Tag Archive for ‘Teaching’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'Teaching'

Student-Delivered PD?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 5, 2008 in Teacher Training. 6 Comments

I like Scott McLeod’s thoughtful and often provocative ed tech blog Dangerously Irrelevant. But I’m a little skeptical about an idea he’s floating. He starts off a new post with two self-evident observations: 1) Most staff development is awful, and 2) Kids are often technology “experts” on technology. No argument there. But he follows those ideas off a cliff, proposing a Big Idea: Have students deliver technology-related professional development for teachers.

The kids get the learning power and social/emotional benefit of being teachers and leaders. Adults and other students learn from the true experts. All we have to do is walk away from our egos and our fear and embrace our mission statements, the ones that say that we all should be learners and say nothing about from whom we must learn. How about it? You ready to start doing this?

How about no? I applaud McLeod’s premise and agree that we should give kids every opportunity to be the experts. Letting them be responsible for classroom computer maintenance and training for parents and younger students would be useful and “authentic.” Perhaps I’m just quibbling about the what constitutes “professional development.” But training that simply tells teachers how to use tech tools doesn’t meet my definition of professional development. Good technology P.D. should be focused on effective instruction using technology — technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself – and that is (one assumes) beyond what a student can deliver. We should be past the point of thinking we’re teaching with technology because we have computers and smart boards in the classroom.

Essential Reading for Teachers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2008 in Opinion. 1 Comment

Dan Brown’s memoir of his first year as a New York City teacher, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, is out in paperback. I will freely admit my bias: Dan’s book resonated with me because his experience as a New York City Teaching Fellow assigned to a school in the Bronx mirrored my own experience so closely. Still, Dan is a fine writer and Great Expectations is a great read.

Top 5 Teacher Books, anyone? Off the top of my head, here’s my list:

1. Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder
I’d pay to read Tracy Kidder’s grocery list.

2. Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, Rafe Esquith
Esquith’s essential optimism re-energized me on many occasions. Try to find even a sentence of “woe-is-me-this-is-too-hard” in his book. The man’s a saint.

3. The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child, by Ron Clark
The original New Paternalism. Go ahead and mock Clark’s highly prescriptive measures, but this book made me a better teacher. What higher praise can there be?

4. There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, by Alex Kotlowitz
Not a teacher book per se, but a first-rate account of childhood in urban poverty. Kotlowitz avoids the tendency to sentimentalize the lives of the urban poor, and his book is all the more powerful for it.

5. Ms. Moffett’s First Year, Abby Goodnough
My favorite book about the alternative certification experience before Dan’s came along.

While not a teacher memoir, or even an education book, the one I’d make required reading for any new urban teacher would be Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I wish before I’d become a teacher, someone had merely handed the book to me and said, “Just read this. Everything you need to know is in here.”

It’s What’s Inside That Counts

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 2, 2008 in Education News. 2 Comments

Great teaching, not great buildings, make for a first-rate education, says Jay Mathews in the Washington Post.

Ten years ago, I wrote a book about high schools with golden reputations in some of the country’s most expensive suburbs. They were full of Advanced Placement classes and fine teachers, but I was astonished at how bad some of the buildings were. Mamaroneck High School, in one of the most affluent parts of Westchester County, N.Y., had three 66-year-old boilers that repeatedly broke down and many clocks that didn’t work. La Jolla High School, north of San Diego, full of science fair winners, was a collection of stained stucco classrooms and courtyards of dead grass.

Mathews is right, of course, but while some in education use poor facilities as an excuse for underachievement, let’s not make excuses for miserable facilities either. I taught for years in a poorly maintined 110-year-old building in the South Bronx, whose construction predated indoor plumbing and electricity and seemed to reject both like badly matched donor organs. Pigeons roosted in the lighting fixtures if you forgot to close the windows at night. There wasn’t so much as a slide on the playground. There wasn’t a playground. On its best days it was an physically uncomfortable place to go to school. A few blocks away, the local library remained shuttered for years while it operated out of a trailer. It’s hard to imagine upper crust Manhattanites abiding these kinds of conditions for long for their children. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.

“It might be better if we spent our money on principals and teachers who inspire, who don’t take lethargy or resentment for an answer,” says Mathews. “Put educators like that in the rickety buildings we have, and stand back.”

Stand back indeed. It smarts to be struck by falling plaster.

Environmental Education or Advocacy?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 2, 2008 in Curriculum and Teaching. 0 Comments

Interest in environmental education is soaring, due to concerns over global warming and energy prices, notes this USA Today piece. But when does environmental education become advocacy?