may stem from sources closer to home.

For questions or more information feel free to contact

Your children’s school – ask about what kind of safeguards are in place for children using computers and internet
The local police department can often provide tips and tools for parents looking to safeguard their children
Your internet provider, cell phone company, and cable company usually provide special parental controls to help parents monitor and restrict activity

Another less obvious resource but no less important are other parents and guardians. Getting together with the parents of your children’s friends is a great way to share strategies in addition to establishing expectations. Often children will go to other houses to gain access to inappropriate material.

Make sure all parents are on the same page and there is a game plan in place should a parent discover either child is gaining access to unwanted media or engaging in inappropriate behaviors.

The real question of whether young kids should have access to today’s technology is a complex one. With technology making its way into schools, gaming arenas, and in the home, shielding kids from all technology is becoming more and more difficult. The true answer is every parent and guardian must make the personal decision of how much is too much of a good thing.

New Teachers Know It All

2012-02-13T08:57:00.002-07:00

Here's a guest post from Deia Sanders, a teacher from Mendenhall Jr. High in Mendenhall, MS!

As the school year quickly approached, we were in our staff development meetings staring at familiar faces we had missed all summer and excited about the new faces that had joined our team. It was my turn to speak. I had gone from a classroom teacher to the new title of Master Teacher. Part of my new duties now included professional development and new teacher induction. Today’s talk was to be about Classroom Procedures.

As I stood and presented about the procedures for entering the class, going to the restroom, leaving class, getting in groups, going to the bus, riding the bus, etc… I could see on the new teacher’s faces that in their mind this was overkill. And when I said this needed to be rehearsed for the first couple of weeks of school, I could feel the deep breaths of doubt exhale from their bodies.

Actually, I guess everyone could feel it, because that’s when a second-year teacher I had mentored stood up and said “I know this sounds like too many procedures, and I doubted it when she tried to tell me this last year, but I didn’t do these things and I paid for it all year.” Yes!! That was the testimony I needed to get buy-in from these teachers… or so I thought.

As the first day came the nervous first year teachers were following the Power Points on procedures and practicing in the classrooms and halls. I was so proud to see the progress. But by day 3 and 4 their routines were waning and their thoughts had turned in to trusting these nice, quiet junior high kids in their classrooms. It was a stark contrast from the experienced teachers who were turning their class around for more practice when procedures were broken, correcting mistakes, and addressing issues before they happened.

As the year progressed, the new teachers who doubted the importance of drilling procedures and expectations for two weeks, showed their inexperience with their loud classrooms, low homework return, and chaotic lines as they trekked back and forth to the cafeteria and assemblies. It reminded me of warnings from my parents about my own behavior as a child, which I didn’t heed, and eventually felt the consequences of. As much as we tried to help the teachers regain control, the expectations are set with the first impression, and it’s difficult to recover when they don’t take you serious.

Just the other day I was talking to a new teacher who was reflecting on his experience so far this year. He was sharing that next year he would start out like we suggested, and had learned his lesson. It seemed like the appropriate time to warn him about “spring fever” and how wild the kids would get as the weather warmed. Once again I was given that same look of doubt that they had with my procedure warnings in the beginning, and again I related to how my parents probably felt when I was a teenager and thought I knew it all. I immediately knew that once again they would have to walk through the fire to feel the flame.

So… it’s almost March and here we go again!

The Continuum of Positive Behavior Intervention and Support: Tier One Supports

2012-02-10T08:00:00.009-07:00

Emaley McCulloch from Autism Training Solutions will be giving a free webinar on February 29 as part of the monthly free PD theme here at School Improvement Network. Emaley is writing a few blog posts to help you understand her webinar topic, Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports.

And here's a hint for ya--it's not just for children with autism, and it's essential for classroom management. Enjoy!

The Continuum of Positive Behavior Intervention and Support: Tier One Supports

PBIS is organized into a continuum in which students receive levels of support based on their social and behavioral responsiveness to intervention. Not all students will respond the way we may want or expect them to when using school wide or classroom management strategies. Additional interventions and supports may need to be in place for some individuals. For example, the ability to earn a star on a chart may not be sufficient reinforcement for Emily to finish or remember her homework. She may need a more individualized incentive program.

A three-tiered prevention logic lends the flexibility to provide broad interventions for most students, provide additional supports for some and, intensive and highly individualized supports for few. PBIS is related to Response to Intervention (RtI) in this way. Literacy and numeracy implementation frameworks are examples of the application of RtI for academic behavior, and PBIS is an example of the application of RtI for social behavior (PBIS Center, 2009).

PBIS is about improving classroom and school climate by making it positive, strengths focused and maximizing academic achievement by nurturing behaviors that support learning.

What are some PBIS Practices that work for most students?

Make behavioral expectations for school and classroom positive and clear. (e.g., Say, “Clean up after yourself” instead of “Don’t leave your trash around”)
Defining and teaching classroom routines (e.g., establish a signal, such as an auditory cue, for obtaining class attention)
Establish self-management routines (e.g., time to fill out a checklist of work tasks to complete)
Establish a positive environment (e.g., catch them being good! Five positive comments for every correction)
Create a functional, physical layout in the classroom (e.g., classroom activities have locations, teacher has clear view of whole class, traffic patterns/transitions are established)
Maximize engagement (e.g., opportunities for student responses 0.5/min)
Promote success (e.g., adaptations available to match students ability)
Utilize hierarchy of responses to problem behavior (e.g., have specific behavior assessments and plans for individuals whose behavior impedes their learning or the learning of others)
Use various modes of instruction
Ensure systems are available for educators to request behavioral assistance

A.W. Todd , Rob Horner, George Sugai, University of Oregon May 2004

We can't, and it's the hardest part.

2012-02-08T08:00:00.005-07:00

Check in at the webinar’s page for Autism Training Solutions free webinar, “Training Educators to Do Behavior Assessments” on February 29!

It’s me, Jared Heath, again. There’s something you’ve got to know about School Improvement Network and February’s free PD theme, “Behavior and Classroom Management: Make It Work, Make It Last.” To put it simply, we can’t change student behavior. Here's why.

I know we’ve talked a lot about the great advances students have made when teachers use PD 360. I’ve written about it in many places, and I’m proud to work for this company because of it. But whether we’re talking about student behavior, differentiated education, or test scores, it really isn’t PD 360 or School Improvement Network making those changes.

I used to think it was teachers who made the difference. But that’s not really true, either. Is it? And teaching something that you know is so important and watching the concepts and principles bounce right off their heads is the hardest part of teaching that I can fathom.

When I taught, I took too much credit.

I taught ESL classes, and my students were from all over the world. In one class, I had students from Brazil, Japan, China (Cantonese speaking), Taiwan, and several Central American countries. Having been conversational in German, French, Chinese, and Spanish at various points of my life, I understood the frustrations of learning a new language, and as a student of the English language and English literature, I also understood the capricious nature of my native language. I was armed and ready to help these students learn English.

And they did. I was recognized early on for the advances that my students made. I didn’t understand then what that truly meant—I was recognized for the advances that my students made. Now as I look back, I see that any other organization would have had those 20 – 30 students howling for my blood as I received recognition for their accomplishments.

When I didn’t do well in school as a youngster, I also had a bad habit of giving teachers too much credit—it was somehow their fault when I didn’t perform as well as I wanted to.

The truth is that education belongs to the student. As teachers, we are facilitators. As a company, School Improvement Network is a supporter. But the only person who can decide what to do with the training given to her is the little girl with her new pink backpack and her open mind.

February’s free PD theme on schoolimprovement.com is built to help you give students what they need. Many of our students need the right tools to start building better behavior, and it is up to us to provide those tools. But if you will allow me to wax optimistic and don my rose-colored glasses, I feel that we need to believe in kids just a little more and give them a bit more credit.

I would never diminish our roles as educators. I simply discovered as I reflected on my time as a teacher that the more my students knew that I believed in them, the more they learned. And perhaps they even became so much more, because they believed in themselves, too.

What experiences do you have where your students felt empowered? Have you had experiences where the message didn’t get through, or worse, it blew up in your face?

Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Check in at the webinar’s page for Autism Training Solutions free webinar, “Training Educators to Do Teacher Evaluations” on February 29!

To what degree is your school implementing Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS)?

2012-02-06T08:41:00.008-07:00

And here's a hint for ya--it's not just for children with autism, and it's essential for classroom management. Enjoy!

The word Positive in Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) encapsulates the whole purpose and aim of PBIS in schools.

Past behavior management models lacked effectiveness because they were –

· Reactive

· Focused on punishment

· Poorly implemented

Through PBIS, team members can take a proactive approach. They can reduce problem behaviors by making pro-social and pro-learning behaviors easy and rewarding for both teachers and students. Thus, teaching positive behavior as relentlessly as we teach reading or other academic content is the ultimate act of prevention, promise, and power underlying PBIS (Algozzine, Wang & Violette, 2011).

Although PBIS is an evidenced-based intervention, it is not a curriculum. PBIS is a framework for ensuring that all students have access to the most effective and accurately implemented instructional and behavior package possible.

The framework consists of three elements to achieve these outcomes:

Supporting staff behavior through school-wide systems
Supporting student behavior through evidence-based practices and
Supporting decision making through data

Framework of PBIS

Systems

The systems that are important in supporting the implementation of PBIS are:

· Universal screening and assessment (http://www.apbs.org/Archives/Conferences/sixthconference/files/E4%20Breen%20et%20al.pdf, http://www.apbs.org/files/fbapractice.pdf)

· Commitment to staff training in evidenced-based interventions (http://www.autismtrainingsolutions.com/autism-training-school-benefits)

· Team-based collaboration (http://www.apbs.org/files/teamingpractice.pdf)

· Fidelity measures (http://www.apbs.org/Archives/Conferences/8thconference/files/E8-Kelk11.pdf )

· Progress monitoring (http://www.behaviortrackerpro.com/ )

· Data-based decisions (http://apbs.org/Archives/Conferences/fourthconference/Files/Riffel_L_no1.pdf )

Evidenced-Based Practices

The practices that are important for supporting the implementation of PBIS are:

· Functional Behavior Assessment (http://www.autismtrainingsolutions.com/content/fba-tool-kit )

· Positive Behavior Support Planning (use of reinforcement and teaching meaningful replacement behaviors)

· Using research-based teaching procedures and curriculum (http://www.nationalautismcenter.org)

· Establish working conditions that support and promote strengths and talents of staff (http://www.apbs.org/files/systemschange.pdf )

· Implement practices such as coaching, co-teaching, mentoring and self-assessment to measure fidelity of implementation (http://www.apbs.org/Archives/Conferences/seventhconference/files/F7_Basu.pdf )

Data-Based Decisions

The data that are important for supporting the implementation of PBIS are:

· Academic assessments and progress monitoring

· Operational defined behavior is measured over time in multiple settings

· Quality of life measures (http://www.beachcenter.org/resource_library/beach_resource_detail_page.aspx?intResourceID=2481&Type=Tool )

What stage in the implementation process of PBIS are you in?

Here is a full step-by-step guide to implementing PBIS in your school

http://www.osepideasthatwork.org/toolkit/pdf/SchoolwideBehaviorSupport.pdf

Behavior and Classroom Management: Make It Work, Make It Last

2012-02-03T08:00:00.006-07:00

Hi there, loyal blog readers! It's Jared Heath here with School Improvement Network. By now, many of you have seen the link our website that invites you to be a guest blogger. That's a fun little part of a new way we're helping educators now, but it's only a small part. I'd like to break that corporate image for a minute and talk to you about what we're doing each month.

Free PD

Sure, PD 360 is supporting teachers and students in phenomenal ways. It's incredibly inexpensive for your schools, and it's proven to be more effective than even I imagined (and I'm a marketing guy). But our passion truly is supporting teachers, helping students, and improving schools, and we felt like we could do a little more to help you.

