Redesigning Professional Development
By Patricia A. Wasley, CEO, Teaching Channel
For years we have invested significant resources in professional development for teachers – somewhere in the vicinity of $16 billion per year. And please don’t forget the countless hours of time and energy that teachers spend in trying to move their practice forward. Unfortunately, the disappointing fact is that we have not seen the corresponding jump in student achievement that such an investment merits. It’s no surprise why when the common approach to professional development is revealed. More often than not, new strategies are demonstrated in front of groups of teachers who come from a variety of disciplines, grade levels, and school contexts. In this setting, teachers can observe and can ask questions, but they are sent back to their own classrooms to figure out how to adapt new strategies on their own.
Read More →Virtual Worlds Allow Us To Play And Dream — But Do Educators Dare To And Remember How To Do Just That?
By Lisa Dieker, Ph.D. and Michael Hynes, Ph.D., University of Central Florida
As we face class-size increases, new or improved standards, reduction of budgets, higher and higher levels of accountability and whatever else can be thrown at us as educators, we wondered what would happen if we just stopped for a minute, closed our eyes and dreamed about a utopia in education. What would we dream? Would we see classrooms in jet planes traveling the world, unlimited access to the latest developments in technology, teachers supporting each and every student, daily massages for our hard working classroom teachers, or would we simply dream of peace, happiness and harmony for each student who walks into the door of a school?
Read More →Common Core and College Completion: A Shared Agenda for K-12 and Higher Education
By Jacqueline E. King, Director, Higher Education Collaboration, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
While K-12 education has been pre-occupied with implementing the Common Core State Standards, higher education has been engaged in its own reform agenda aimed at radically increasing the number of Americans with high quality postsecondary credentials.
Read More →Extending Quality Technology for Effective Teaching and Learning
By Todd Roberts, Ed.D., Chancellor North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
Faced with new standards and decreased access to professional development offerings, more and more teachers are taking a do-it-yourself approach to professional learning. They’re scouring the Web for quality content, often using Google to find materials.
Unfortunately for these proactive professionals, many initiatives designed to address the new standards have not yet produced the large collections of aligned materials needed to effectively implement a new curriculum. The quality of content found in a broad search of the Internet varies, and educators are spending much of their limited planning time slogging through content that hasn’t been evaluated or slick vendor sites designed to convince them that an out-of-the-box solution is just a $450 check away.
Read More →Research Triangle Park, North Carolina: A Tom Vander Ark ‘Smart City’ Area
Education advocate, advisor, and author Tom Vander Ark has been exploring where innovations in learning are occurring and the organizations that are making an impact across the country in his Smart Cities series. In this week’s Education Week series, Vander Ark writes about North Carolina’s Triangle Region, including its “top-notch” universities and some extraordinary schools making significant improvements in innovation. Moreover, Vander Ark mentions the successful educational leadership efforts of former North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., as well as The Hunt Institute, and its efforts as a leader on high standards, college/career readiness, and preparing education leaders.
Read More →New Technology Bill Could Provide Assistance for CCSS Implementation
“Technology can be a tool to drive equity and to help transform how education is delivered, making learning more student-centered and recognizing teachers as education designers…”
This quote from Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) appears in recent coverage by Huffington Post education reporter Joy Resmovits of a new technology bill introduced by Miller that focuses on “tools that provide teachers with instantaneous feedback on their students’ progress.”
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