Students

Non-Fiction, #CommonCore, and Deep Learning

Eduflack 21CS, CCSS, Science, STEM, Students, teachers, Uncategorized

Not a day can go by without someone criticizing the Common Core State Standards or blaming the Common Core for all that ails our public education system. And while assessments are usually the prime target for Common Core haters, the standards’ emphasis on non-fiction texts have drawn greater scrutiny in recent months.

No, Eduflack isn’t going to (AGAIN) rise the defense of Common Core and all that it stands for. Instead, I’d just like to provide a terrific example of how an exemplary educator can use the expectations under Common Core, mix it with a non-fiction topic, couple it with student collaboration and teamwork, and produce a final learning experience that is a winner for all those involved.

Full disclosure here, I am completely bias. The teacher in question is my daughter’s third grade teacher. Earlier this year, she had students work in pairs to develop “marketing” brochures for each of the planets in our solar system. Students did research and identified key facts. They organized those facts to make a compelling argument. They were then asked to present their findings as if they were travel agents, trying to convince families to visit a particular planet. Bunches and bunches of Common Core standards and expectations, all wrapped up in a project-based science lesson that demanded teamwork and critical thinking.

Here’s the brochure my daughter and her partner came up with. They were tasked with marketing Uranus, and played up the terrific aspects that a cold, ice planet could offer a little kid.

This was one of the most engaging lessons I’ve seen in either of my kids’ classes in recent years. And it is a great example of how the Common Core should be taught and can be taught by a great teacher. It demonstrates that Common Core isn’t about memorizing facts or relying on worksheets or boring children into submission.

No, Common Core can be about real, deep learning. And in the hands of good teachers who are empowered to use it right, Common Core can be a wonderful guidebook for meaningful student learning.

 

Teacher Leaders Wanted

Eduflack accountability, Achievement gap, Students, Teacher Education, teachers

All students deserve highly skilled, well-prepared teachers. In order to build the teaching profession that students deserve, maximize recruitment, increase diversity, and raise the bar for quality preparation, the front end of a coherent teaching pipeline must begin in secondary education.

Make sense? Agree that the current pipelines for teacher recruitment are insufficient? Believe that we need to do a better job to show today’s high school kids that teaching should be a desired career? Then you might just believe in Educators Rising.

If you don’t agree with the above statement, or aren’t sure if you do, you need to take a closer look at the stats. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of new teachers report that they graduated from their preparation programs unprepared. One-third of teachers leave the profession in their first three years. And teacher turnover is highest — and student achievement is lowest — at schools with high levels of poverty. At the same time, projections say we will need to hire 1.5 million new teachers by 2020 (that’s almost half the teaching workforce, for those keeping count).

Dear ol’ Eduflack is proud to be a part of Educators Rising, a new initiative powered by PDK. Educators Rising offers a few simple, yet audacious goals:

  • Offer rigorous, hands-on opportunities for students to explore the teaching profession
  • Build a national, virtually connected community of rising educators
  • Offer a self-sustaining teacher development model that empowers local teacher leaders

To work toward these goals, Educators Rising is creating a standards committee to help determine what teacher preparation looks like for students in secondary school. Or more simply, what should high school kids know and be able to do if they want to be on the path of becoming effective educators?

PDK is now soliciting applications to serve on that Educators Rising Standards Committee. The application, along with additional details, can be found at: 

For those educators who want to improve the profession, for those educators who want to see more young people aspire to be teachers, for those educators who want to do something about the negative narrative surrounding teachers and teaching, Educators Rising and this committee can be a very specific answer to an important problem.

So I ask Eduflack readers to share the application with any educators you think could contribute to the discussion and the creation of meaningful standards. The only way to have strong, effective standards is to have strong, effective teachers involved.

 

Respecting the “Modern” Family

Eduflack changemakers, Parents, race, Students, teachers, Uncategorized

In today’s age of blended families, alternative families, and just play different families, it is hard to believe some still see the good ol’ nuclear family as the norm in the United States. It is even harder to believe that an school teacher would hold such a view.