From that idea sprang what we now offer on our new website as "Free PD." Every month has a specific theme, and February's theme is "Behavior and Classroom Management: Make It Work, Make It Last." Here at the inception of this initiative (we just started in January), we are offering the following free resources:

Free PD 360 videos
Blog posts that discuss the topic in depth (that's where you come in)
Free monthly webinars
Monthly ebooks (coming soon)
SchoolCasts ~~(coming soon)~~ NOW HERE!

Are you ready for a confession? Me, I'm a high school dropout. Technically. It's not that I didn't have teachers who cared about me, and it's not that I didn't have the capacity. But I knew as a 17-year-old kid that there had to be more to education than what I experienced. I work at School Improvement Network, because I believe in educators. I believe in you. And this is what I can do to help you. [But don't worry--that story ends well. I got my GED, went to college, married a beautiful lady, and started a family. :) ]

Free PD 360 Videos

Like I said earlier, PD 360's differentiated training is doing wonders in schools all around the world. That's why we're releasing one free video from the PD 360 library every week--but be sure to catch it before the next week, because we replace it with a new one every Monday morning (or afternoon). Come visit our Free Video Blog, comment on the video, and for heaven's sake, start a conversation about it. No one is as good at this teaching thing as you.

Blog and Guest Blog Posts

You are the expert--no one knows what it is like to teach in your classroom in your school under your circumstances like you do. And it's not just teachers. Administrators have a lot to tell us about their experiences and how they are making the machine roll. We can tell you anything we want, but you'd probably rather hear it from your peers. We have this blog, and we also write a Common Core 360 blog. Drop by each to see what's going on. We post to each several times a week, and we hope we can answer your needs.

An educator emailed me a few weeks ago, shaming me for asking you to do the guest blog posts for free. That's actually not true. We do giveaways every month for educators who write a guest post for us. For the month of February, EVERY educator who blogs for us gets an ENTIRE YEAR of Common Core 360 for free. In the month of March, EVERY educator who blogs for us gets FREE registration for the School Improvement Innovation Summit.

Send me an email at jared.heath@schoolimprovement.com if you'd like more info.

Webinars

Our partners are just as excited about helping you as we are. At the end of every month, you have a chance to sit in on a free webinar featuring people who do this stuff professionally. In February, you'll hear from the folks at Autism Training Solutions (and when I say they're changing the world, I mean it).

If you can't catch the webinar, we do a pretty good job at posting the video within a couple of weeks for you to watch at your leisure.

SchoolCasts and eBooks

SchoolCasts are audio recordings of webinars and PD 360 videos that you will be able to download and listen to on your commute or on your morning jog. We're working on making these available to you as soon as possible.

At the end of every month, there's a lot of content that we've gathered for these themes. We put it all together into an ebook and make it available to you--again, entirely free. We'll have January's ebook out (Common Core: Supporting the Whole Teacher and Student) within the next couple of weeks.

The Wrap Up

I invite you to avail yourself of these resources. They are free so that you can use them in your classroom and your profession. Come around every week for the video, email me your blog posts so that I can post them, and enjoy what I am working avidly on making one of the largest caches of free professional development resources.

Our students need you. This is one way we can help you meet their needs.

From the Source: A High School Student Speaks Out

2012-02-02T16:16:00.001-07:00

High school senior Haylee Wilkes of Brighton High School, Utah, joined the content department here at School Improvement Network in a job shadowing event this morning. While she was here, she wrote a blog post for you, dear readers. I'll be honest--I was impressed with how quickly she understood and applied the principles my colleague and I gave her. She seemed like an astute young lady with a bright future.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read her post. Though not vindictive (despite a rather provocative title), Haylee's post spells out the failure she felt as she confesses to having received (or earned?) a 22 on the ACT. "Average" and "mediocre" were how she described herself. I remember well the days that my own perception of a person was largely--and wrongly--dependent on their GPA and ACT. My perception changed when I found out that my wife, a person much more intelligent than I am, has an ACT score 8 points below mine. But we don't all have the benefit of such a changed perspective.

Did Haylee earn a 22, or did she receive it? We talk about college and career ready, but do we help our students feel college and career capable? And though education is not about "feeling good," what obligation do we have to help students build a self-perception and self-confidence to do what they can obviously do well?

Haylee is a bright young lady, though her standardized test scores don't reflect her view of "smart." Learn more over on our Common Core 360 blog where Haylee posted her experience.

Part 2: "Our Best Shot at Creating [a] Common Vision"

2012-02-01T08:00:00.003-07:00

Follow up from Monday's post:

"This process should ensure that students reach success," Karen Kidwell explains.

But ensuring success is difficult--almost as difficult as helping teachers throughout the system buy into such a romantic view of education. Ensure? How can we really ensure success? Karen continues:

"Of course, woven through all of that is, what does effective practice look like on a day-to-day basis? And so, we have been working for some years in our state to develop the set of characteristics that really define highly effective teaching in learning practices. We needed a venue where we could bring people together in larger groups and give them time to work with their peers in their own districts.

“This system of networks is going to be our best shot at creating this common vision,” says Kidwell, “but also sharing the wealth of learning that we have in our state and the wealth of expertise that we have at every level, from the teacher leader to the superintendent. You can see this occurring in the following clip of Seth Hunter presiding over a leadership meeting.”

“So,” Hunter says to his math leadership network, “welcome to the March, OVEC math leader meeting. This is actually our last meeting for year one. Your feedback has told us that you wanted to spend more time looking at the Standards. So, we have blocked out essentially the first two hours of today to spend time looking at some more standards.”

“This video depicts the content leadership network, which met eight times over the course of year one and this was our wrap-up meeting for that year,” he describes. “During the meeting we spent a big chunk in the morning looking at the Standards and asking ourselves, what, within a grade or within a course, would be a reasonable sequence to put into place.”

“Leaders like Seth are the specialists that come in to us and want our expertise as teachers,” says Megan Hearn, an algebra teacher. “They know the Standards, they know what they’re looking for. They’re there and then they come to us and they want to know: “You being a classroom teacher who’s going to be teaching this, tell me what you think. It’s been wonderful.”

“These initial meetings also represent a brainstorming stage,” Hunter says. “At this point, we get it all out. So this is where the districts get to adjust what’s happening and at the state level, through the networks, to meet the needs within their context, and this is where I think that Kentucky is really getting it right in terms of scaling this work up.”

“It’s really beneficial,” says algebra teacher Michelle Hawkins, “in that you get a network of teachers yourself to look at the Standards, to bounce ideas off of one another, to talk about the struggles that your district’s facing. I feel very comfortable with what we’ve done, with the deconstruction. I feel very comfortable with the help that we’ve gotten and the feedback that we’ve gotten.”

Watch the entire video--entirely FREE--on our website. School Improvement Network is releasing videos every week from its vast library for public consumption. No catch. No gimmicks. Just quality, differentiated PD. Find out more by visiting www.schoolimprovement.com/pd360-free-pd.

Part 1: Content Leaders Network

2012-01-30T09:39:00.003-07:00

Watch the Common Core 360 video "Content Leaders Network" FREE on our website! Every week, we are releasing one free video from our on-demand PD library of differentiated training. No catch. No gimmicks. Just free PD.

Stay tuned for more FREE professional development resources from your #1 source of on-demand training, School Improvement Network.

The following is an excerpt from a Common Core 360 video.

We have established a strong system for helping teachers and educators get familiar with the new Common Core Standards here in Kentucky,” says Felicia Cumings Smith, associate commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Education. Our system will also help them understand the Standards deeply so that we can translate that to teaching and learning in the classroom.

“Senate Bill l really required us to look at this whole system between assessment, instruction and new standards,” adds Karen Kidwell, project manager for Kentucky’s System of Leadership Networks. “We knew that we really needed a very systemic model that would involve all the key players. We really have to take our time because as much as you would like for things to just happen, you have to give people processing time, you have to give them struggle time so that we can learn from that and make adjustments.

“The goal of our leadership networks,” explains Smith, “is indeed to build capacity at the district level because we know they need to take ownership.”

“We decided when we started the work with our leadership networks that we really needed to find the best facilitators possible to make these conversations happen, to share strategies,” says Kidwell.

“Through a very careful screening and interviewing process, we got sixteen of probably the best and brightest mathematics and English language arts educators in the state,” Kidwell continues. “They work with clusters of about twenty to maybe twenty-five districts each and so they run the networks for the teacher leaders, but they also spend their time in between network meetings working directly in the districts. This is the critical work that will move implementation of the core academic standards across our state.”

Seth Hunter, Math Specialist for the Kentucky Department of Education explains how the subject specialists went about directing their leadership networks.

“Once a month,” says Hunter, “all of the math specialists and language arts specialists come together under the facilitation of Karen Kidwell. Karen, together with the specialists, interprets the broad goals laid out in Senate Bill I into actionable items for the network meetings. So, we’re all a part of the planning team and it’s really a very empowering process for me personally.

“We established, basically, a large goal for the work of the networks,” Karen remarks. “We see it as at least a three-year process. The first goal was to really interpret the Standards to make sure that everyone is really clear what do these standards really imply for both teaching and learning and assessment purposes.”

“Our next goal is then, if you understand those standards how you try to translate those into targets that students can see and begin to reach,” Karen continues to explain. “After that, we want to develop materials and resources teachers already have, and we want them to ask themselves, “do these truly align to and support the new Standards?” and if not, “where can we go to find resources and tools that really do support the new Standards?” With these decisions made, teachers will then develop local assessments that they can use daily based on those learning targets for kids around these Standards so that they know, on a day-to-day basis, that their kids are on track to be successful with the Standards. If they’re not, they can intervene right away in a meaningful way to keep the kids motivated and continuing to learn.”

Save a seat at Dr. Lisa Leith's webinar TOMORROW entitled "Common Core Standards: Equity and Opportunity." Register here!

Attention Spans: The HDMI Cable Between You and Your Students

2012-01-24T07:00:00.003-07:00

***Don’t miss Dr. Lisa Leith’s webinar, “Common Core Standards: Equity and Opportunities” on January 31^st!***

Guest post by Dr. Lisanne Pluth, PhD

Attention spans or a lack of focused attention is something that hampers almost every educator in the K-12 grades. A good attention span is like a high tech LED HDMI cable between the teacher and the student. This is a powerful connection and it is essential to learning. Class sizes are growing due to tight budgets making it increasingly difficult to get and keep students’ attention. Attention spans may also be shrinking due to the influence of media and television on the brains of small children. Simply put, without adequate attention spans it is often difficult to get anything done in the classroom.

Remove or Limit Distractions

Many children, no matter what their age have never been shown how to focus their attention. Younger children are more prone to easy distraction but even children in the 10-12^th grades may become easily distracted and this can negatively affect their ability to focus and learn new tasks.

One way to increase attention spans is to make students aware of the powerful impact distractions can have on their performance both in the classroom and at home. By simply setting up roll play situations where students are given a simple task and then are constantly interrupted by other students it is possible to help students become aware of distractions. Using stopwatches to time undistracted vs. interrupted performance tasks easily helps students see the difference in their own learning abilities when distracted. Roll play can be made fun with the introduction of real life distractions such as people, cell phones and music.

Increase Motivation

One of the central reasons children often lose attention is that there is a significant lack of motivation to maintain focus. Children seldom have attention span problems with computer games because the games are constantly giving the child positive reinforcement in the form of winning rounds and points to continue playing the game. Most games are also set to cycle at quick intervals so that positive reinforcement comes quickly. Moreover, additional challenges always follow positive reinforcement.

Using this same plan of attack will often work well with students that have trouble maintaining focus. The motivation and positive reinforcement can take many forms including praise for good work, scores, extra playtime and funny jokes. Different educators use rewards in a variety of ways to keep the game going. The key here is to follow the gaming framework and keep momentum moving.

