Why Teachers Should Try Twitter

Let's get meta—We were talking on Twitter with ed blogger Bill Ferriter (@plugusin) about his February EL column, "Why Teachers Should Try Twitter," and got some good advice for Twitter beginners. Ferriter wrote,

If I had to make a recommendation to your readers who are new to Twitter, it would be to join with a group of colleagues. When you join by yourself, Twitter can be a lonely place until you build some solid digital relationships. When you join with colleagues, you know someone is listening and you can extend conversations/discoveries in real life.

Ferriter calls Twitter his "favorite tool for differentiating my own learning." If you're using Twitter professionally, how does it measure up to Ferriter's experience that it's "a constant source of new ideas to explore"?

Daily Riff Is Ready to Change the Conversation

Although there is a bounty of insightful education blogs in the blogosphere, that hasn't prevented the Daily Riff from making a splash with controversial and thought-provoking commentary. This new blog, which focuses on current events, opened shop in November with posts that include an apprehensive take on Bill Gates' role in education, a critical review of a recent Brookings Institute report on education reporting, and a look at current concerns surrounding teenage promiscuity.

For an opinion-filled roundup of education news, visit the Daily Riff at www.thedailyriff.com.

When Students Don't Play the Game

Jessica Towbin's first instinct when encountering students' widespread disengagement and outright hostility toward her was to try to establish control in the classroom. But this was useless at getting to the root reasons why students were tuning out.

What did help Towbin find out where her students went when they passively or actively withdrew from lessons?

• Shifting from a focus on control to a focus on inquiry.
• Finding out who students are and what's important to them.
• Articulating that learning matters and why it matters.

In "When Students Don't Play the Game," Towbin learns that starting where students are isn't just about diagnosing skill levels; it's about repeatedly asking, "Where are you?" and being prepared to step back and listen.

What helps you reach students who "don't play the game"?

Why ASCD EDge?

ASCD recently launched ASCD EDge, a social networking community for educators. Since then, we have received many good questions (see Scott McLeod's recent blog post) from educators and ASCD members: Why create a new social networking platform when so many already exist? Are you abandoning your presence on Twitter or YouTube or Facebook in exchange for this platform? Why should I join and actively participate?

The first question (Why create a new social networking platform?) is one we've wrestled with quite a bit. As many of you know, for years ASCD has been home to a strong and thriving community of educators: our authors, our affiliates, our networks, Emerging Leaders, Educator Advocates, the Whole Child Initiative, our Healthy School Communities, and the list goes on and on. What we realized in the past year, however, was that we didn't have one place for all those different groups of educators to get together online, connect, and share best practices. We decided to build ASCD EDge to be that place. 

But rather than limiting the community to just our experts or paying ASCD members, we wanted to open it up to all educators, who are welcome to join—for free—and begin their own groups and discussions around issues of their choosing. Whereas professional learning networks on sites like Ning usually assist with discussion on specific interests, ASCD EDge allows members to delve deeper on topics while still being part of a larger, more diverse environment. And although external networks have provided opportunities for professional information sharing and networking, they're not robust enough to facilitate integrated virtual professional development for educators supported by ASCD's wealth of resources and expertise.

We Can Raise Standards (1983)

Although the movement toward national standards in the United States didn't gain serious momentum until the 1990s, educators have long worried about how to ensure a quality education to students on a national level. In the early 1980s, this anxiety was fueled by reports like A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which argued that the U.S. education system was eroding and the nation was falling behind other advanced countries.

In the October 1983 issue of Educational Leadership, research professor Herbert Walberg taps into the zeitgeist of the moment by contrasting the decentralized approach to public education used in the United States with Japan's organized and demanding system.

Read the article: We Can Raise Standards (PDF)

"You Can Get Louder, But It's Better to Use Your Evidence"

Teaching leadership skills via the four Rs—rigor, relevance, relationships, and results—was the headline on one of last week's most-clicked ASCD SmartBrief stories. But throughout the story on San Francisco's City Arts and Technology High School's ability to build academic futures for its students, debate and civil academic discourse figures prominently as the vehicle that unites these four Rs.

A couple of free articles from our archives dig deeper into the power of Socratic inquiry and dialectic discourse in the classroom; check out What Would Socrates Say? and Clash! The World of Debate.

Do you have your own twist on the four Rs? What instructional approaches pair well with your teaching philosophy?

Creative Leadership: Skills That Drive Change

No doubt shrinking budgets are among the top concerns of school leaders these days. However, a recent commentary in The Washington Post notes, "If all you want to do is cut costs, you don't need a leader; you need an accountant."  

So we asked ASCD Annual Conference speaker Gerard Puccio (Creative Leadership: Skills That Drive Change), chairperson of Buffalo State College's International Center for Studies in Creativity:

Why is creative leadership, not just good accounting, vital to schools in these tough times?

Puccio: A recent Harvard Business Review article on adaptive leadership noted that leaders in this new millennium must accept the fact that chaos and crisis are here to stay. This may be a bit dramatic, but what is certain is that change is here to stay, as are all of the implications and consequences associated with continuous change.

Remembering Mary Anne Raywid

Education Week reports the sad news that education scholar Mary Anne Raywid, an expert on small and alternative schools, has passed away at the age of 81. Raywid published many articles over the years in Educational Leadership, which addressed issues such as school choice and "dangerous organizations" in education.

Raywid last wrote for EL in February 2002, with the article "The Policy Environments of Small Schools and Schools-Within-Schools." She vividly describes the diversity of leadership models and policy environments among efforts to "downsize" schools, through learning communities or schools-within-schools.

The article makes a strong case for strategic planning to facilitate these models; she writes, "when structures and policies act as barriers to innovation, we must modify them if we want small schools to flourish." Her recommendations are especially relevant as Race to the Top applications are motivating states across the country to modify charter school regulations.

Screenagers Can't Find the Off Button

Young people ages 8–18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day engaged with electronic devices like computers, smart phones, and TVs, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). That's an hour more than KFF reported five years ago, and because kids are often multitasking when interacting with technology, they'e actually packing way more hours of media consumption into that seven and a half hours.

While the study claims no cause-and-effect links, it did find heavy media use (16 hours or more) associated with behavioral problems and lower grades.

Media has become more portable in the last few years, as well as more personally relevant to teens, with the explosion of user-generated content—meaning the next KFF study could report even higher consumption rates among youth. Study authors note that Twitter did not even exist when they began surveying consumers for this study.

Chicago Tribune's coverage of the KFF study delves into setting boundaries for media use and creating home environments that balance low- or no-tech and high-tech activities.

Are the same boundaries and balance of activities important in schools? Do you help students manage their media intake?

ESEA Reauthorization and the Whole Child

Educators must take advantage of the impending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to ensure that a comprehensive whole child approach to learning becomes a national priority, writes ASCD Executive Director Gene Carter in this month’s "Is It Good for the Kids?" column.

Carter points out that promising examples of a coordinated, whole child approach to education exist at the local and state levels, from superintendents in Pennsylvania and Washington State who have integrated the whole child framework into their district improvement plans to education, youth, and community groups in Massachusetts that have joined together to spearhead Success for Life, a collaborative effort to advance the lifelong prospects of youth.

The federal government is beginning to take a cue from these local efforts, Carter contends, but hasn’t made the whole child approach enough of a priority by including it in the Race to the Top Fund's competitive priorities.

With ESEA reauthorization looming, Carter calls for Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration to put action behind their words, bringing together a national summit that draws attention to, coordinates, and expands on promising local efforts to support the whole child.

Do you see examples of a whole child approach at the local level? What do you think the federal government can learn from local and state efforts?

Ed Week’s Annual Report Card Shines Spotlight on Common Standards

The ongoing national debate over common academic standards, fueled by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association's Common Core State Standards Initiative, is the special focus of Education Week's annual Quality Counts report this year. The report's original 50-state survey discovered the following:

• All 50 states and D.C. have standards for the four core subjects, but only 18 states have detailed standards for all of those subjects.

• Forty-two states have developed resources such as curriculum guides, lesson plans, and sample test items for all core subjects.

• Most states look beyond their borders for guidance when writing and revising their academic standards. More than 40 states have drawn on the work of national subject matter organizations and 22 have looked to other states, but only 16 have engaged in international comparisons or benchmarking.