But over at Medium, I write about how a teacher’s failure to recognize the 21st century construct of the American family can do real damage to the children in her classroom. In my latest contribution to Ashoka’s Changemakers in Education series, I write:

We worry about how testing is affecting kids today. We wring our hands over how standards or higher expectations are impacting our children. We fret over whether students are expressing enough grit or enough skills to succeed in the future. Maybe, just maybe, we should also realize that there is no one cookie cutter to define today’s kids. There is no one way to describe their abilities, their interests, learning achievements, or even their family structures or backgrounds.

Give it a read. I promise it’ll be worth it.

 

Immigration Lessons, Third Grade Edition

Eduflack Immigration, Students, Uncategorized

The edu-daughter is learning about immigration this month in her third-grade class. Before things even got started, we made sure she realized she was, herself, an immigrant. She arrived in this country at 13 months old from Guatemala. She was sworn in as a baby U.S. citizen in the basement of the Bush Airport in Houston.

For whatever reason, she has really taken to this focus on immigration. Over the weekend, the edu-daughter went to work on her personal white board to write up what she has learned so far about immigration. (She then asked if we could text the picture to her teacher, so she could see what she was up to.)

IMG_2156

My first thought, after reading her notes, was that she is learning about immigration via The Godfather Part 2. There is a rising sense of pride that she sees immigration as Vito Corleone did as he arrived on our shores.

But after further reflection, I was even more proud with how she has jumped into this lesson and how she is not reflecting any of the ugliness that we see on the topic of immigration in the mainstream media these days. It would be very easy for a child, particularly a brown child, to realize that when they talk about “those people” coming into our country and us needing to send them back home, that some of those people carry the same blood and look just like she does. But she’s not seeing that.

One of these weekends, we need to make a trip to Ellis Island. I want to show her where the Finellis and the Perones on my side of the family came into the country. Sadly, the Ricciardellis didn’t come in through Lady Liberty, they arrived via Boston. But there is enough family history on Ellis Island for her to get a sense of things and better understanding of how this country came to be and on whom this country is truly built.

 

 

Teaching True Meaning of First Amendment Rights

Eduflack equity, higher ed, race, Students

For weeks, Eduflack has been biting his tongue on the rash of intolerance offered in the name of tolerance on our college campuses. Too many stories of free speech being squashed in the name of “safe zones,” too many instances of aspiring “activists” believing Constitutional rights only apply to those individuals and causes that one completely agrees with.

Over at Medium this week, I wrote about our desperate need for today’s college students to truly understand the rights that they claim to embrace. Quoting everything from the First Amendment to President Andy Shepherd’s monologue from the movie, The American President, I just had my “I’m mad as hell” moment.

As I wrote:

But a funny thing happened between a generation known for its passionate advocacy for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War and now. Today, too many see those freedoms and speech and assembly with self-inflicted blinders, believing such rights are meant to apply only to those who agree with us.

As originally conceived, the First Amendment was written to ensure a protected place for reasoned dissent in our new nation. Today, it is used as a weapon to protect against disagreement or opposing viewpoints and silence those who may see things differently.

When, exactly, did we allow the First Amendment to be bastardized to prevent civil discourse and public debate? When, exactly, did we determine it was OK to defend free speech, but only if it was speech we agreed with?

I know it is Thanksgiving week and all, but give it a read. We should all be thankful for our rights, whether we are red, blue, or purple with sparkly pink polka dots.

“I’d Like to Give the World a Phone …”

Eduflack Dadprovement, Students, teachers, technology

Loyal readers of Eduflack know two things. First, I am passionate about education technology and its ability to transform the learning process for students. Second, I am a proud adoptive father, and never miss the opportunity to talk about (or write, as one can read in my book, Dadprovement) our family’s experiences bringing our children home from Guatemala.