Breaking Tasks into Chunks

Any teacher who has taught for a long time automatically divides and conquers. If there is a set curriculum that is too large they will automatically break it down into appropriate chucks for their students. Sometimes just reorganizing a complicated or tedious section of the curriculum makes it much more manageable. When tasks seem possible it is much easier for students to focus and concentrate their attention.

Laughing is Fun but Learning is Serious Business

Teachers are constantly balancing teaching and learning with keeping control of the classroom. Sometimes a serious voice is very helpful for increasing focus and maintaining attention from a group of students. Instilling urgency is another way to focus attention. Timed performance followed by reward helps students learn how to focus their attention and stay motivated while learning.

Learning how to focus and lengthen one’s attention span is one of the most important and least taught skills in K-12 education. By making your students aware of their own power to focus educators can give them a skill that will carry them forward to be successful in college and throughout life.

Dr. Lisanne Pluth, PhD works as a Broadcast Manager for Resident Hall Linens. Her experience also includes teaching at both the University of Kansas and the University of San Diego.

***Register TODAY for Dr. Lisa Leith’s webinar, “Common Core Standards: Equity and Opportunities” on Jan 31^st!***

Online Learning Fills Void for Early Readers

2012-01-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

While not every teacher is embracing the increase of technology in classrooms, other teachers would say technology is making all the difference. It’s not necessarily that the programs and apps found on computers and mobile devices are “better” than the face-to-face instruction in the classroom, it’s that technology is providing a solution where there was no solution before.

First-grade classes at Public School 55 in the South Bronx in New York are experiencing a technology-based solution firsthand. Because of a remote tutoring program sponsored by JPMorgan Chase, students at P.S. 55 are receiving reading help from volunteers online. While one could argue that it’s not as good as having a volunteer present in the classroom to help with reading, online volunteers offering to help gives more help to the students than no volunteer at all.

The program was created by Seth Weinberger, a 56-year-old former technology lawyer from Evanston, Ill., and the founder of Innovations for Learning, a 19-year-old nonprofit organization that has set its sights on raising persistently low reading scores among the nation’s poorest children. The tutoring software is being tried by over 550 volunteers in 60 low-performing classrooms in Chicago, Detroit, Miami and Washington, as well as at P.S. 55, where in 2010, only 15 percent of the third graders passed the state English exam.

To learn more, read the full article here.

Are online volunteers a step in the right direction for schools who struggle receiving help with tutoring?

Common Core Standards - The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

2012-01-20T09:53:00.001-07:00

***Don’t miss Dr. Lisa Leith’s webinar, “Common Core Standards: Equity and Opportunities” on January 31^st!***

In regards to the Common Core Standards, the good news is great, the bad news is terrible, and the ugly . . . well, it’s unthinkable. Whether good, bad, or ugly, the Common Core Standards are exactly what we make of them, and the Standards depend entirely on how we map them.

Allow me to explain.

The Good

Our first charge vis-à-vis the Common Core is to redefine the connotations behind the word “standards.” Do we have a common purpose? Are we working toward the same goal? If so, then we have a standard. Gone are days where we live from class period to class period, praying that enough of our students pass. If we are measuring students on a pass/fail rubric, then we are intentionally labeling some students as failing.

The Common Core Standards give us an opportunity—a choice—to reclaim the classroom and the learning process and do what we are so passionately involved in doing. But the Common Core Standards as they are written on paper are useless—I repeat, useless—without a breathing, customizable plan or map that changes year by year or even day by day to answer the needs of our students.

The good news is that teachers have more authority and power to mold a classroom around what they know they need to teach rather than following mandates. With effective curriculum mapping, teachers are using the Standards to turn classrooms around. For many it will require a different kind of pedagogy, philosophy, and strategy, but we have already seen enormous benefits from it.

The Bad

The bad news is not that students will be assessed according to the Common Core. The bad news is that teachers work in isolation, or at least they do not collaborate effectively and frequently. Teachers working in isolation cannot use the Standards or their curriculum maps to the fullest potential, and teachers are not using assessments to improve teaching methods.

The irony is that teachers work together across grades, subjects, and departments every day, whether they do so intentionally or not. The constant flow of students necessarily carries enormous implications, and teachers are not capitalizing on one of the greatest opportunities to intentionally impact student learning. The Common Core Standards—and sustained student learning—require teacher collaboration to survive.

The Ugly

The most unthinkable thing that we can do to our students is to simply comply with the Standards instead of embracing them.

Compliance alone is indicative of not understanding how closely the purposes of the Standards are aligned with your own—to prepare students for college and a career. Issuing a book labeled with “Common Core” is not enough, because it will never answer the needs of each student. Love or hate the Standards as you will, but do not let your students’ education pass them by.

***Don’t miss Dr. Lisa Leith’s webinar, “Common Core Standards: Equity and Opportunities” on January 31^st!***

Two Worlds, One Book

2012-01-18T16:48:00.001-07:00

The Common Core Standards are designed to ensure every student is prepared to go on to a post-secondary education or a career. The Standards do more than provide a quality education across states; it promotes providing a quality education among all students from every neighborhood and every school.

Children don’t control where they come from, who their teachers are, or even what information they are taught in the classroom every day. They can control, however, if they will learn or progress in the class. Bringing the best of education to each classroom is the only way the playing field is evened. Where a student comes from should be an asset, not a liability.

In New Jersey, two eighth grade classes are recognizing the value of studying the same book, but with two separate approaches. Just as the Common Core Standards emphasize, strategies used by the teachers in this NY Times article are sharing how race and wealth doesn’t have to play a part in the quality of education students receive.

How have you been able to bridge the divide of race and wealth in your classroom?

Teaching: Positive vs Negative Reinforcement

2012-01-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

We have a guest post from our friends at Core Essentials about effective teaching strategies!

Reinforcement has been used to help strengthen and increase the probability of a specific response for decades. The use of reinforcement procedures can be used with both typical and atypical developing children as well as students with different psychological disorders. There are two types of reinforcement: positive and negative. However, many teachers find it difficult to distinguish between the two. When it comes to teaching a class full of students, you will find that a combination between positive and negative reinforcement will work best.

Positive Reinforcement

Positive reinforcement is a very powerful and effective tool to help mold and change behavior. It works by praising and rewarding desired behavior, which then makes the behavior more likely to happen in the future. The following are some ways to make positive reinforcement work best in a teaching environment.

Targeted praise: Students and children in general respond more positively to praise, more specifically targeted praise. For example, saying “April, you did a great job on your essay” will be more effective than saying “good job class.”
Specific timing: In addition to making the positive reinforcement more specific, timing is also important. For instance, if a student only answers a question partially then total positive reinforcement isn’t necessary. Only after the student has done the desired behavior should heaping praise be given.
Reward irregularly: Rewards are much more effective when they are used sparingly. This will also help improve overall student behavior, because rewards could be given at any moment and not just on certain days at a certain time.

Negative Reinforcement

For most people, the term “negative reinforcement” gets easily mistaken for punishment, which is not the case. With negative reinforcement, you are increasing a behavior, whereas with punishment, you are decreasing a behavior. Negative reinforcement can also be thought of as when a negative or unwanted behavior is stopped or avoided due to removal of a certain stimulus/item after the behavior is exhibited. That way the likelihood of the positive behavior occurring again will be increased and coupled with a positive direction.

For example, if you have a student that forgets to turn in homework, then they will receive negative reinforcement by getting a bad grade; therefore that behavior turns into an unwanted behavior for the student. If the student turns homework in and is met with a positive reaction, then that is negative reinforcement and the student will be likely to turn homework in because of the positive response.

The use of positive and negative reinforcement is a continual balancing act that is never quite perfect. However, as a teacher, it is your responsibility to continue working towards achieving a balanced discipline and reward plan that works best for you and your students.

This article was written by Core Essentials, a values education program, designed for grades K-5, that provides affordable, simple, and downloadable tools allowing schools to quickly incorporate values education into their curriculum. Our program encourages individual classrooms, the entire school, and every family to emphasize the values they learn each month.

Visual Learners

2012-01-13T08:00:00.001-07:00

We hope you enjoy this guest post on visual learning from our friends at Home Tuition Agency!

Visual Learners
There are several different types of learners, and understanding how to address different learning styles is one of the most important first steps a teacher can make in getting through to his or her students. The most successful lessons will learn to incorporate multiple styles of learning, providing activities that appeal to students through visual, audio and hands-on learning applications.

For many people, learning about concepts from a textbook is nearly impossible. They may often be heard saying that they "Just can't envision this" or that concepts don't make any sense from their description. You can try to explain the concept in multiple different ways, but ultimately the thing that makes the concept make sense in their heads is a visual representation: a diagram, photograph, demonstration, video or other visual element.

Ideally, any given lesson should incorporate multiple types of learning. While most people have one dominant learning style, they will usually learn faster if they are given multiple approaches to any problem. Depending on the subject matter you teach and the age of your students, you can utilize several different types of lesson plans.

Creative Teaching Methods for Visual Learners
-- Have your students role-play a situation. If you are teaching history, for example, you can assign your students historical characters and a moment in history for them to play out.

-- Have students create posters about the topic. Stress that the posters should be informational as well as attractive, and see what your students can come up with. As an added bonus, you can hang these posters up on the wall of the classroom for reference throughout the semester.

-- Have students make video documentaries about a topic. They can then present these videos to the class. Make sure to specify any limitations about what the video should include or how long it must be.

-- Whenever possible, allow for some experimentation. If it won't hurt anything, allow your students to venture away from the lesson to find their own answers. For example, create a science experiment where students can create their own method of testing the hypothesis.

-- Create an interactive website for your class. Even better, enlist your students to help you create the page. This can be informational as well as functional, allowing students to have a place to come and check on work or other information long after the site is introduced.

There are endless opportunities for ways to encourage students to learn visually and in a hands-on atmosphere. No matter what subject you teach or what age your students are, you should always ask yourself how you can add an extra dimension to any lesson that you teach. Adding visual and hands-on learning techniques to your existing repertoire can help engage students and foster learning in a creative and challenging environment.

Author Amanda Lee is a career counselor and content contributor for hometuitionagency.com.sg, which emphasizes Chinese tuition as an integral factor in international studies.

Supporting the Whole Student

2012-01-11T14:39:00.001-07:00

Here is a guest post from Dr. Lisanne Pluth, PhD, on supporting the whole student and college readiness beyond academics!

Supporting the whole student is phenomenally important in this day of social media and increased social fragmentation. College life is much more than academic work; it requires a student to be personally accountable for finances, everyday living, dorm room supplies, and navigating a complicated and often physically dangerous social arena.

Increasingly across college campus blogs there are stories about lonely freshman students who can cope with the academics but can’t seem to cope with the life that marks their paths into college. Many of these new college kids will drop out of college and worse. According to the American College Health Association (ACHA) suicide is the second highest cause of death among college students. In addition, according to the most recent ACHA surveys, our college students are having trouble with a variety of College Life issues. For example 19.1% of them reported problems with anxiety, 12.4% reported problems with Internet use/computer gaming, 19.4% had sleep difficulties and 27.5% reported problems with stress. Without social support and an emphasis on the development of the whole student at the high school level students are often not ready to take on the complicated tasks of college. Parents, educators, students and universities need to start addressing this national issue.

A young woman I have the privilege of knowing from Iran captured the essence of the importance of nurturing the whole student the other day while venting her frustrations to me about her American boyfriend. She said, “He is like a baby, his parents do everything for him. They buy his car insurance; when he needs a sweater his mother just goes and buys one for him. He thinks of nothing besides playing Lacrosse,” She paused and her forehead wrinkled, then she went on looking at the fingers in her lap as if they held the answers. “I’ve lost a lot of respect for him, here he is a grown man and really his life, the life here, is so easy. Even though I’m younger than he is and I’m from Iran, where as a girl we know nothing, I feel like the adult in the relationship…”

What could I say? This girl had managed in a very few short sentences to prove that we had let this young man down. The “we” being: our society, our educational system and even the young man’s well-intentioned parents. The boy in question is already 23 years old but mentally he is much younger and he still hasn’t taken responsibility for himself in most areas of his life. In contrast, his Iranian girlfriend against all odds has grabbed her future. Her strength and courage is amazing. She doesn’t even know if she will ever be able to go back home. She is going through school in a foreign language and living in a foreign culture. At the same time she lives with the daily burden of not knowing whether her younger brother or someone else in her family might be killed. Against all odds she is coping and succeeding very well.

