Tuesday Tidbits, October 12, 2010

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Abner Oakes

Last week I spent three days working with a school district in South Dakota, a place with which I’ve worked for about three years, and I was struck by something that the school board president said near the end of our Thursday meeting. He told me that the district had advertised for a job opening and that it had received one resume for that opening – just one. I was thunderstruck. Sure, it made sense – this opening needed a person with a somewhat specialized background, and the district is in a very rural county – but I was still thunderstruck, given that job openings these days attract hundreds of applicants.

It’s interesting that this anecdote flies in the face of recent research on attracting principals to rural settings, which showed that “superintendents of rural school districts in at least two states…are not facing a shortage of applicants for vacant principal’s positions.” Wonder if those findings can be extended beyond the principal, to other positions in these districts.

On September 29 I wrote about Race to the Top (RTTT), and an astute reader (and good friend!) asked why Montgomery County schools had not signed on to the Maryland application, missing out on about $12 million. This article stated that the “school system’s lack of support for Race to the Top centered on how teacher evaluations might differ from what the county uses and the nature of the tests that would be administered to students.” The state’s application even stated that “Maryland determined that the…County’s [teacher] evaluation system does not calculate student growth, and therefore would not be aligned with the statewide system.”

In Rhode Island, another RTTT winner, two school districts were not part of that state’s app, Chariho Regional and Little Compton, and this article said that the state left Little Compton out since it had answered negatively to several questions on the memorandum of understanding that each participating district completed as part of any state’s app. Guess the state had no room for nay-sayers. As of September 17, Little Compton is appealing to the state to have that action reversed, so that it might get part of Rhode Island’s overall award – about $71,000.

Finally, I was reading this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, the Food Issue, and got thinking about school lunch and the last lunch I had that was actually cooked by the people in the cafeteria, not something delivered to the school from a central kitchen and then warmed by a Cafeteria Manager. It was a delicious casserole prepared by three women at Magazine Public Schools in Arkansas, with fresh rolls and topped off by a very decadent, piping hot peach cobbler, the fruit fresh and local.

As you might imagine, there are many sites and blogs out there about school food. Farm to School lets you find a farm-to-school program in your state; here’s the blog Better D.C. School Food, with great links and resources; and I am fascinated with s’Cool Food, which “focuses its efforts in the public school districts in Santa Barbara (CA) County.” At s’Cool Food’s Commonly Asked Questions page, see this question, “How do I get more information about what my child is eating at school?”, and its answer: The US Department of Agriculture, “which administers the National School Lunch Program, encourages all parents to have lunch with their children at school at least once a year. Actually seeing what food is being offered in your school cafeteria, and what foods they are choosing, is the best way to become accurately informed about what your child eats at school.”

I have never bought and had lunch at school with our son; now I need to.

Posted in Federal policy, Principal, School, School district, School food | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Building the better classroom

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Abner Oakes

Slate has launched its third Hive “crowd sourcing” project, this time focused on modernizing the American classroom. Here’s Linda Perlstein’s kick off article; at its end you can submit your ideas.

For me, when I think about the ideal classroom, the first thing that comes to mind is the space and the ability to make the space fit the activity or activities for that day of teaching. When I go to the theater, I like those productions that have tables or chairs that move or are moved around, that have walls or other scenery that drop from the flyspace, that even have a carousel system for the stage, allowing quick changes for different scenes.

In my classroom the kids and I moved our desks and chairs and other furniture around a lot, in loud and clumsily choreographed bursts; we might gather close up to the board for a quick mini-lesson, disperse into small groups, and finally push everything to the edges so that people could practice their scenes from Macbeth. In addition to matching the space with the activity, I liked the brief bit of chaos, the physical release for my students, as we went from one configuration to another. It was a quick break, and then we’d get right back to work.

A good friend who’s a middle school teacher wrote this last evening, when I asked for his input: “Classroom set up differs from teacher to teacher. Some have a difficult time dealing with the chaos of moving desks. I particularly like that activity but happen to have a huge room and don’t have much need for moving the desks so I regroup students often, or do the think/pair share thing where they have to get up and move around.”

He continued that the classroom’s “Promethean board gets students to their feet and engages them in the learning, so although I teach middle school and not elementary school, I have used it as a ‘station’ a few times.”