For most who have no idea, last month Guatemala elected a new president, as elections were coming up and the previously elected president is currently sitting in a jail cell. I won’t go into the politics of the nation, the military, non-military rule that is prevalent, or any other such things. Let’s just say a new president was elected. His previous career was as an actor. And his famous role was playing a moron who gets elected president (yes, you can’t make this up).

Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales earned more than two-thirds of the vote in an October runoff. He now sits in the big chair in Guatemala City. And one of his first official actions was to make some new education policy.

As background, Guatemala is an incredibly poor country (so much so that citizens sneak into Mexico illegally to do the unwanted jobs there). Education is not compulsory. Far too many of the nation’s citizens receive no formal education, whether it be because of access or finances or cultural prioritization.

So how do we address this? One could start with strong early childhood education programs. There are countless other ways to begin, most of which cost money. So President Morales decided he would think outside the box?

His plan? Free cell phones for all students. He’d pay for it by letting all of the cellphone companies paint their logos on school walls, assuming they donate the phones to the kids in question.

To summarize. We have schools ill-equipped to integrate phones into classes that already have 60 or 70 students in them. We haven’t prepared teachers for how to make use of these phones. And we are sending little kids out into communities where their new piece of technology makes them prime targets for robbery. All under a belief that if you give a kid a phone, she will learn (or for the cynic, that a phone can replace actual teaching.)

Don’t worry, teachers, President Morales has a plan for you too. While attending public school isn’t required, the Morales administration is convinced that attendance and teacher absenteeism is a big issue. So future plans include tagging teachers with GPS trackers to ensure they are showing up for their jobs.

This is why so many people think policymaking should be left in the hands of real professionals.

On the phones, I don’t doubt Morales’ sincerity in thinking if he can get kids tech, it will improve their learning. But delivering the hardware is the last step in a solid edtech plan, not the first thing out of the shoot. And as you are asking teachers to change their instructional practice, insulting them by demanding they be tracked doesn’t seem to be the wisest of strategies.

And yes, I realize some will suggest this is just another example of how the anti-teacher, corporatization of public education model of reform in the United States is being exported around the globe. Before you do, let’s not. I don’t think American education reformers are setting their sights on the Guatemalan education market. Heck, even the cellphone companies that may be painting their logos on school walls soon are largely local (it isn’t Verizon and AT&T you see much down there).

But it does speak to the danger of reform for reform’s sake. If one truly wants to improve education in a country like Guatemala, is it more valuable to have books or cell phones? Is there more benefit to content-based professional development of teacher GPS tracking? And is it more valuable to think through plans rather than announce the first thing that pops into your head when asked about education?

No matter how well meaning, we can’t close achievement and opportunity gaps by simply providing a child a cell phone that they may not have a month into the term.

Sometimes, Halloween Is Just About the Costumes and Candy

Eduflack Students, teachers

As a kid, my parents encouraged us to make our own Halloween costumes, and rarely would allow the store-bought plastic ones. The only store costume I ever had was a Darth Vader costume. Otherwise, I was a race car driver and a wizard and all sorts of things. My favorite was probably the year I was an old-school radio, wearing a huge box decorated with wood-grained shelf paper. It made for a long evening, but it was worth it.

I remember the Halloween parades at elementary and middle school. I also remember the one year we were all forbidden from trick or treating because of the Tylenol scare. And I remember the year my own kids had their Halloween delayed a week because of the damage from Hurricane Sandy.

I get that the world is growing more and more politically correct. I get that schools are having to make tough decisions about what can and should be part of the instructional day. I get that candy and sugary parties are no longer welcome in our schools. And I realize that Halloween doesn’t rank up there on the school priority list these days. So I can understand, as the New Haven Register reports, that some schools are looking to do away entirely with celebrating Halloween and having those beloved costume parades of my childhood.