Supporting and teaching the whole student needs to be a community effort. This isn’t about the failure of educators, parents or students. It’s about all of us. There needs to be a qualitative shift in education that prepares students for College Life and not just college classes. In turn college curricula need to provide further emphasize on the development of the whole person rather than teaching antiquated subjects in institutions that are still organized like 17^th century religious colleges. We aren’t preparing college students and we aren’t preparing our society for a bright future.

Some new programs such as Jumpstart and Everfi and have added additional programs on financial literacy in an effort to increase individual responsibility and accountability among our young people. A good beginning, these programs still don’t deal with the whole student. We need to embrace common core standards that will help our young people grow up into accountable, responsible, thoughtful, and happy adults. The definition of these core values and standards cannot be dictated and teachers cannot be expected to carry this burden. Whole student standards mean rethinking the definition of “ education” and how it is implemented in our society.

Dr. Lisanne Pluth, PhD works as a Broadcast Manager for Resident Hall Linens. Her experience also includes teaching at both the University of Kansas and the University of San Diego.

When Educators Learn, So Do Their Students

2012-01-03T16:36:00.002-07:00

"The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, aph. 32 (1973)

As educators, it can sometimes be a struggle to instill a desire for learning within students—helping them grow beyond “what do I need to know for this unit or test?” to “what can I learn from this concept and apply it?” The same question can be asked of educators, “Am I taking the time to learn from the concepts around me and applying them in my life?”

Connecticut teacher Larry Shortell recently released his story of continual learning in Summers Off: The Worldwide Adventures of a Schoolteacher. As he visited schools in foreign countries he discovered his American experiences are just as interesting to educators in those countries as theirs are to him.

Although it’s important to learn and practice the latest classroom strategies, educators taking the time to further their learning of non-classroom related topics and explore the everyday concepts in the world is also valuable to students. As educators learn more, they can discover more about how their individual students learn and continue to provide the education their students need.

To learn more about Larry Shortell's journey and how it has impacted his students, click here.

Are We Too Accommodating to Today's Students?

2011-12-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

As a nation, we have accommodated students’ needs more and more as we work to provide them with the optimal learning environment, but at what point does accommodating become enabling?

Laura Klein, 8th grade teacher at I.S. 217, Rafael Hernandez School of Performing Arts in the Bronx, explains, “It’s our job to teach them no matter what. We are often the adults that children see with the most consistency and frequency, and we are responsible for their educations, in the broadest sense of that word. But to truly help them be successful, we ourselves have to embody the “no excuses” attitude.”

“The problem is that by allowing ourselves no excuses, and doing whatever it takes to make students successful, we often find ourselves accepting excuses from them.”

As an educator, do you ever make excuses for your students? If so, where do you draw the line?

Read Laura Klein’s full article here

Students Learn Social Studies "On Location" with Technology in the Classroom

2011-12-14T16:32:00.001-07:00

While most of us have never been to Egypt, students in Dan Jones’ social studies class have come close. Taking full advantage of available green-screen technology, Mr. Jones transports his students to the places they study.

Jones, who is in his seventh year of teaching, said every teacher can find creative ways to use technology in class. He said he picked up most of his strategies by experimenting with a variety of online tools.

"Our students' world is made up of Facebook, YouTube, texting and more," he said. "We, as educators, need to bring these things into our classroom and figure out how to use them for an educational purpose . . . I have students creating websites, portfolios and video book reports.” Jones’ goal is for kids to leave his class with a portfolio of work they’re really proud of.

Do you agree with Jones? Do educators need to bring technology into the classroom?

Read more about Dan Jones and how he has used technology in the classroom here.

Giving the Right Attention to All Students

2011-12-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

While every educator has likely experienced a child who makes a spectacle in class to receive attention, not every teacher knows how to react. Last week, Coach G (Education Week) offered some tips to steer teachers and administrators in the right direction. “It all starts with the need to focus attention on constructive behavior at the expense of disruptive behavior rather than the other way around,” he said.

Three of Coach G’s tips include:

1. Give attention to attention givers

2. Leverage all available attention
3. Communicate non-verbally

As Coach G puts it, “There's no way around it: all children need and deserve attention. And how you manage a classroom full of kids vying for attention can make or break your overall effectiveness as a teacher.”

To learn the “how” behind Coach G’s tips, click here.

Blocks Help Build Student Learning

2011-11-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Technology has revolutionized the world of education. How students learn and what they learn is constantly changing, but that doesn’t mean that educators should throw out everything they’ve ever done in the classroom. Blocks, yes blocks are making as much of an impact as ever in the learning of young children. So why not combine the two?

Yesterday, Kyle Spencer of The New York Times published an article filled with the positive effects of blocks in today’s classroom. Block building is not about occupying time or finding a way to get kids away from a computer screen. Blocks are about exploration.

Jean Schreiber, a self-described “block consultant,” advised a group of parents to engage their children in building by photographing their work. “Don’t rush to help them with structural challenges,” she said. “You don’t have to ask them a million questions. Just sit with them and notice.”

Jessica Thies, a teacher at Chapin School on the Upper East Side, said her students photographed their block extravaganzas with one of the school’s iPads. Last year, they made a documentary about blocks using a Flip video camera and edited it during computer class. “It is very low-tech/high-tech here,” Ms. Thies said.

Sasha Wilson, co-director of the four-year-old Bronx Community Charter School, said his faith in blocks was solidified by a struggling second grader’s actions after an apple-picking field trip. “She went to the block corner and built an incredibly complex structure, a tractor engine, and she was able to talk about how all the parts moved,” Mr. Wilson recalled. He said he told his staff a few days later: “We need to be looking at this student in a very different way.”

Blocks may just be one more tool we can use to help students learn.

What do you think?

Read The NY Times article here.

Data-Sharing is Key to College and Career Readiness

2011-11-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

Every day, we hear “data this,” and “data that,” being told “the data” will show us how to get students college and career ready. Although data is powerful, its power lies in what we do with it. Kentucky educators are discovering how data really makes a difference in the education of their students. It’s no secret that collaboration is a vessel for change, but it wasn’t until university professors and high school teachers began comparing notes about their expectations in class that real changes began to occur.

According to an article in Education Week, transition courses were developed in high schools to help lagging students avoid remediation in college. Advanced Placement restrictions were lifted to expose more students to college-level courses. As communication lines opened, other changes followed. The percentage of college-going students in Kentucky went up, and the need for remediation in college went down.

Kentucky is at the forefront of collecting and sharing P-20 data, information that spans preschool through graduate study. Since the 1990s, it had been tracking the performance of students over time. But not everyone knew it.

Sam Evans, the dean of the college of education at Western Kentucky University, in Bowling Green, was part of the group that sketched out how the new P-20 collaboration would work. "Everybody had their data sets, and they weren't speaking to one another," he said. The focus of the discussion, he said, was practical: "What do we need to know?"

The driver for everyone to work together was economic development. There was agreement that the only way it could be achieved was with more college degrees and well-prepared high school graduates, said Mr. Evans.

How can we improve the use of data in our schools?

To learn more and to read the full article, click here.

Teachers Teach Students How to Be Competent Curators

2011-11-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

“The 21st century will not be defined by the volume or speed at which you consume information. (That was the old way of being smart.) It will be defined by how well you curate that information, translate it and contribute information back in a way that your community can understand it. Teaching students to be competent curators is our main responsibility as educators.” –Angela Maiers (education-tech expert)

Earlier this week, Julia Steiny included this quote in her article, "Most Kids Way Ahead of Us as Digital Learners, for Better and Worse." She discusses the future of earning in a digital age, giving us a new way to look at what happens in the classroom every day.

Do you agree with Angela Maiers?

How Much Do You Value Education?

2011-11-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

No one can deny that education is important, no matter what country they live in. It’s true that every person doesn’t have the same opportunities for education as their peers across the globe, but that doesn’t mean there is a lack of dedication to learning.

Last week, Nicholas D. Kristof from the New York Times presented the story of a malnourished 14-year-old Vietnamese girl making every sacrifice possible in order to go to school and take care of her two younger siblings at the same time.

Dao Ngoc Phung is so obsessed with schoolwork that she sets her alarm for 3 a.m. every day to cook rice for breakfast while reviewing her books. She rides her bike with her two siblings for 90 minutes each way to and from school. Though she is only 14 years old, Phung takes responsibility not only for her learning, but that of her younger sister and brother—she doesn’t complete her homework until after she helps them finish theirs. Sometimes this means late nights with little sleep to start over again the next day.

Phung is not the only one who values education. Kristof explains, “Teachers in America’s troubled schools complain to me that parents rarely show up for meetings. In contrast, Phung’s father takes a day off work and spends a day’s wages for transportation to attend parent-teacher conferences.”

Then what may be most admirable is the following statement from Phung’s father. “If I don’t work, I lose a little bit of money,” he said. “But if my kids miss out on school, they lose their life hopes. I want to know how they’re doing in school.”

“I tell my children that we don’t own land that I can leave them when they grow up,” he added. “So the only thing I can give them is an education.”

Today, we might ask ourselves, “How much do I value education?”

Read the full article here.

How Much Do You Know about Implementing the Common Core State Standards?

2011-11-04T17:02:00.000-06:00

There is no doubt that the Common Core Standards will change education. Whether those changes will be lasting and positive is largely dependent on the implementation of the Standards. How does your school plan to use the Standards? How do you plan to use the Standards? Recently in the Harvard Education Letter, Robert Rothman addressed five myths about the Common Core State Standards that may provide perspective concerning Common Core implementation.

Myth #1—The Common Core State Standards are a national curriculum.

Rothman reminds readers that “standards are not curriculum: standards spell out what students should know and be able to do at the end of a year; curriculum defines the specific course of study—the scope and sequence—that will enable students to meet standards.”

To learn more about this myth and additional myths, click here. To learn more about how to effectively implement the Common Core Standards, click here.

Parent Conference Attendance Affects Teacher Merit Pay

2011-10-31T16:58:00.000-06:00

It’s not just about test scores.

At least 29 school districts in Idaho have developed merit plans partly based on parental involvement. Many plans also include student attendance, graduation rates, and writing assessments.

In the central Idaho countryside, Challis schools have set a goal that teachers make contact with the parents of their students at least twice every three months.

In southern Idaho, up to 70 percent of the potential bonus available to employees at Wendell High School will be based on attendance at parent-teacher conferences. More than 40 percent of parents have to attend the meetings in order for Wendell teachers to earn the maximum bonus and that goal was exceeded this fall.

About 50 school districts and charter schools have opted not to develop their own pay-for-performance systems but rather to comply with the state's plan, which bases bonuses on standardized test scores. In the 105 districts and charter schools that have developed or are working on their own merit pay plans, teachers will still have to meet statewide goals in order to receive their pay-for-performance bonus.

To learn more about Idaho's plans for merit pay, click here.

Is it possible to truly measure a teacher's performance? If so, how?

Do Teachers Still Wonder?

2011-10-21T16:35:00.002-06:00

“We must remind ourselves how little we know and how much there is to know.”

As we get older we attend more classes, have more experiences, and gain knowledge all along the way. For many of us learning becomes a means of survival, rather than an exploration of life. So where along the way do we forget to question, to wonder, to be curious?