“Kids can only focus for so long,” he finished writing, and “so getting them to their feet is a good transition. They tend to remember only beginnings and endings, so if you have a lot of beginnings and endings in the lesson, they tend to remember more. At least that’s my experience, and it’s supported by the research done by Jon Saphier and promoted by the study on Skillful Teaching.”

I very much like what he wrote about “stations,” which are seen often in elementary school settings but rarely in middle and high school classrooms; see this great description of them from Montgomery County (MD) schools. Does your daughter’s teacher use this strategy to differentiate instruction? And how might a better built classroom make easier the use of stations?

Posted in Classroom, School, Teachers, Teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Tuesday Tidbits, October 5, 2010

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Abner Oakes

Sorry – a day late with this post. Travel and balky airport Wi-Fi to blame.

The Education Trust has a space at its website for parent resources; I like the pamphlet on homework and the questions and answers about academic standards. This set of questions and their answers is particularly important as states adopt the Common Core State Standards. Is your state on the list of those that have?

Do you know the web-based tool Wordle? It’s great fun with kids; it generates word clouds from text, no matter how little or how much, and my son and I played with it with a report that he wrote, to see what words were used most frequently.

A piece from two former colleagues and their take on Waiting for ‘Superman’: “What if instead of focusing our energies on building ‘Super Teachers’ – able to leap standardized testing in a single bound – we work instead to create a bold staffing model that empowers teachers and plays to their strengths? Maybe it’s not about adding on, but about branching out.” You will see in the column that there is role in this new school model, in this new way to think about teaching, for community experts – just like you.

Lastly, I very much like what this blog post from ASCD (formerly the Association for Curriculum and Development) had to say about classrooms and schools. Called Would I Want My Child in This Classroom? and by Steven Weber, it was ultimately about the alignment of classroom instruction with standards (see the Common Core State Standards above), but it asked tough questions about practices in the classroom and the school building, such as, “Would I want my child in this classroom if a majority of the instruction is focused on memorization and recall?” or “Would I want my child in this classroom if the science and social studies classes are considered non-essential for grades K-5, because they are not tested?” or “Would I want my child in this classroom if the teacher is passionate about worksheets?”

The predominance of worksheets in certain school buildings drives me crazy – what I once called the Cult of the Ditto, but then that shows my age. I have been in several classrooms where the teacher sits at his or her desk while the kids dutifully fill out a worksheet. Yes, there is a place in the classroom for quiet, individual practice – with a set of mathematics problems, for example. But these worksheet-driven moments can be an iceberg tip, pointing to more problematic issues with teaching and learning in a classroom.

Maybe some questions to ask: I see that you use worksheets in class – how often does that happen each week? Are children allowed to work together on them? How do you assist students as they work on them? What kind of follow up is done with students – do you correct these worksheets in class, maybe with the whole group, or simply collect them? Have your charges ever developed their own worksheets, for use by the whole class?

Posted in Classroom, Federal policy, Parents, School, Teachers, Teaching | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

For parents: Making sense of Race to the Top

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Abner Oakes

Race to the Top (RTTT) is $4.35 billion program designed by the US Department of Education to spur school reform activity in states, and states competed against each other to win a portion of that money and implement a variety of reform-related activities. Money was doled out in two rounds; Tennessee and Delaware were funded in the first round, and nine states and DC were funded in round two.

When the second round winners of RTTT were announced, my son’s school’s listserv buzzed that our state, Maryland, nabbed $250 million. What folks seemed to be asking was – How would that cash find its way to our school district and to our school? Well, it won’t, sort of, as one listserv poster reminded people: Montgomery County (where we live) and Frederick County school districts did not sign on to Maryland’s RTTT application, as they did not wish to take part in some activities outlined in the application. Now, these two school districts will still take part in state-wide RTTT activities; they just won’t get a cut of the money that will be directly distributed to school districts.

(In many states public charter schools are their own school district or LEA, local education agency, in ed world parlance; it’s worth a whole ‘nother post to look at how they will receive or be impacted by RTTT bucks.)

So, say you’re in a state and school district that was awarded RTTT money: Just what might your district do with that money? What might be its impact on your kid’s school?

I posed that question to a friend who works in a state education agency that got RTTT funding, and he wrote this: “Half of the [RTTT] money is going to the LEAs,” and much of that district-level funding will go “to professional development, some to technological solutions, STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] resources, instructional coaching, community engagement initiatives, etc.” He went on to say that the district’s RTTT money can’t be used for recurring expenses, such as class size reduction and personnel, although instructional coaches, as mentioned above, would be an exception.

