Voices in Education

Archives

Showing 201-210 of 315 Posts

Browse all Posts »
Measuring Effective Teaching with a Team of Superheroes As the parent of a six-year-old, I'm often reminded that a team of superheroes should not share the same superpower. Rather than have three Supermen, it's much better to have one guy who is super strong, one who can run really fast, and one who can do something totally unexpected--like turn themselves invisible.
Comments ( )
Value-Added Measures: The Public’s “Right to Know”? I love newspapers. I really do. I subscribe to both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But their recent decisions to publish teacher names along with their "value-added" ratings shows the newspapers at their very worst--focusing on what sells papers rather than the public good. In the process, they may single-handedly bring down what could be one of the more positive developments in K-12 education in recent decades.
Comments ( )
Slow, Erratic, and Underwhelming—Progress in Narrowing Achievement Gaps For more than a decade, states, districts, schools, and teachers have devoted enormous energy to closing achievement gaps between rich and poor students and between students from different racial and ethnic groups. But how much progress has been made in narrowing these gaps?
Comments ( )
Can Brief Interventions Help Reduce Achievement Gaps? Earlier last school year, while writing a book with a group of colleagues reflecting on our work on shrinking achievement gaps in Arlington, Virginia, I read a 2011 article in Science by Stanford University researchers Gregory M. Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen. They reported on an experiment in which, after a brief social-psychological intervention with college freshmen, the African American achievement gap with white students as measured by GPA after three years in college was cut by more than half. In addition, the African American students reported improved health and reduced doctor visits after the same three-year period.
Comments ( )
The Power of Pivotal Moments How do minority students who are first in their family to attend college manage to make their way to higher education despite what seems like overwhelming odds? Most Americans believe that low-income minority students who excel in school do so because they are smarter, more motivated, and willing to work harder. Stories abound in mainstream media outlets about minority working-class students who are able to "beat the odds" to become highly successful students.
Comments ( )
Ordinary Teenagers, Extraordinary Results: Apprentices at Work In a small office lined with desks and computer stations, a dozen teenagers pored over paperwork and deliberated decisions, one young man zipping from table to table in a wheelchair. The young people, 15 to 18 years old, were reading, discussing, and evaluating job applications.
Comments ( )
Setting Off and Sustaining Sparks of Curiosity and Creativity In the summer of 2010, Newsweek pronounced--on its cover no less--that the United States was suffering from a "Creativity Crisis." The coauthors of the cover story, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, quite ably synthesized cutting-edge research about how to create the conditions for promoting creativity and offered specific ideas on how to address the crisis.
Comments ( )
Assessments That Measure What Matters My father-in-law was a classical pianist. He immigrated to the United States from Austria in the early forties. His first official act was to apply to the American Federation of Musicians for a union card, which he needed in order to work. To get this card he had to pass a simple test: the examiner pointed to a piano and asked him to play something.
Comments ( )
What Inspired Me to Study Parent and Community Engagement As is true for many teachers, I have fond and not-so-fond memories of my first year teaching. It was a year both of trial and error, of extreme joy and disappointment--that led to self-doubting about my effectiveness as a teacher. The first couple months were, at times, terrifying and discouraging.
Comments ( )
Overpaid? A Teacher's Perspective on Compensation For many Americans who have never worked in a classroom, teaching could look like a cushy profession: days that end at three; long holidays; a work year that's significantly shorter than that in other fields.
Comments ( )