Peter Huidekoper Jr. so clearly described the loss of wonderment and the need for its return in his article, “The Age of Wonder.” He says, “To learn, it is best to begin humble, open, unsure. Most adults know that feeling. Teachers must know that feeling. And yet, we forget. Sometimes, as we focus on convincing parents, students, principals (our evaluators), even colleagues, of how much we know, we lose touch with this quality we so hope to find in our students.”

“Our foolish pride gets in the way as if we need to prove we know more than those darn bright kids staring back at us, who read better than we ever did and absorb new information faster than we ever could.”

Peter questions the desire teachers demonstrate to their students. Do they encourage desire and learning in the classroom? He reminds us that, “Searching invites participation. Knowing says, ‘I hope you can begin to catch up to me, here at the finish line, here with my wealth of information.’ The former fosters wonder and learning; the latter, regurgitation and boredom.”

Read the full article here.

New Research Gives Insight to Teacher Training

2011-10-19T16:50:00.003-06:00

The academic progress of students is linked directly to where their teachers attended college.

Not to say that if a teacher went to a low-ranking school that they couldn’t or wouldn’t be successful in the classroom, but rather that all teacher training is not created equal. According to the director of the University of Washington Center for Education Data & Research, Dan Goldhaber, the new research revealing that academic progress of public-school students can be traced, in part, to where teachers went to college is just the first step toward determining what kind of training — not where the training occurred — best prepares teachers for excellence in the classroom.

Washington state schools are among the first to see which teacher-training programs seem to result in the best student test scores, but 35 states now have the means to do similar research, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national organization formed by education and business groups to track state progress on collecting data about students and schools.

Is the future of teacher training on its way up?

To read the full article, click here.

Digital Library Aids Students Learning in a Digital Age

2011-10-13T08:31:00.000-06:00

What if we encouraged students to learn in the same ways and with the same tools they spend their time away from school, their “free” time?

Not only that, what if we provided them the means to learn in that same way?
In Chicago, the city’s main library is giving it a go. With a 5,500-square-foot space, Chicago teens are utilizing resources in the “YOUmedia” section of the library to experience learning on “their terms.” While no one knows if this new media space will help the students directly in their classrooms, it is likely to provide a greater interest in learning altogether and knowledge of how to use modern day technology to pursue interests they may want to pursue in the future as a career.

"We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids," says DePaul University's Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space. Just as schools have always pushed teens to read critically and pick apart authors' arguments, she says, educators must now teach kids how to consume media critically and, ideally, to produce it.

To learn more, click here.

Is Collaboration Essential for Students to Learn?

2011-10-04T16:37:00.000-06:00

“If school isn’t about doing things together, just about everyone has better places to spend their day.” Ira David Socol declared this statement in his blog post about the necessity of collaboration in creating and sustaining real learning. The dilemma of students becoming prepared for careers in the 21st century and centuries to come in what Socol calls a 19th century school (a classroom with a bunch of kids doing the same thing in the same way on the same device) is not a new one, but while many discuss the problem, Socol outlines what he believes is a solution.

He explains that classrooms where, “educators think the information of the world still moves via paper and pencil, that there are ‘correct answers’ to everything, and that there is a structured cultural norm of learning behavior, best exemplified by the silent child bent over a wooden desk with a thick physical book, which must be duplicated if a student is to succeed in their learning spaces” is an environment that impedes the desire for students to come to school at all.

Instead, Socol gives four ways to provide an environment that promotes self-motivated learning:
1. A learning environment in which students make most decisions
2. A time environment in which students learn and work along a schedule which makes sense to them
3. A technological environment which supports collaboration across every barrier
4. A social environment where adults do not rank students according to their oppressive standards

To learn more about Ira David Socol’s solution and improving collaboration in schools, click here.

Once Upon a Time . . .

2011-09-30T15:53:00.001-06:00

In 1956, Peter Stang left his hometown in Hungary to travel to the United States. Why? Because the U.S. represented opportunity—opportunity to achieve anything Stang could imagine. Now, at 69, Peter Stang is receiving the National Medal of Science, the highest honor given to a scientist or engineer by the United States.

Over 50 years ago, and even before that, immigrants came to the U.S. searching for a better life, knowing the freedom to study, learn, and progress was finally possible. Some might argue that the country has lost that reputation or that it has significantly diminished. Although we may not currently be at the top compared to competing nations of the world in math and science, the United States still has an abundance of potential. Peter Stang became a world-renowned chemist (ranked 69th on a list of the world’s top 100 chemists) because he had opportunities. He credits his success to the freedoms and opportunities he has enjoyed in the U.S. “This is the only country in the world that I know of that takes the best of anyone in the world and gives them the opportunity to succeed.”

Can the United States still be the catalyst for great learning and innovation? How?

Learn more about Peter Stang by clicking here.

Are the Students Asking the Questions?

2011-09-27T17:02:00.000-06:00

Any teacher will tell you that asking the right questions is imperative to fostering real learning in the classroom. But what about the questions the students are asking? In a recent article, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana discuss the positive effects of teaching students to ask their own questions. They conclude that, “Typically, questions are seen as the province of teachers, who spend years figuring out how to craft questions and fine-tune them to stimulate students’ curiosity or engage them more effectively. We have found that teaching students to ask their own questions can accomplish these same goals while teaching a critical lifelong skill.”

While learning more about questioning, a child at Boston Day and Evening academy observed: “When you ask the question, you feel like it’s your job to get the answer, and you want to figure it out.” Rothstein and Santana indicate that, “When students know how to ask their own questions they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own.”

Are you teaching students how to ask their own questions? Do you agree with Rothstein and Santana?

To learn more about teaching students to ask questions from Rothstein and Santana, click here.

Will Wyoming's Students Achieve with the Common Core State Standards

2011-09-23T17:01:00.000-06:00

In June 2010, Wyoming’s Board of Education decided to adopt the Common Core State Standards. Although the opportunity to raise the English and math scores of students seems like a good idea, nearly one-third of the members of the Legislature’s Joint Interim Education Committee have decided that the Common Core math standards are too difficult for Wyoming students.

One would think if students are struggling with achieving the standards that almost every state in America has adopted, what will change if the standards don’t change? What will be done to ensure those students stop struggling and experience high-level learning? If the legislative committee reverses the decision by the Board of Education, Wyoming’s students likely will always be behind the other states in terms of math achievement.

Kay Persichette, dean of the University of Wyoming’s College of Education, said the Common Core Standards do raise the bar in math. That’s exactly what should happen if our students are falling behind their counterparts in other states.

“It only makes sense that we have some platform of expectations in terms of rigorous common standards in core subjects across the nation if we’re going to be able to reasonably compare achievement, progress and learning,” Persichette said.

How Do We Determine Teacher Effectiveness?

2011-09-19T16:29:00.000-06:00

National leaders, teachers’ unions, state officials—all have tried to come up with the most effective method for evaluating teachers. What will ensure quality educators for the students in our schools? Although there is no simple, ready-made solution, Nancy Folbre argues in an article in the New York Times that rating teachers according to their students’ performance on standardized tests and firing those who don’t make the grade will likely backfire.

Too much pressure to improve students’ test scores can reduce attention to other aspects of the curriculum and discourage cultivation of broader problem-solving skills, also known as “teaching to the test.” The economists Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom describe the general problem of misaligned incentives in more formal terms – workers who are rewarded only for accomplishment of easily measurable tasks reduce the effort devoted to other tasks.

Advocates of intensified teacher assessment assert that current practices leave too many incompetent or ineffective teachers in place. But many schools suffer from the opposite problem: high teacher turnover that reduces gains from experience and increases the costs of personnel management. As Sara Mosle pointed out in a recent review of Mr. Brill’s “Class Warfare,” about 40 percent of teachers in New York City quit after three years.

Is there a solution?

To read the full article, click here.

The Current Condition of Our Education

2011-09-14T15:06:00.000-06:00

“The passing references to children and students feel largely like rhetorical flourishes in the partisan and ideological fights among adults.” Yesterday, Gene R. Carter, CEO and executive director of ASCD, made this bold statement on the current condition of our education system in the United States. Evident in the title, “We Need a Different National Conversation,” Carter exposed disappointing facts about the decline in the education system that will likely remain if the conversation about education does not change. He said, “Our poorest children routinely don’t get the help they need inside or outside the classroom. Their teachers are the least well prepared; their schools are the least funded; and the community services they need are largely lacking.”

“We talk about the importance of teachers, but we are in the midst of firing tens of thousands of them. We want teachers to be more effective, but we rarely provide the professional development they need or encourage their desire to be the best they can be.”

Carter fearlessly called on Congress to support a whole-child approach to education, to support quality schools and effective teachers, to broaden the definition of academic excellence, and to embrace college- and career readiness standards that include all core academic subjects, not only reading and math.

Read the full article and learn more here.

CA Superintendent Takes $800,000 Pay Cut to Save School Programs

2011-08-29T16:10:00.000-06:00

“Where will the money come from?” That’s the question every superintendent and other school officials are asking as they try to find a way to keep the programs and jobs that are near extinction. While many school leaders might be looking within their already shrinking budgets, Fresno County School Superintendent Larry Powell is taking matters into his own hands . . . and out of his own pocket.

Until his term expires in 2015, Powell will run 325 schools and 35 school districts with 195,000 students, all for less than a starting California teacher earns. He asked his board to allow him to return $288,241 in salary and benefits for the next three and a half years of his term, equaling a total of $800,000. He technically retired, then agreed to be hired back to work for $31,000 a year — $10,000 less than a first-year teacher — and with no benefits.

To read the full article, click here.

How Is Your District Saving Money?

2011-08-22T17:06:00.000-06:00

For years, states and school districts have spent hundreds of hours struggling to redistribute and make calculated cuts to school budgets in an attempt to provide a quality education in spite of the lack of funding. While the decrease in funding has caused the cutting of teacher positions and even classes like music and physical education, many schools have resorted to even bigger cuts—cuts like eliminating an entire day of instruction.

The Irene-Wakonda School District in South Dakota is among the latest to adopt a four-day school week as the best option for reducing costs. The four-school week is an increasingly visible example of the impact of state budget problems on rural education. This fall, fully one-fourth of South Dakota's districts will have moved to some form of the abbreviated schedule. Only Colorado and Wyoming have a larger proportion of schools using a shortened week. According to one study, more than 120 school districts in 20 states, most in the west, now use four-day weeks.

Larry Johnke, the superintendent of the district, said the district will add 30 minutes to each day and shorten the lunch break to provide more class time Monday through Thursday. In elementary school, recess and physical education classes will be shortened.

What is your district doing to save money this school year?

To read the full article, click here.

Standardized Tests: Are They Helping or Hindering?

2011-08-19T16:46:00.001-06:00

This week in EducationNews, Julie Steiny compared punitive testing models to educational bullying. While she isn't directly blaming the tests, she says, “We’ve crossed a none-too-fine line between accountability—which we all want, without question—to bullying, plain and simple.”

She affirms, “Tests are not the problem. Achievement results are just information. Reliable data is great. It shows us where successful innovation might be underway. It raises red flags, confirms good work, and anchors hunches that our latest strategies are working, or not. We’ll never improve education without hard information, and plenty of it.”

“No, the problem is the bullying. Bullying has become a unique characteristic of America’s education culture. Comply or be punished. Get your students to meet federal and state proficiency standards — or else. Failure can bring public humiliation, wholesale staff dismissals, or schools being closed down entirely. States lean on districts; districts on their administrators. The public and pundits snarl at teachers. Teachers try hard not to take it out on their students.”

Tests are more than measurements for teacher effectiveness. Tests provide large amounts of valuable data, but it’s what we do with the data that makes a difference, how we better help the students understand the curriculum. As Steiny puts it, “The tests are a red flag, not a diagnosis. Test scores are just measurements until digested and interpreted by human judgment.

To read the full article from Julie Steiny, click here.

Declining Economy Hinders Student Learning in the Classroom

2011-08-17T16:27:00.000-06:00

Unemployment and foreclosure are affecting the ability for students to learn in the classroom. Recently, an annual Kids Count Report estimated that 56,000 Utah children who lived in mortgaged households have been disrupted by foreclosure since 2007. Utah is just one of many places where the poor economy is becoming one more hindrance to children’s learning.

Midvale Elementary school teacher Leandra Stromberg says, "I've had students who tell me they can't come to school because they don't have gas for their cars or it is broken or there's too much snow." She said children from the nearby homeless shelter often join her third-grade class halfway through the year or whenever they move to the community.

"The economy has gotten worse since I started teaching," Stromberg said. "I've seen many of my students, who used to come to school in cleaner clothes, brand new outfits and backpacks, come back the next year with the same stuff. They're lacking supplies because the economy has gotten worse."

Have you seen the effects of a declining economy in the lives of your students?

To read the full article click here.

Exercise Increases Students' Ability to Focus in Class

2011-08-11T17:06:00.000-06:00

Keeping students focused and engaged in the classroom can be more work than covering the actual lesson material at times. According to an article in the New York Times, one aid in attention retention is exercise. A new study of 138 schoolchildren ages 8 to 11 living in Rome demonstrated that students’ performed better academically after physical activity, specifically endurance exercise (results based on students’ performance on a written test widely accepted as a good indicator of a person’s attention and ability to concentrate).

The study also revealed that when students were asked to learn new drills with a ball in their gym class versus the endurance exercise class, the test scores increased, but not as much as with endurance-focused exercise. The second session, which was “geared toward the development of both motor control and perceptual-motor adaptation abilities,” required more thought than the endurance class, the researchers wrote. The same researchers speculated that asking the students to both think and move was too much, inducing “an excessive stress load” on their brains.

To read the full article click here.

Cincinnati Closing Achievement Gap and Increasing Graduation Rates

2011-08-08T16:15:00.001-06:00

For years, leaders in education have worked hard to close the achievement gap between white students and African American students. While many schools and districts are still pushing forward in this effort, Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools (CPS) has managed to close the gap with their high school graduation rates.

For over a decade, CPS has involved coordinated, research-based strategies towards closing the gap, but without the creative and courageous work by those actually in the schools, such an ambitious goal could not have been realized. So how did they do it? Is there a way other districts can repeat such success?

Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools used several strategies including:

• Focusing on just a few goals (increasing overall graduation rates and reducing the high school graduation gap).

• Taking educators, parents, community leaders and students to visit some of the nation’s most effective urban district and charter public schools.

• Focusing staff development on a few key areas: literacy, numeracy and learning to work more effectively with today’s urban youth.

• Increasing youth/community service so students learned they are capable of more than they thought.

• Positive ongoing leadership from the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers

• Holding principals accountable and replacing some in schools where there was not much progress.

To read the full article and see the full list of strategies, click here.

How Technology is Changing Classroom Instruction

2011-08-05T16:58:00.001-06:00

Yesterday, in a San Diego Newspaper, author Jeffrey Taekman claimed that 30 years ago MTV rewired our brains for learning. Now, you can decide whether that is true or not, but Taekman was using MTV’s introduction of the music video in the 80s to support his statement that today, “educational methods that embrace technological advances are needed to enhance the learning experience.”

He goes on to say, “despite numerous advances in technology and the science of learning, the majority of our teaching remains lecture-based, for no better reason than it is the easiest approach.

It is time for a change.

Taekman goes on to discuss the responsibilities of educators to adapt new roles as guides or facilitators, rather than “end-all, be-all oracles spewing forth knowledge.”

To read the full article click here.

Lesson Learned: How a Teacher Was Changed Forever

2011-08-04T16:45:00.000-06:00

Every day, teachers are asked to instruct anywhere from 15 to 40 students in their classrooms. Whether big or small, it seems there are always those stories of the kid who throws a fit or gets completely out of control. In fact, most teachers could probably name the top five horror stories of students misbehaving in their classes off the top of their head. Marilyn Rhames was no different. Within her first six months of student teaching she fled an elementary school on the West Side of Chicago, hoping her perception of teaching would not be too tarnished after such a negative experience.

One day, in the teacher’s lounge of her second school, she, along with other teachers, were spurting out their horror stories to each other. That is, until a middle school social studies teacher spoke up and said, “It happened to them” —the four words that shut her and the other teachers up. “It happened to them, not to you. You tell the stories like it's some kind of entertainment, but it happened to them—the kids. They are the ones who 30 years from now will remember these stories with tears in their eyes.”

Have you had similar experiences? Let us know what you think.

To read the full article click here.

Dear Student: Advice for the New School Year

2011-08-01T17:05:00.000-06:00

If you could give any advice to students returning to school this fall, what would it be? Phrases such as “pay more attention in class, study harder, or try to make new friends” might come to mind, but Jeff Thredgold went far beyond that when he published a letter to his children seventeen years ago. Recently, he republished the letter as a reminder to his children and grandchildren of what to keep in mind as the new school year begins, and perhaps a reminder for us all:

· Recognize that the only limits you face are those you set for yourself.

· Be the BEST that you can be.

· Recognize that YOU are responsible for your successes and failures.

· You must earn your way.

· Strive for excellence—not perfection.

· See the glass as half full, rather than seeing it as half empty.

· Focus on positives, rather than on negatives.

· Look to praise, rather than to criticize.

To read the entire letter, click here.

Educators Speak about the School Improvement Innovation Summit

2011-07-28T16:42:00.000-06:00

The School Improvement Innovation Summit was a great success! July 11, 12, and 13 were filled with dynamic speakers and presentations focused on improving today's world of education and sharing ideas and skills that can be used firsthand in the classroom and the overall school. We want to thank everyone who participated as a presenter and especially for those committed individuals who came to learn how to create real transformation in their local districts. We could go on, but we thought we'd let you hear for yourself from those who attended the Summit.

A New Way of Learning for Teachers

2011-07-22T15:35:00.000-06:00

Every day, teachers are focused on how they can use technology and innovative strategies to prepare students for their future in a fast advancing world. However, while most of those teachers are being asked to think “outside the box,” many of them are still being in very traditional methods and environments, until now.

Instead of instructing teachers through typical courses, Relay Graduate School of Education will contain 60 modules, each focused on a different teaching technique. There will be no lectures and no building to hold class. Instead, the graduate students will be mentored primarily at the schools they teach.

Do you think this new type of graduate school will make a greatly improve K-12 classroom instruction?

To read the full article and learn more, click here.

States Present Their Own Solutions to No Child Left Behind

2011-07-19T17:00:00.000-06:00

It’s no secret that No Child Left Behind has caused frustration and discontent among educators and state officials for years. However, now select state representatives are taking matters into their own hands. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker reported, “We are not trying to get around accountability. But instead of using the blanket approach that defines a lot of schools as failures, we will use a more strategic approach so we can replicate success and address failure."

While some states are still waiting for Congress to make the big changes, other states have lost patience. South Dakota, Montana and Idaho recently told officials they would disregard key aspects of the law. Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said states must either follow the law or apply for a waiver. "There is no Plan C," he said, adding that the department can withdraw federal funding from states that don't comply.

To read the full article click here.

The Future of School Assessments

2011-07-18T17:10:00.000-06:00

Standardized bubble tests have been the norm for almost all state and national testing. Numerous educators will say the traditional tests are limiting and will agree that these assessments don’t always display the true knowledge of the student. Also, as evaluations in every state are changing and evolving, these assessments are playing a larger role in demonstrating teacher effectiveness.

With so much emphasis being places on the assessments, it is no surprise that teachers, administrators, and parents are anxious to see if the new assessments being developed will actually make a difference and be an improvement from the current method of testing. So who’s in charge of creating the new assessments? Two separate groups — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium — are using the federal government’s Race to the Top Funds to come up with the new testing systems, which will be used by different states.

The new tests will be designed to use technology in both administering and scoring and will measure “performance-based tasks, designed to designed to mirror complex, real-world situations,” according to the New York Times. In addition to greater technology integration, the new assessments will be more performance-based and require more in-depth critical thinking.

To learn more, click here.

Budget Cuts Equal Less Class Time

2011-07-07T17:35:00.000-06:00

The recent effect of budget cuts is not painting the prettiest picture of the future of our nation’s education. Not only has the lack of funding caused an increase in class sizes, but also the cramming of classes into four-day weeks and cutting summer programs and days off the school year.

While virtually everyone in education agrees that American students need to spend more time in the classroom, states can’t ignore the fact that it’s just not in the budget. “Instead of increasing school time, in a lot of cases we’ve been pushing back against efforts to shorten not just the school day but the week and year,” said Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the federal Department of Education. “We’re trying to prevent what exists now from shrinking even further.”

Read the full article and learn more here

New Federal Data Reveal Educational Inequities

2011-07-01T17:08:00.000-06:00

“Transparency is the path to reform,” said Russlynn Ali, the Department of Education’s assistant secretary for civil rights. New federal statistics shared Thursday revealed the level of equity in schools and districts across the United States.

Ali commented, “These data are incredible and revelatory. They paint a portrait of a sad truth in American schools: Fundamental fairness hasn’t reached whole groups of students.”

“For a long time, we have fallen short on why the achievement gap exists,” she said. But the data collected show “gaps in opportunity, in access to courses and other resources that continue to hobble students across the country.”

Although the data online isn’t aggregated by state, the numbers offer a glimpse into the educational inequities at the national level:

• Some 3,000 schools serving about 500,000 high school students weren’t offering Algebra II classes last school year, and more than 2 million students in 7,300 schools did not offer calculus.

• At schools where the majority of students were African-American, teachers were twice as likely to have only one or two years of experience compared with schools within the same district that had a majority-white student body.

Read the full article and learn more about the national inequities here.

School Improvement Network-Atomic Learning Partnership Gives Educators New Tools

2011-06-30T12:10:00.000-06:00

Districts across the U.S. are utilizing numerous resources to provide teachers with a well-rounded professional development program. While the use of multiple resources allows districts to provide comprehensive training, it creates a challenge for end users in accessing resources from various websites and managing multiple logins.

To begin addressing this challenge, Atomic Learning and School Improvement Network announce a collaboration to provide shared resources to guide educators on a path to technology-empowered learning.

With the release of Atomic Learning’s new Effective Online Teaching and Learning spotlight program and PD 360’s Technology Pedagogy training, the companies have come together to build a free educator forum where all educators can explore the topic of online teaching and learning.

Learn more about the benefits of this partnership here.

Duane Sprague talks with Jon Blissenbach, Director of Product Management at Atomic Learning, about the recent partnership between Atomic Learning and School Improvement Network:

Does Class Size Really Make a Difference?

2011-06-27T16:34:00.000-06:00

Principals and teachers across the nation have been fighting for small class sizes in spite of budget cuts and increased enrollments. For several years, San Diego has been successful in maintaining these small class sizes in a district of 130,000 students, but that may no longer be possible. Using state and federal stimulus dollars, San Diego has held class size to 17 in kindergarten through second grade at its 30 poorest schools. However, with stimulus money spent and budgets deadlocked, San Diego’s young students are looking at a future of 30 students instead of 17.

While educators debate whether the academic gain from reducing class size is worth the cost, research has shown that significantly smaller classes make a difference in the earliest grades. In fact, Mr. Barrera, the school board president, believes that the rise in the district’s state test scores — to 56 percent proficient in English from 45 percent three years ago — is due, in part, to smaller classes.

So, the question is: Does class size really make a difference?

Read the full article here.

One-to-One Laptop Program Helps to Raise Test Scores

2011-06-24T16:58:00.000-06:00

How would lesson plans change if every student in your school in grades 4-12 had a laptop in the classroom? In Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina, students’ faces light up as they pick up their laptop ready for the school year to begin.