The rest of this state’s money will be focused on larger, state-wide projects. “While the changes parents see might not be as obvious as those with local spending,” he finished, “they are going to see big changes in the assessments their children are taking, things being done in turnaround school districts, and the level of public reporting about teacher, school, and district effectiveness.”

What might a parent do to get further information about RTTT in his or her state or his or her school district? A few ideas: First, see below for the RTTT websites of those 11 states and the District of Columbia. For those 12 entities I tried to find three things that might be helpful: Information about the school districts that signed on with the state’s application and therefore will directly receive cash; a short ‘n’ sweet document, a one- or two-pager, about that state’s RTTT plan; and links to the full apps.

I’ll update the above as I dig around some more.

So, find your state. See if your district signed on. Print off the short ‘n’ sweet doc; dive into the state’s RTTT site or even into the full application. Take that short ‘n’ sweet doc with you to one of your district’s question and answer sessions – or email your school’s principal and have him or her send your query on to someone at the district. In fact, see if someone from the district can come to a PTA meeting and talk about RTTT, without jargony gobbledygook. And feel free to add your own ideas in the comment section below.

Have a good weekend!

Posted in Federal policy, Parents, School district | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

More on Ask Abouts – and designing a better classroom

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Abner Oakes

Yesterday, I wrote briefly about Ask Abouts, prompts from a teacher for parents to ask their child about what’s happening in class, and I got this related idea from a teacher and parent in Elgin, IL: “I am doing this [Ask Abouts] with [my son’s] teacher…she calls them ‘Conversation Starters.’ [My son] brings this home every Friday with five questions. At dinner, or whenever, we have this dialog with him. As a 2nd grader, it is great for him to practice giving us details about something new he is learning…we do not need to return anything, but we sign his planner that we had this conversation.”

Other bit of news: Get your thinking caps on. This from a writer for Slate: “I am leading an interesting project for Slate magazine I wanted to let you know about. Next week, Slate will be kicking off the third installment of its ‘Hive’ project, a contest in which readers submit their ideas to solve an interesting problem. Previous Hives have taken on energy efficiency and urban transportation. This time, we want readers to design a better classroom, one suited to the way children are – or you think should be – taught.”

This writer continued: “We’d love to have innovative entries from everyone from schoolchildren to teachers to academics to architects to simply curious and engaged people with no involvement in schools except that they once went to them…Entries will be judged by readers and a panel of judges, finalists will be highlighted, and the winner will be announced in November. The contest is being sponsored by Coca-Cola, which may actually build a classroom based on the winning design.”

Next week, when I get the link to the kickoff story and requirements for entry, I will post and tweet. More soon!

Posted in Classroom, Parents, School | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Tuesday Tidbits, September 28, 2010

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Abner Oakes

As a part of this week’s Education Nation activities, see this Education Nation Scorecard, which allows “families to navigate the education system by providing useful, easily understandable information about performance at individual schools, as well as in districts, states, and the nation as a whole.” Seems to me just a re-branding of the Great Schools site – but I need to poke around in it to see what might be new.

Do you know the Guys Read website, from author Jon Scieszka? Tons of suggested books for boys.

Found another piece on parent involvement from a past place of work, The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement. It “highlights the ways in which selected high-performing schools incorporate parent and community involvement in their efforts to increase student achievement.”

See this CNN clip on star chef Todd Gray’s visit to DC’s Murch Elementary School, from Michelle Obama’s initiative that has chefs adopting schools to promote healthy eating.

I plan to write more about project-based learning and the rich student work that can come from it. Until then take a look at this sample of student work from schools that implement the Expeditionary Learning design – work that is authentic and real world-focused. These final products show a deep engagement with the material and a deep desire that the work have impact beyond the schoolyard.

Lastly, had a brief back and forth with a friend about interactions with her child’s new teacher, which have been very positive. I particularly liked that this teacher sends home weekly “Ask Abouts,” prompts for parents to ask the child about what’s happening in class. The teacher sees it as a way to generate responses beyond the standard “How was your day?”/”Fine” exchange. Great idea.

Posted in Books, Classroom, Parents, School, School district | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments