What administrators want teachers to know and do

Effective teachers demonstrate a deep understanding of the curriculum. They plan, teach, and assess to promote mastery for all students. Effective teachers provide high-quality instruction to increase student achievement for all students by providing researched-based instruction filled with technology integration. Effective teachers provide a respectful, positive, safe, and student-centered environment. They collaborate with their colleagues to analyze data and plan for effective and equitable instruction. Effective teachers continually reflect and evaluate the effects of his/her choices and actions. Effective teachers build positive and professional relationships with students, parents, and community members. 

A mother comes home and finds her son and husband in the front yard. Her son is sitting on the ground beside his shiny new bicycle. Mom asks, "What have you two been up to today?" The father looks up, grins, and says, "I taught Isaiah how to ride his bike." "Well, Isaiah," the mother asks, "why aren't you riding?" "Well, I taught him," Dad replies, "but he didn't learn it."  When teachers are unclear on the specific proficiences involved and don't know how well their students are learning, they run the risk of being a little like th father in the story, saying, "I taught it, but they just didnn't get it."

Below is a Ted Talk video given by Linda Cliatt-Wayman’s who describes her first day as principal at a failing high school in North Philadelphia.  She was determined to lay down the law but soon realized the job was more complex than she thought. With palpable passion, she shares the three principles that helped her turn around three schools labeled “low-performing and persistently dangerous.” Her fearless determination to lead — and to love the students, no matter what — is a model for leaders in all fields.

Type into address bar   http://bit.ly/Ta0415

Public school education is broken. It is an investment gone bad and its shareholders are left with negative poor credit.  It is a series of faulty practices with no thought to how the outcome of policy will affect the lives of the participants.  The microcosmic thinking has filtered its way into our educational systems where children are not trained to be individual thinkers but regarded as off-limits because of the position of their parents in the community.  Not every child has that stigma but it leads to inconsistency in the classroom, ultimately affecting classroom management and impeding curriculum enhancement.  Teachers in training are often told to play the dance of finding who the parents are rather than to hold the curriculum as the guide to academic success.  

Often we want our students to build new models of reality, or at minimum to question some of their existing ones. We are expecting our students to engage in what might be regarded as an unnatural act. While their natural tendency is to understand the new in terms of the old, we are asking them to build completely new models of reality, or question old ones. Most students don’t do that very well, or very easily.

Teachers  are all dealing with students who are attempting to reconcile new sensory information with their existing mental models. Intellectuals are most likely to learn deeply when they are trying to solve problems or answer questions that they have come to regard as important, intriguing, or beautiful. This is their description of what we call the Natural Critical Learning Environment.

Moreover, students are most likely to question and perhaps shift their paradigms if, in the course of pursuing those questions or problems, they find themselves in a situation where their existing paradigms produce incorrect or unsatisfactory explanations. They face what some have called an “expectation failure”—their mental model has predicted an outcome, but that expected result doesn’t match with their current sensory input and how they interpret it.

When faced with new information that is in conflict with their current mental model, students typically invoke one of two processes. They can choose to take a surface approach to this event by dismissing this new information as a special case and simply wrapping it around their current paradigm, or those same students can take a deep approach by grappling with how this new information will irrevocably change their mental model, ultimately creating a new and deeper conceptual understanding. If they have an opportunity to grapple with the dissonance they encounter—to try, fail, receive feedback, and try again—before anyone makes a judgment of their efforts, they are more likely to learn deeply.

People are most likely to learn deeply when they are trying to answer their own questions or solve their own problems. However, in a formal educational environment, learners typically are not in charge of the questions. Teachers usually frame the curriculum and at least implicitly shape the questions. Perhaps rightly so, but that reality produces an enormous chasm between an ideal natural critical learning environment and conditions existing in most universities. To bridge that gap, to reach the students educationally, the best teachers—and this may be their most profound ability—find ways to link their own disciplinary concerns and interests with those of the students.

You can make a child sit at his or her desk, but only the child can decide to learn. Engaging a student’s intrinsic motivation is the goal of academicians everywhere. Providing students choices in the classroom is a proven way to deliver effective instruction, engage students, promote critical thinking, and utilize the multi-sensory power of technology to reach every student.

Choice is important because it is part of what human beings want to do. Providing choices during instruction makes it possible for students increase engagement, form critical thinking skills rather than memorization, and explore different modes of delivery and assessment through technology.

PODCASTS

10 Podcasting Projects Teachers Should Try in the Classroom

If orange is the new black, podcasting is the new oral report. And now that teachers have easy access to tools like Garage Band and iPods that make recording a breeze, podcasting is quickly becoming the latest creative mode of learning and presenting in schools. Here are 10 ideas to try in your classroom today.

1. Current Events Newscasts: Practice nonfiction reading skills by having your students do weekly or monthly podcasts on an interesting current event.
2. Reading Radio: Have your students make short radio broadcasts summarizing the books they are reading.
3. Roving Reporters: Send your students out into the “field” (a.k.a. the school) to interview key players in important school events.
4. Celebrate Culture: Have your students record podcasts about important cultural months like Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month and then present them to the school or parents to commemorate the events.
5. Bring Your Teacher Home: Send a little bit of yourself home with your kids by podcasting important parts of your lessons.
6. Podcasting Library: Have your students collaborate to create a library of podcasts from which future students can learn.
7. MusicCasts: Have band or orchestra students create podcasts for each instrument, detailing specific notes, sounds and characteristics of each instrument.
8. Awesome Audio Tours: Give your students the chance to be tour guides for new students at your school by having them podcast school tours that kids can listen to when they enter.
9. Podcasting Pen Pals: Record interactive or encouraging podcasts and then send them to another classroom in another state or country.
10. Reenactments: Have your students reenact important events in history using period language and vocabulary.

Use Audacity to create podcast  http://www.audacityteam.org/download/