Mark Edwards, superintendent, launched the one-to-one laptop program four years ago in an attempt to bring technology to the classroom on a more personal level. Most districts nationwide were using laptops in at least one grade at one campus, according to the 2008 “America’s Digital Schools” report from The Greaves Group and The Hayes Connection, but the success of such efforts isn’t widespread.

Yet, the 5,400-student Mooresville district has drawn national recognition, securing a visit last summer from Karen Cator, director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology. “I think Mooresville has a tremendous amount to offer in terms of leadership and what they've learned along the way,” Cator told local media.

Since the “digital conversion,” test scores in the district have increased, with overall student proficiency rates growing from 73 percent to 86 percent in three years, putting Mooresville in a fourth-place tie in North Carolina’s academic index ratings. And the district’s four-year graduation rate improved 22 points to 86 percent over five years, according to district data.

Read the full article here.

Teachers Welcome Media and Technology in the Classroom

2011-06-20T16:41:00.000-06:00

According to a national survey tracking teachers’ use of media and technology in the classroom, nearly all K-12 teachers reported in 2010 that they use some form of digital media for classroom instruction. Types of media included interactive games, activities, lesson plans, and simulations. As teachers get more strategic in their use of technology and media, teachers are integrating media more thoroughly into content and instruction.

Teachers also report strong preferences and affinities for specific types of technology, often tied to the grade levels they teach. Teachers of grades 4 through 6, for example, use interactive whiteboards the most, with 47 percent reporting that they use them to supplement or support their teaching. A good number of K-12 teachers (17 percent) who don't have access to interactive whiteboards say they want them. Pre-K teachers, on the other hand, use and value digital cameras more than any other device. And, while cell phones are banned in most schools, 17 percent of high school teachers say their students use personal cell phones for classroom assignments or activities.

Read the full article here.

Why Job-Embedded Professional Development Is So Effective

2011-06-17T16:30:00.000-06:00

Research has shown that job-embedded professional development, when conducted correctly, is more effective than traditional PD because it better addresses the needs of adult learners. In job-embedded PD, educators work on concepts or initiatives more than once, making the learning more effective and longer lasting.

iPad 2 For Your Thoughts?

2011-06-16T10:54:00.003-06:00

We’re looking for a new name for the world’s largest online community of educators and we’d love your help!

The PD 360 community is home to over 700,000 collaborating teachers, administrators, coaches, mentors, instructional leaders, and paraprofessionals. Community participants have the ability to create their very own forums with links to content they have found most useful in their everyday practices and upload files from external resources, all in a place where their peers can comment and discuss.

This is where you come in: we want to give the community a name that represents the rich resources that are shared within it, the learning and collaboration that happen on it, and the people who communicate every day through it.

Share your best ideas, and you’ll receive an iPad 2 if we choose yours!

Don’t have access to PD 360 and the community? No problem. Register here for a free 30-day trial, and let us know what you think.

Submit your idea on Facebook

Entries can be submitted until August 30, 2011 at 5 p.m. (MST). The winner of the iPad 2 will be announced September 6, 2011.
*If we do not select a name for the community from the entries posted on Facebook there will not be an iPad 2 recipient.
**If more than one participant enters the name we select, the first person to do so will be awarded the iPad 2.

Strategies to Improve Teacher Effectiveness: A Contest

2011-06-15T17:00:00.004-06:00

School Improvement Network wants to hear from you! Teacher effectiveness has become a major concern throughout the U.S. with measurable outcomes lagging behind global competition.

“Principals and district administrators are in a unique position to see what works across a variety of classrooms,” said Chet Linton, CEO of School Improvement Network. “We want to hear from the leaders closest to the action, whose voices are important in the national debate.”

Between now and June 15, we are inviting principals and K-12 district administrators to post a comment to this post (500 word max) sharing their ideas for “Improving Teacher Effectiveness in Your School District.”

Twenty-five lucky winners will receive a professional development scholarship to the School Improvement Innovation Summit, a two-day conference in Salt Lake City, July 11-13 (valued at $1,200). The scholarship includes Summit tuition and free licenses to SINET online professional development, as well as online community access to 700,000 educators and recognition at the Summit.

The online public will then vote to determine the winners. Voting will occur June 16-20. Winners will be notified by email. Full terms and conditions are available here.

Please use your actual email address in the entry so we can contact you, or send us your name, school district, & email address in an email to contest@schoolimprovement.com with the subject line: CONTEST

PD 360 Creates Big Change in Small Missouri District

2011-06-13T16:48:00.000-06:00

Although a small, rural district in a high-poverty locale of Polk County, Humansville R-IV School District in Humansville, MO is taking big steps to bring quality professional development to their schools. Like other rural districts, Humansville has been faced with budget cuts, time restraints, diverse teacher needs, a small teaching staff, and high teacher turnover.

While searching for solutions to some of their greatest challenges, Humansville R-IV discovered the quality research-based on-demand platform PD 360 and realized it was a perfect partner in achieving their professional development goals.

As a small staff, Humansville teachers are delighted with the ability to share support and ideas with teachers around the country through PD 360’s interactive communities and groups. Teachers and administrators can share best practices, learn from one another, and eliminate classroom isolation.

Most importantly, PD 360 is having a positive impact on student achievement. In the Missouri Assessment Program, Humansville’s Math proficiency scores have progressed from 26.9% in 2007 to 40.1% in 2010. And the Communication Arts proficiency scores have advanced from 32.2% in 2007 to 40.6% in 2010.

View the full case study of Humansville R-IV here.

Montgomery Offers a Different Approach to Teacher Evaluation

2011-06-08T16:57:00.000-06:00

Measuring the success of teachers has been an ongoing dispute in the education community. Deciding which teachers should stay and which teachers should go isn’t an easy task for any district, but for Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland there is a unique system in place to help make those decisions.

The program, Peer Assistance and Review — known as PAR — uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel — made up of eight teachers and eight principals — can vote to fire the teacher.

Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s state superintendent of schools, called PAR “an excellent system for professional development.” Senior staff members from the United States Department of Education have visited here to study the program, and Montgomery County officials have gone to Washington to explain how it works. In February, the district was one of 12 featured in Denver at a Department of Education conference on labor-management collaboration.

Learn more about PAR and read the full article here.

School Improvement Network Facebook Fan Wins iPad 2

2011-06-07T17:12:00.003-06:00

In the month of May, School Improvement Network gave our Facebook fans the opportunity to win an iPad 2. After weeks of "likes" and great comments from educators all over the world, we announced the winner on June 1, 2011.

Carrie Grona from Austin, TX was the lucky winner!

Thank you to all our fans for joining us for this contest, leaving comments, telling your friends, and for all the work you do to stay updated on the most innovative and effective classroom practices available! Don't forget to stay connected on our Facebook page to learn about teaching techniques, education news, case studies and more from School Improvement Network, including more opportunities to win.

Study Explores New Methods for Vocabulary Building

2011-06-06T17:07:00.000-06:00

Children learn new words at various stages and through various techniques. While many of these techniques include flashcards and picture books, a new study suggests that children—and, in fact, all new language learners—can build up concrete vocabulary from interacting with a complex learning environment, not just repeated exposure to words in isolation.

Many language-development researchers believe children learn a new word gradually, taking a general meaning from encountering it multiple times in various contexts and gradually arriving at a more specific meaning. By contrast, the researchers for the new study argue that people instead make a best guess about a new word’s meaning based on the context in which they initially encounter it, and hold onto the meaning unless it is clearly found to be wrong.

“Where people were learning gradually, they were learning the wrong thing. They got more and more abstract descriptions in order to cover all the examples,” said Lila R. Gleitman, a study co-author and a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “But little children don’t learn that way at all; they learn concrete before the abstract; they learn doll before they learn toy.”

Read the full article here.

The Power of Professional Learning Communities

2011-06-03T15:24:00.000-06:00

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are changing the impact of teachers in schools across the United States. Recently, Jackson Junior High School in Jackson, Missouri has noticed dramatic improvements since the implementation of PLCs.

There are four critical questions at the core of Professional Learning Communities: What do they want students to know? How will educators know when a student has learned it? How will educators respond when a student doesn’t get it? How will educators respond when a student already knows it?

Teachers and administrators at Jackson Junior High School say students and faculty are working collaboratively to answer those questions. And that partnership, they say, is paying big dividends.

The Jackson School Board heard and approved an evaluation of the instructional effectiveness of the junior high's PLC, which just wrapped up its third year. The collaborative culture has seen some real measurable results, according to principal Cory Crosnoe and junior high teachers. Discipline referrals have been cut by a third, and grades were up considerably in the first semester of the recently completed school year. F's made up just 3 percent of the grades, according to district statistics.

Read the full article here.

Learn more about creating and improving PLCs here.

New Principal Leads School Turnaround at Chicago High School

2011-06-02T16:29:00.001-06:00

Chicago’s Marshall Metropolitan High School is experiencing a drastic school turnaround with principal Kenyatta Stansberry leading the way. Stansberry, 39, is one of a new breed of principals charged with reforming some of the worst schools in the Chicago Public School system. This is her second turnaround high school. Where other educators run from buildings paralyzed by violence, chaos, and virtually no learning, Stansberry thrives.

"The minute you slip up, the minute they think you're not paying attention, they're going to think, 'It's OK. We're about to get away,'" says the mother of two and former preschool teacher who now butts heads with the most challenging of CPS students. "You have to be consistent."

That consistency has helped Marshall, a school that habitually landed in the bottom rung of the state's high schools, show signs of improvement this year. Attendance has gone up by 22 percentage points. Seventy percent of freshmen are on track to graduate, up from 30 percent last year. Results for the most recent Prairie State Achievement Exams won't be available until July, but school officials are confident of big gains over 2010, when only 2.6 percent of students met or exceeded standards.

Read the full article here.

What has been your experience with school turnaround in your district?

Building a Better Education System in the United States

2011-05-31T15:56:00.000-06:00

According to the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, the United States ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in mathematics. Ranking the knowledge of 15-year-olds in 70 countries, the report demonstrates the need for the U.S. to make improvements in how it's educating its students.

The new report from The National Center on Education and Economy (NCEE), an organization that researches education systems around the world, says that America can solve this educational crisis by looking at it like it looked at manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century.

"We took the best ideas in steelmaking, industrial chemicals and many other fields from England and Germany and others and put them to work here on a scale that Europe could only imagine," the report says. By using the educational strategies of successful nations, NCEE says, the U.S. can catch up.

"The most effective way to greatly improve student performance in the United States is to figure out how the countries with top student performance are doing it, build on their achievements and then, by building on our unique strengths, figure out how to do it even better," Marc Tucker, NCEE's CEO, said in a statement.

Read the full article here.

How do you think we can build a better education system in the United States?

New Documentary Zeros In on the Realities of Teacher Life

2011-05-26T10:15:00.001-06:00

In an advanced screening on Tuesday in Washington D.C., Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other government officials previewed a new documentary titled, “American Teacher,” produced by Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari. The documentary follows five K-12 educators from different parts of the country as they navigate the life of being a teacher.

At the heart of “American Teacher,” lies the question, “Why are teachers in the United States so undervalued and lately even disparaged?” Narrated by Matt Damon, the film seeks to counteract popular misconceptions about the teaching profession and present a picture of what teachers actually do and what their lives are really like.

Read more about “American Teacher” here.

Using Blogs to Teach Writing in the Classroom

2011-05-23T15:56:00.000-06:00

The art of writing instruction has never been simple. Teaching a student when to use a comma or the definition of a metaphor is one thing, but facilitating expression through words is a much more complex undertaking. In an interview with Michael F. Shaughnessy, Education News.org Senior Columnist, Jon Schwartz, a teacher at Garrison Elementary School in Oceanside Unified School District, CA, explained why using blogs can be such a powerful tool in teaching his students to write.