• States anticipate a variety of challenges to adopting the common core standards, including the need for a high level of stakeholder input and support, disruption to ongoing state efforts, and misalignment between the state and common standards.

Bookmark This! WaPo's Top Edublogs 2010

Looking for some good reads straight from the source's mouth? Maybe 2010 is the year you resolved to start your own edublog, but you want to check out some great examples to get you going? You'll want to check out Jay Matthews and Valerie Strauss's just-released list of the Best Education Blogs for 2010 (Washington Post), highlighting teachers, policy wonks, and journalists adept at covering the edusphere.

It's a short list, and we're proud to note that The Line, written by 7th grade teacher Dina Strasser, makes the cut. Dina's been blogging Marzano's Art and Science of Teaching for us over the past year. And back in '08, she blogged our Annual Conference in New Orleans.

Congratulations to all the winners, and a special Inservice shout-out to The Line!

Teaching Banned Books

Books discussing political or religious differences or that are deemed age-inappropriate, or those that include profane language, sexual, racially discriminatory, or violent content, sometimes wind up challenged or even banned from inclusion in school curriculum or libraries.

Read our previous coverage of Banned Books Week in the post "Ideas Don't Die."

However, many educators argue that teaching content that offers a different or even critical view of society, the government, or religion promotes intellectual freedom in the classroom and helps students hone their close reading and thinking skills.

"Challenging Content: Teaching Banned Books in the Classroom" in this month's Education Update newsletter covers some of the considerations for educators who are including flagged literature in their syllabuses. Are parents engaged and informed about curriculum choices? How will units on challenged literature encourage safe and civil discussions among students?

As an educator, do you see value in teaching banned or challenged texts?

Read with Me: Helping Parents Help Children

No surprises here: a recent survey underscores the importance of reading to and chatting with children in their first years as a vital building block to speech and literacy.

We asked ASCD Annual Conference presenter Bill Driedger (Read with Me: Helping Parents Help Children) to share how his personal and professional experiences with literacy instruction have shaped his mission to get families reading together. By including prereading activities in everyday life and play, reading became part of his kids' everyday world and a positive experience that translated into a love of learning.

Inservice: Why focus on whether students are reading at home?

Bill Driedger: Partly, questions from concerned parents spurred my work with family literacy. They went something like this, "I'd like to teach my 4-year-old to read; do you have any materials or resources to help me with this?" I knew what they really wanted-—a polished set of lesson plans to use for formal reading instruction with their preschoolers.

On the other hand I saw what my wife, a highly effective kindergarten teacher (only a slight bias here), was doing with our children at home. So many everyday activities became engaging learning opportunities for our children, often centered on literacy. "’T’ for Thomas," my three-year-old would hear her say as he played with Thomas the Tank Engine. He learned the alphabet (really) through playing with the many train engine friends of the popular book and TV character.

"High-Performance Teams Aren’t Just Born; They're Trained & Coached"

Before staff overhauls or school closures, analysts at the American Institute for Research want you to consider their evaluation of nonprofit Strategic Learning Initiatives's (SLI) successful interventions in some low-performing Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

Education Week brings us last week's most-clicked SmartBrief story, on how CPS and SLI partnerships have delivered wins for students, staff, and teacher's unions. SLI uses a Focused Instruction Process model, which, broadly summarized, includes shared leadership, targeted professional development, continuous improvement, and parent engagement.

Notably, educators have a say in whether their school accepts the SLI agenda (80 percent staff buy-in is required for adoption), and teachers and administrators are encouraged to adapt implementation to best meet individual school needs. Embedded SLI team support at the school site and collaboration are also hallmarks of the improvement process.

Advocates of the SLI approach to turnarounds say it's cheaper, less disruptive, and builds a long-term investment in human capital, as compared to U.S. DOE stimulus-funded protocol for school turnarounds (all four DOE models call for the principal to be fired; one calls for the school to be closed).

Social Learning in a Free Society (1958)

"In periods of rapid change and threats to accustomed ways of life, human beings are likely to seek ready-made scapegoats and shortcuts to salvation. These times have underlined this point . . . A tide of concern and criticism of American education, unprecedented in recent generations, has lately been channeled into calls for greater rigor, more selectivity, more science and mathematics, mass-production methods."

