Who’s Really Not Ready? If I was cynical, I’d think that Mike Russell’s announcement that option of delaying the implementation of National 4 and 5 exams for a year was deliberately timed to coincide with the Budget. There can be no doubt that with regards Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), this is a bit of a climbdown no matter how it has been spun… but, I do think it is grossly unfair to point the finger at the Minister alone. After all, he will not be the one standing in a classroom delivering the new courses, that’ll be us, the teachers. Is it possible, that ultimately the fault lies with the schools themselves? Or, is this all just symptomatic of a fundamental lack of understanding of the role of assessment in learning? I’m going to lay my cards on the table straight away — I like the Curriculum for Excellence. So with that out of the way, let’s consider the elephant in the room. BTW: This room is getting a bit crowded because there’s a second elephant in it. What will the assessment be like?
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School board member flunks standardized test, speaks out against "no accountability" examinations Rick Roach, a highly educated, multi-term member of Florida's District 3 school board, took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (a mandatory standarized test that largely determines a student's final educational certifications) and failed miserably. He's gone public with his conclusion that the test "has no accountability." I'm sympathetic to his arguments on the reading sections -- students are questioned on an unfamiliar passage and are asked to pick the most correct answer from several largely correct answers, and receive no points for a partially correct response -- but less sympathetic to his reaction to the mathematics section. He argues that higher mathematics aren't "what kids need" in the "real world" and should not be on the test. I'd be happy to abolish the test altogether, but not higher mathematics instruction. I struggled with higher math (flunked calculus twice before passing) but I'm glad it was part of my education. “I won’t beat around the bush.
What Schools Can Learn From Google, IDEO, and Pixar A community about to build or rehab a school often creates checklists of best practices, looks for furniture that matches its mascot, and orders shiny new lockers to line its corridors. These are all fine steps, but the process of planning and designing a new school requires both looking outward (to the future, to the community, to innovative corporate powerhouses) as well as inward (to the playfulness and creativity that are at the core of learning). In many ways, what makes the Googles of the world exceptional begins in the childhood classroom -- an embrace of creativity, play, and collaboration. It was just one year ago that 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number-one leadership competency in our complex global marketplace. We can no longer afford to teach our kids or design their schoolhouses the way we used to if we’re to maintain a competitive edge. [Photos by Steve Hall] The Blue Valley Schools Center for Advanced Professional Studies (BVCAPS) takes a similar approach.
Public sector strike: 'we have to live too' | Society | The Observer The police investigator Nicola Ashley, 35, works for Durham police as a financial investigator. Previously she worked for Barclays for 13 years. She transferred her private sector pension into the local government pension scheme. She earns £29,700, contributes £161 a month into her pension and faces having to pay an extra £80 a month. "I've never taken industrial action before, but the government seems so intent on showing utter contempt you do stop and wonder what they'll come back for next year. "My husband is also a public sector worker, so we're facing a double increase, and along with rising childcare costs, fuel, even car insurance, it's unbelievable. "I've a seven-year-old daughter: we can't afford another child and are penny-pinching all the time, even though we are both working full-time. "I made the decision to go back to work after I had my daughter, to maintain my pension and to try and make things secure for her. "I wonder if I would have made the same life choices again.
Stand Again It’s hard to describe to people all of the magic that happens at Anastasis on a daily basis. It really does feel like something special, a magical quality of falling down the rabbit hole into another world where school is fun and challenging and wonderful. The learning that happens here is very organic, it lacks a formulaic approach. So when people ask us how they can do what we do, it isn’t a simple answer. Anastasis learners are in a continual state of growth, discovery, and creativity. We are just wrapping up an Inquiry unit about “How the World Works.” The nice thing about having ALL students in the same big guided inquiry during a block, is the incredible overlaps in learning that occur between classes. For each inquiry block I give teachers an inquiry guide with the driving inquiry question, the key concept, and the individual lines of inquiry that could be explored. This is the point that the magic I mentioned above starts to happen. Inside the planetarium: Planets The Jr.
Sharing the Process: a (literally) hands-on approach to the literary essay « Universe As Text I’ve been working a lot with my AP Literature and Composition students on their writing skills. Writing about literature has many aspects that can be troublesome for student writers. One of the most difficult parts for my students has been learning to formulate an argument about a fictional work, and–in particular–using quotes in order to further the argument that they create, instead of inserting irrelevant narrative quotes to illustrate a glorified summary. Part of this, I think, has been due to their tendency to write an essay without quotes first, before going back and trying to “plug in” a quotation here and there. When done right, quotations should be the framework of the piece, upholding and elaborating the claims of the student writer. So how does one achieve the incorporation of quotes that are an integral part of an essay’s structure? I love this technique because it’s very visual and very hands-on.
The Long Tail Donald Clark Plan B 1200 leaders in learning from 120 countries at WISE2011, all flown into Doha by the Qatar Foundation to shape the future, with a focus on innovation. Did they succeed? Yes and no. It takes more than three days to create an Education Spring. Here’s my take. Education’s a slow learner It may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems. It took a politician, Gordon Brown, to show we educators how to communicate, teach, frame a problem THEN a solution. Generation gap Few were using Twitter, Facebook was a mystery to most and fewer still blog. Real innovators, like Jimmy Wales, were thin on the ground. Crisis of relevance The Arab Spring has taught us educationalists a lesson. There was some agreement on the lack of relevant skills, most employers expressing dissatisfaction with critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and communications. Educational colonialism
Waiter Rant Plagiarism Differences in High School and College Students Culture B. Gilliard A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy. But another interesting fact emerged from the report about the difference between high school and college students. College students were more likely to use content from cheat sites and paper mills, the report finds: 19.6% of content matches in college students’ papers came from those sites, whereas just 14.1% of matches to high school students’ papers. The data from this report comes from TurnItIn’s own business: some 128 million content matches from 33 million student papers (24 million from higher education and nine million from high school) over a one-year period. Related Explore: cheating, plagiarism
The Physics Book: An Illustrated Chronology of How We Understand the Universe by Maria Popova Making knowledge digestible in the age of information overload, or what a cat has to do with quasicrystals. Einstein famously observed that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it’s comprehensible. The book, which could well be the best thing since Bill Bryson’s short illustrated history of nearly everything, begins with a beautiful quote about the poetry of science and curiosity: As the island of knowledge grows, the surface that makes contact with mystery expands. Pickover takes a wide-angle view of what physics actually is, encompassing everything from relativity to quantum mechanics to dark matter and beyond, in a spirit that honors the American Physical Society’s founding mission statement of 1899, which holds physics as “the most basic and fundamental science.” Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. Share on Tumblr