One key element to motivating students to express themselves through writing is giving them a topic they care about personally. Schwartz relates a story where a college professor of his gave him a specific book to read for a book report after assessing his personal interests and it made all the difference to Schwartz’s interest in writing the report. In addition to the personal nature of writing assignments making a difference, Schwartz also addresses other elements of using student blogs, such as confidentiality, parent and principal support, and tailoring the entire blog writing experience to the particular grade level teachers are instructing.

Read the full interview here.

Is the Professional Development in Your District Preparing You to Teach Today's Students?

2011-05-20T17:08:00.001-06:00

"If you try to teach students today in the way they were taught before, you’re going to have disengaged students. Dropouts today are not because students aren’t interested in learning; it’s because schooling has not changed to fit the needs of today’s students," said Curtis Linton in his interview with Ken Royal on the topic of on-demand professional development.

In today’s episode of The Royal Treatment, Ken Royal discussed Tablet-Age Professional Development with Curtis Linton, Vice President at School Improvement Network. Curtis shared insights into the need for a type of professional development (PD) that demonstrates best practices accessible at the exact moment when the PD is needed, not only at a designated time in the future. Here are more highlights:

On-demand professional development really requires that we support teachers in the way we know good teaching of students also occurs:

What does the teacher need to know?
How do we know if the teacher knows it or not?
How do we support the teacher if they don’t know it?

The support provided to a teacher in terms of professional development needs to happen at the moment, not be pushed off until later on.

Listen to the entire interview here or download the podcast for free on iTunes here.

Has your professional development changed to fit the needs of today's students?

President Obama Delivers Commencement Speech at Booker T. Washington High School

2011-05-16T12:43:00.000-06:00

Today, President Obama delivered the commencement speech at Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis, Tennessee. Competing against schools across the country, Booker T. Washington High School demonstrated an incredible increase of graduating students from 4% in 2005 to 70% in 2010, and was selected based on their entry video. Here are some highlights from the president’s speech:

“Well, we are here today because every single one of you stood up and said, ‘Yes we can.’ Yes we can learn. Yes we can succeed. You decided that you weren’t going to be defined by where you came from, but by where you want to go – by what you want to achieve, by the dreams you hope to fulfill.”

“Today BTW is a place that has proven why we can’t accept any excuses when it comes to education; that in the United States of America, we should never accept anything less than the best our children have to offer. As your teacher Steve McKinney, a.k.a. Big Mac, said in the local paper, ‘[W]e need everyone to broaden their ideas about what is possible. We need parents, politicians, and the media to see how success is possible, how success is happening every day…’”

“Education also teaches you the value of discipline – that the greatest rewards come not from instant gratification, but from sustained effort and hard work. It’s a lesson that’s especially important today, in a culture that prizes flash over substance, that tells us the goal in life is to be entertained, that says you can be famous just for being famous.”

Read the full speech

Booker T. Washington Entry Video

And the Winner Is . . .

2011-05-10T17:16:00.001-06:00

iPad 2 Winner - Valerie Kirklin

In the month of April, School Improvement Network asked PD 360 users to participate in a survey to help us improve their experience with PD 360 and all of our professional development products. Thank you for your honest feedback and for assisting us to produce tailored professional development to help all students succeed. Congratulations to Valerie Kirklin from Oak Park Elementary School in Pine Bluff, AR for winning the iPad 2!

A Learning Community of 700,000 Educators

2011-05-06T17:07:00.001-06:00

Today, best practices and effective teaching methods are constantly changing and advancing. As educators search for ways to stay up to date with new innovations in education, PD 360 provides a central, secure location to not only learn best practices from leading educational experts, but also to learn from and collaborate with a community of 700,000 other educators.

Community participants have the ability to create their very own forums with links to content they have found most useful in their everyday practices and upload files from external resources, all in a place where their peers can comment and discuss. With the ability to search by topic, teachers can easily find answers to their questions such as “What is the best way to deal with misbehavior in the classroom?” or “What are some methods of differentiation that have worked for you?”

The PD 360 Learning Community really is that—a community. Collaboration has never been so powerful and far reaching. Even outside of the actual community forums, users can create profiles in PD 360 and connect and share directly to other users through the Colleagues feature. Once teachers and administrators join the community they will have access for life, whether or not they decide to continue utilizing the rich PD 360 resources after the 30-day trial.

Click Here to Join the PD 360 Learning Community

As Teacher Appreciation Week concludes we just want say, “thank you” for continually learning so that you can continue to enlighten the minds of the students in your schools!

President Obama Honors State and National Teachers of the Year

2011-05-03T16:53:00.000-06:00

In a ceremony outside the White House this morning, President Obama honored the National Teacher of the Year, Michelle Shearer, and the State Teachers of the Year. In honor of National Teacher Appreciation Day, we thought we would share some of the president’s comments and highlight a few of the characteristics that we can all honor in the teachers around us:

“What people I think don’t realize is just how much work and how much sacrifice it takes to make that connection. My sister is a teacher, and so I’ve had the occasion of just watching her preparing lesson plans and then going out of her way to call that student who she thinks has potential but is slipping away, and working with parents who maybe don’t know how to support their kids. And it’s tiring work, but how incredibly gratifying it must be.”

“Because in the end, the most effective teachers are the ones who are constantly striving to get better and help their students get better. Those teachers who stay up late grading papers. The teachers who give up their afternoons and free periods to give that student a little bit of extra one-on-one help, and spend evenings and weekends developing lesson plans and activities that don’t just teach the material, but make it come alive. And the teachers who see the potential in students even when the students themselves don’t see that potential.”

“In the words of one of my favorite poets, William Butler Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Teachers here today, and thousands like them, are surrounded every day by young people who will shape our future. But it takes a special person to recognize that. It takes a special person to light that fire, to raise our children’s expectations for themselves, and never give up on them no matter how challenging it might be.”

In addition to the president’s comments, Michelle Shearer affirmed the positive and necessary impact teachers can have on their students in the classroom when she said, “My students will tell you that I love to give pep talks, and Friday was their last one before their AP chemistry exam. And among other things, I said, you are problem-solvers. No matter how challenging the questions, have confidence, forge ahead, and make progress toward solutions.”

“Likewise in education, no matter how challenging the issues, we must be problem-solvers. And as we continue to debate ideas, allocate resources, and implement change, we must make progress in a positive direction and always -- always -- see the faces of our students.”

To read the full transcript from the ceremony Click Here

National Teacher of the Year Committed to Helping Underrepresented Students

2011-05-02T16:06:00.001-06:00

We all remember those teachers. The ones who made us believe we could do more than we ever thought we could. While we wish we could honor all of those teachers, one teacher in Maryland is receiving one of the highest honors a teacher can receive—National Teacher of the Year.

Michelle Shearer is a chemistry teacher at Urbana High School. With over 14 years of experience, Shearer believes “there is an aspiring scientist in all of us.” She said she captures students’ attention by making real-life connections to scientific concepts.

Before teaching at Urbana, Shearer taught at the Maryland School for the Deaf where she offered, in American Sign Language, a course in advanced placement chemistry for the first time in the institution’s 135-year history. She wrote on her contest application that when she suggested to her students that they also take AP calculus, they asked, “Why?” She signed back, “Because you can.”

Shearer said she is committed to helping children who have traditionally been underrepresented in science, including those with special needs and minorities. She has worked with students with poor vision, dyslexia, dysgraphia, attention deficit disorder and Asperger’s syndrome in her AP chemistry classes.

Read more about Michelle Shearer at The Washington Post

Experimental Teaching Method Improves Instruction at Ohio High School

2011-04-29T16:43:00.000-06:00

At Marion Harding High School in Marion, Ohio two teachers are experimenting with "inclusion" teaching, designed to educate students with learning disabilities in a regular classroom.

Math teacher Paula Thomas and Phil Carr, an intervention specialist, are co-teaching an Algebra I class in which traditional students and students with disabilities are taught alongside each other. The teachers share duties, including instruction and grading, and offer extra help to struggling students, regardless of whether they are among students with individual education plans.

Among the benefits to such an arrangement, Thomas said, is that they can double up in in-class intervention and plan lessons together. Carr said there are times when one of them would observe while the other would instruct.

Read the full story at The Marion Star

Could a similar method of “inclusion” teaching be effective in your school or district?

Classroom Blogging for Beginners

2011-04-28T15:50:00.002-06:00

In recent years, blogs have become more than just an online hub for great cooking recipes and elaborate how-to lists. As teachers work to integrate technology into the classroom, blogging has taken its place as an effective teaching tool for instructing students. Initially, educators might be nervous or hesitant to implement the use of blogs, but with a few guidelines, a classroom blog can be a powerful teaching resource.

Yesterday, Marsha Ratzel, a National Board-certified teacher in the Blue Valley School District in Kansas, presented eight tips for teachers just beginning the classroom blog process. With everything from choosing a blog platform to monitoring comments and assuring parent cooperation, we are excited to share Ratzel’s helpful tips with you, our readers.

Marsha Ratzel's 8 Tips for Blogging in the Classroom

Will the Common Core Be the Key to School Improvement?

2011-04-25T16:53:00.001-06:00

Recently, The New York Times published an article about schools that have begun implementing the Common Core Standards. Whether it’s through using more technology or instructing the students to “watch the movie” before they “read the book” for a change, adapting the Common Core suggests a curriculum that is more relatable, therefore helping the students to internalize what is being taught in the classroom versus rote learning of facts. Changing instructional strategies is an attempt to alter what teachers have “always done” to ensure students are even more prepared for college than they have been in the past.

One teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, Ms. Giannousis, explained her experience with implementing the Common Core Standards, “It wasn’t about making things easier for the students, but about challenging them to experience a classic in a different way.”

How do you think the Common Core Standards will affect education in the U.S.?

Read the full article at The New York Times

PD 360 is a "Positive Tool for Principals" in Petersburg, Virginia

2011-04-22T16:01:00.002-06:00

“PD 360 is a positive tool for principals. They feel empowered because they now have the tools they need to lead teacher focus and they are able to be PD directors themselves.” Gail Wade Staff Development Coordinator Petersburg City public Schools, VA

Petersburg City Public Schools (PCPS) is located in Petersburg, Virginia, along the eastern seaboard just 23 miles south of the state capital, Richmond. It is a small district with a student population of 4,630 in seven schools.

PCPS, like many districts, has experienced difficulties:

• PCPS did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the 2009-2010 school year and had four Title I schools.
• PCPS did not meet full Standards of Learning (SOL) accreditation.
• PCPS had the highest dropout rate in central Virginia, with 19.2 percent of the Class of 2010 not making it to graduation. However, that number marked a sharp drop from 2008 when 31.1 percent of potential graduates dropped out.

PCPS Staff Development Coordinator, Gail Wade, was anxious to assist struggling teachers and thereby benefit students. She wanted a cost-effective single source that would provide many avenues of professional development (PD) for all educators. After sampling a free PD 360 trial, she quickly realized it was a perfect answer for the district’s PD.

Learn more about Petersburg's PD 360 Experience

Collaborative Learning Improves Students' Reading Skills

2011-04-21T17:03:00.001-06:00

It’s no secret that children learn at different rates and levels, and that’s without the racial achievement gap and learning disabilities. While districts across the country have implemented various practices to remedy the unevenness of learning in classrooms, two schools in Denver are using a technique called collaborative strategic reading to better understand reading—in particular for those learning English and students with learning disabilities.

With a student body of 40 percent English-language learners and 12 percent with learning disabilities, this technique is being put to good use at Merrill Middle School and Martin Luther King Jr. Early College. The strategy was developed by Janette Klingner, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She started the work in 1993 at the University of Miami, while working on the dissertation for her Ph.D.

"We really did develop it with English-language learners and students with learning disabilities in mind, and we've made changes to make it even more appropriate for them, but we've seen it helps anyone," Klingner said.

Read the full story at The Denver Post