But to ban because it discriminates against low-income students? To ban because of fear of nut allergies? Or to ban because a secular holiday has “religious overtones?” Seriously?

Perhaps my favorite, or most disheartening, quote from the New Haven Register story is that one school district in Washington State did away with Halloween celebrations “because children dressed in costumes might often real witches.”

The spokeswoman from Puyallup, Washington even went so far as to say, “Witches with pointy noses and things like that are not respective symbols of the Wiccan religion and so we want to be respectful of that.”

How can we lament our kids losing their childhoods because we are so focused on testing and student achievement in the schools, while at the same time stripping kids of the joys of something as simple as Halloween, fearing it may be offensive to the Wiccan religion? Would it be acceptable to dress as Glenda the Good Witch, rather than the Wicked Witch?

Eduflack can look at Halloween costumes and see priest costumes and Pope costumes and even “sexy nun” costumes, and not feel that my Catholic religion is threatened. While I may wonder why someone would want to dress as a sexy nun, doing so isn’t an affront to my religion. It is Halloween.

We need to let kids be kids. On October 31st, the Eduflack household will be handing out full-sized candy bars to any kid who shows up at our door in costume. Extra treats go to those have a particularly creative, homemade costume. The day before, I will be at the edu-daughter’s elementary school to see their costume parade. And I will do it with a smile on my face, and a few fun-sized Snickers in my pocket.

Yes, sometimes Halloween is really just about the costumes and the candy. It doesn’t have to be more than that.

Can We Learn Empathy from the Clock Incident and #IStandWithAhmed ?

Eduflack accountability, changemakers, Science, Students

Now that the dust has settled some on the controversy out in Texas where a high school student was arrested and then suspended for building a digital clock at home and bringing it into school, it is time to start asking what we can learn from this experience (and from many like it when school rules seem to conflict with a student’s love for learning).

Over at Medium, I explore this topic as part of Changemaker Education and Ashoka’s Start Empathy Initiative. As I write:

No, we don’t know what would have happened if the student’s skin was Northern European white instead of Middle Eastern brown. We don’t know what difference it would have made if his last name was “Michaels” instead of “Mohamed”. But we do know that our public need to stereotype and give in to phobias may have stifled a potentially strong scientific mind from pursuing his full potential.

What becomes most frustrating about the experience is that, while we talk about the importance of empathy in the schools, we instead see a classic case of “defending” discrimination. Authorities could have taken a step back and tried to look at this through Ahmed Mohamed’s eyes; the pride of building a digital clock on his own, the confusion of being discouraged by a trusted teacher. The fear of being interrogated by police and then placed in handcuffs. All for building a digital clock.

I hope you’ll give it a read.

Racism, Empathy, Liberals, and Baseball

Eduflack changemakers, equity, Parents, race, Students

As I’ve previously written, I am honored to be part of the Ashoka Foundation’s Changemaker Education effort, serving as an Ashoka Empathy Ambassador. This past week, I wrote over at Medium on a very personal experience from my childhood, where I heard supposedly liberal, open-minded parents demonstrate some textbook closed-mindedness when it came to busing and the impact of bringing kids from the inner city into their suburbs.

As I wrote, reflecting on my experiences as a kid:

I want to be empathetic about it. But I’m not necessarily talking about showing empathy for my friend. I want to better understand what in the world can motivate a supposedly liberal, educated adult male to be so thoughtless, so careless, and so ridiculous with his thinking. I want to know how adults who can preach tolerance and equality, and talk about the need for civil rights, can mean it as long as it doesn’t extend to their own local parks and schools.

I hope you’ll take the time to read the full piece over at Medium here, and to really spend some time with some of the great writing being offered through the entire Ashoka Changemakers effort.

Learning Through Student Journalism

Eduflack higher ed, Media, Students

I will often say that the most defining part of my collegiate experience was the time I spent in the basement of Newcomb Hall at the University of Virginia. That space served as the home for The Cavalier Daily, U.Va.’s independent student newspaper.