Sound familiar? If the quote above seems like it's ripped from the education headlines, consider that between the ellipses is a recounting of "an almost frantic clamor to turn out scientists and engineers in the Russian way" in "post-Sputnik" days. The article, "Social Learning in a Free Society," by New York University professor H. Harry Giles, was published in Educational Leadership in October 1958.

Read the article: Social Learning in a Free Society (PDF)

The Homework Gap

What do you do when only some of your students do their homework? In her recent column, teacher Deirdra Grode notes the myriad reasons students don't do homework, but concludes that doing away with homework is not the answer:

By allowing students to complete all their assignments in class, the school does not offer students the opportunity to take ownership of their learning. All the work is completed under teachers' supervision, and students are not practicing the work while making errors.

It's unrealistic, she adds, for education leaders to believe that the achievement gap can be closed within the confines of the school day alone. Teachers should use classtime to engage students in new learning, and students should use out-of-class time for work or practice that they can do independently, Grode says.

Grode's school keeps homework completion expectations high but complements these expectations with student support and family engagement programs. Dig into the specifics of how they do it in February's Education Update "In the Classroom with..." column.

Read All About It @ Teach_J

With the troubled state of today's newspapers and a tenuous, still-evolving model of online journalism, what is the role of the high school journalism teacher? A robust and multifaceted one, as evidenced by Teach_J, the blog of Robert Courtemanche, a journalism and media technology teacher near Houston, Tex.

Courtemanche considers the many motivations and temptations facing today's online journalists, including the issue of writing about certain topics simply to drive up traffic and links—or even to cater to advertisers. These concerns have always been present in journalism, but he observes that they are an even larger issue online: "I think as we go forward, ethics and journalism are going to be more important as the temptation to game the system and cater to advertisers will be greater than ever, but I worry that the economics of journalism in the future may make these concepts seem outdated." Sounds like a great discussion topic for your next class in journalism—or social studies.

He also notes the irony that most social media, including his own blog, is blocked by the Web filter at his school in the post "The Web Is Everywhere But Our Schools." Kids are increasingly going around such filters as more and more of them carry Web-enabled cell phones, making the school's policy seem ineffective as well as overbroad. As journalism increasingly goes online and becomes more interactive, what message does it send to journalism students that many such sites are blocked at school?

Reading Courtemanche's blog makes the topic of journalism more vital and exciting than ever. Check it out at http://teachj.wordpress.com/.

Balancing Academics, Consequences, and Dignity

If you've ever had a student look at you with sad, haunted eyes as you docked her grade for late work; agonized over whether to call home (about pretty much anything); or felt the quiet thrill of a struggling student thanking you for the postcard you wrote about his super quiz score—basically, if you're a teacher—Chapter 7 of Marzano's The Art and Science of Teaching may be the first one you hit.

Summary:

This chapter asks, "What will I do to recognize adherence and lack of adherence to classroom procedures?" Chapter recommendations on consequences in the classroom seems to indicate that a mixed, balanced approach of positive and negative reinforcement is the most effective. Marzano suggests strategies for acknowledging both positive and negative behavior, such as involving the home, staying physically active and present within the classroom, or group contingency responses.

Stuck in My Head:

Marzano mentions briefly in the book's introduction that the order of the chapters represents a "logical planning sequence" for the teacher in addressing her classroom needs (p. 7). I am captured—and comforted?—that this chapter comes in after 131 pages of healthy discussion of curriculum, academic goals setting, and student engagement—well over two-thirds of the book itself.

This chapter's message seems clear: while our diverse, difficult, and daily needs as a teacher may tempt us to spend a majority of our time planning out all the rules, regs, and consequences (and believe me, I've done this), this actually represents a backwards approach to classroom management. The more time we spend working on the quality of our academics, it seems to be saying, the less time we will need for pure, hands-on management of our students. Martin Haberman's observations of star teachers in poor urban schools emphasize this as well.

In other words, kids who are immersed in a self-chosen novel or engaged in a fabulous lab are kids who are probably not trying to text message under their desks.