Calling for New Voices

Want your innovative ideas, perceptions, or insight about education to be heard in a forum recognized locally, nationally, and around the world?

Write for ASCD Express’s New Voices column!

Starting in October, ASCD Express, the online newsletter for the organization’s digital membership, seeks to feature a brief 200-300-word opinion column from educators with a diversity of viewpoints. Check out our list of theme starters below, and submit your column idea or completed column by the listed due date for consideration to Rick Allen. Please include biographical information.

Upcoming Themes

• The value of math (Sept. 6)
• Helping teachers who struggle (Sept. 15)
• Teaching as an art (Sept. 29)
• Formative assessment (Oct. 13)
• The beauty of standardized tests (Oct. 27)
• Homework in the crosshairs (Nov. 10)
• Preparing students for a STEM-centered world (Nov. 24)
• Getting students to think for themselves (Dec. 7)
• Good parents-bad parents (Dec. 21)
• Reaching the reluctant learner (Jan. 6, 2008)
• Improving writing skills (Jan. 20)
• Poverty and learning (Feb. 3)
• Integrating the school specialists (Feb. 17)

Comments

[Saramae]

I look forward to reading community blogs in the future. As an active participant of my personal learning, I feel it is imperative for educators to construct knowledge through peer discussions activated by individual belief systems. Thanks for the opportunity.

[Anne]

As a certified K-8 teacher and a certified art teacher, if bothers me to read (and hear) how the arts are being taken out of the classroom. I hear from new teachers, “I’m given so much to teach, I don’t have time for art.” But art shouldn’t be a separate subject, just as science should be integrated into your reading program. When I attended to ASCD conference in Anaheim in the Spring, the ONE integrated art session the was offered was cancelled. Only ONE, (Shame on you ASCD!) How can we teach the new teachers and may be some of us seasoned ones, how to integrate the arts, if we don’t provide the hows. We need to listen to each other. We are so caught us in shared reading, math boxes, and assessments, …but what about our kids?…Are they retaining, connecting, comprehending? Are we using the skills of technology and art, the things they are good at to teach them? My classroom : students who are second graders in a low-socioeconomic neighborhood. I have one computer in my room and I get $25.00 from my PTA. But we do a lot with a little. I have the students write a monthly newspaper, do research on the internet, use my camera for adjective writing, write books, make paper, we raise crayfish, grow worms, … I have high expectations and no excuses, they know it. ASCD in the coming year and in the Spring conference, I would like to see for me and my colleagues ways to integrate the arts into the classrooms. We do have time, we have to make the time. This is the way our students learn.