The CD has been the newspaper of record at Mr. Jefferson’s University for 125 years now. It has won countless awards and broken story after story. During my tenure there, we actually had major national newspapers trying to convince our printer to read them our front pages, as we had broken a major story regarding the Honor system and a big-dollar-donor parent trying to keep his son from being expelled. They didn’t want to be scooped by a bunch of kids.

During my time at The Cavalier Daily, I held many positions. I started off as an opinion columnist. Over time, I was a sports writer, a sports columnist, a copy editor, the founder of the nation’s first collegiate business section (serving as Marketplace editor), and then as managing editor of the newspaper.

Like me, those who work for The CD do it for the love of journalism. Reporters and editors don’t get paid. They don’t earn college credit (as Virginia doesn’t have a J- school). After being elected managing editor for the 1994-95 year, I worked on average of 80 hours a week down in that basement. Five days a week, we put out an (on average) 16-page newspaper. We had nearly 150 individuals on staff, managing an annual budget of nearly $500,000, all coming from advertising revenue.

At The Cavalier Daily, I learned to write. I learned to think critically. I learned both to work as a team and lead. I learned to appreciate deadlines (as missing deadline cost us money at the printer). And I learned a sense of pride in hard work, in the truth, and in the right thing.

I learned to embrace the words of Thomas Jefferson, found on the masthead the topped my work each and every day. “For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

In recent years, my beloved Cavalier Daily, like so many journalistic institutions, has struggled in the transition into a digital news economy. When I was on the managing board, back in 1994, we actually launched the first web version of the daily newspaper. We were among the pioneers in collegiate journalism.

A few years back, another CD managing board made the bold decision to move from a printed newspaper every morning to a digital one. Instead of using the web to accompany a broadsheet, online and email would lead the day. And again, like others in journalism, The Cavalier Daily realized it was much harder to generate advertising revenue without a print product. And with no financial support from the University of Virginia and a shrinking bank account, the CD fell behind in its rent to the University.

After a time, The Cavalier Daily righted the ship and has been regularly paying its rent to the landlords at U.Va. But it still had $50,000 or so in unpaid rent it needed to make up. The multi-billion-dollar University of Virginia wanted its money. It threatened to evict The Cavalier Daily from its space. So generations of CD alumni acted, and acted swiftly.

The Washington Post tells the story of how those CD alums came together in a matter of hours to pay the rent bill. And Susan Svrluga tells it quite well. And I thank her and WaPo for telling this important story of how a “storied student newspaper” has been rescued (even though WaPo was one of those newspapers, 20 years ago, wanting a sneak peek of what would be on our front pages that winter.)

Yes, the tale of The CD’s rent woes could speak to the financial challenges of print journalism in a digital world. It could speak to the challenges of a fiercely independent student newspaper in an era when universities want to control any and all messaging about them. Or it could speak of the incredible impact organizations and institutions like The Cavalier Daily have on generations of individuals.

The Cavalier Daily saved me when I was at U.Va. As a first year (U.Va. version of a freshman), I was completely lost. I was miserable being in Charlottesville and terribly homesick. I missed my high school days and I didn’t know how to replicate that experience at Mr. Jefferson’s University. My mother pleaded with me to visit the newspaper’s offices. I didn’t want to, but I listened to my mother. And I’m glad I did.

My college experience was The Cavalier Daily. I majored in The CD. It gave me purpose. It helped me get my first job out of college. It is where I made life-long friends. It gave my college days meaning (even if it meant skipping the majority of my actually college classes during my four years at U.Va. – seriously).

Today, I am proud to serve on the board of the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association. And I am even prouder of all of those alumni who stepped forward in recent days to save the CD’s space. Sure, the newspaper could have moved offices. But for the past 20 years, the basement of Newcomb Hall has been The CD’s home. No one wants to be forced out of their home. Particularly when their central mission is training generations of college students to follow truth wherever it may lead.