So there were so many great ideas this week. Many of them a repetition of things we should be doing at any school level, with some specific to the scheduling and needs of a high school. I keep feeling like I have heard all of this before even before this course. I want to know what is it going to take to make the shift to this? When will it start going from ideas for a better education to a plan to actuality? I feel like we are always in this block because the people who make the decisions are not people who have any educational background. We are fighting with a public either nostalgic about their own education and don't want the change, or could care less about education. Are we just waiting for the right politician(s) to be the face of change in public education? There are all these little pockets of greatness as we can see from our readings, but how can we get it to a country of greatness?
This was all spurred from the 9 minute video. They again mentioned how the U.S. ranks internationally on certain assessments. I do agree that our education system falters in that we have too much of the LOTS (lower order thinking skills) and not enough of the HOTS (higher order thinking skills). We aren't creating deep thinkers and reasoners. What I really dislike though is the idea of numbers. My math background tells me that you can make almost any number look as bad or as good as you want it to and I don't like us looking at a single number. We are looking at our ranking, this number, as an epic failure. We should be instead focusing our attention on what it is that we are doing right and work from there in trimming the areas that are not helping us build the kinds of young adults we need to sustain us.
I also wonder about the general population of these countries that are scoring so high. How homogeneous is their population in comparison to ours? Does the natural and expanding diversity of our country account from some of our troubles? Also, how large is the area they cover in relation to their population? In other words, how densely populated and geographically similar is their country? I personally feel it is a lot easier to create systems that are more effective when your population is more homogeneous and your country is somewhat smaller geographically. I can't really articulate why in an intelligent argument at the moment, but I just have this gut feeling that this is part of our problem in the U.S. that is not often accounted for. I am not saying that we can't create a system and curricula that are demanding and rich, but that doing so may prove to be a lot trickier when comparing our population to the populations of those countries who are succeeding (according to the numbers).
I think I will leave it at that...
Friday, February 26, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Common Planning Time
It seems to me that no matter what I read this week for the class, it all seemed to mention somewhere about the need for professionals to sit down on a regular and consistent basis for planning and curriculum development. This seems like such an easy fix to make and I wonder why so many schools don't seem to be doing this. We have NO common planning time where I work and now I feel like I am not fully meeting the needs of my students because I don't have the opportunity to sit and talk about the curriculum on a regular basis. Talk about what I am doing in my classroom, what the others are doing, what do we want to try, how can we improve. Why don't we have more common planning/meeting time during the work day?
After reading Curriculum 21 I really enjoyed the globalization chapter and what we need to do to make our students more globally prepared. I thought it was well-organized and easy to understand. I think it still seems overwhelming though. To me I think the biggest obstacle in getting this new global education in terms of connecting with other schools globally is the technology piece. How are other countries meeting this technology need? Are they really meeting it for all, or are they just meeting it for those students who live in the most populous areas? On the resources available to teachers on p. 24, I could only check off 4 of those items as being within my classroom. I alone have a laptop computer at my disposal. The other two computers sitting in my room are rather old and run sluggishly. I have an e-mail account. I have a digital camera, but one I bring in from home because the one the school has provided is a battery eater and outdated. Then we have an IPOD and IPOD docking station for our classrooms. How do we get all of the technology that is out there to do these wonderful global ideas? How do we reach the rural areas? Maybe I am wrong in my thinking that we need the technology in place first before we can easily and readily globalize our curriculum like it was described in the book.
After reading Curriculum 21 I really enjoyed the globalization chapter and what we need to do to make our students more globally prepared. I thought it was well-organized and easy to understand. I think it still seems overwhelming though. To me I think the biggest obstacle in getting this new global education in terms of connecting with other schools globally is the technology piece. How are other countries meeting this technology need? Are they really meeting it for all, or are they just meeting it for those students who live in the most populous areas? On the resources available to teachers on p. 24, I could only check off 4 of those items as being within my classroom. I alone have a laptop computer at my disposal. The other two computers sitting in my room are rather old and run sluggishly. I have an e-mail account. I have a digital camera, but one I bring in from home because the one the school has provided is a battery eater and outdated. Then we have an IPOD and IPOD docking station for our classrooms. How do we get all of the technology that is out there to do these wonderful global ideas? How do we reach the rural areas? Maybe I am wrong in my thinking that we need the technology in place first before we can easily and readily globalize our curriculum like it was described in the book.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Current Trends in Elementary Education
First I want to begin by speaking about the Kiran Bir Sethl video that we were asked to watch. Wow! So simple and so powerful. There were a few key phrases that jumped out at me while I was listening:
* blur the boundaries between school and life
* aware, enable, empower
* i can
* children as protaganists
* you have got to believe....you can
All of these things are so simple yet form the foundation of a very powerful curriculum that engages students and provides in depth learning experiences that are meaningful. I hope our education system can aspire to be this.
The article Elementary Education: Current Trends from Answers.com left me with many things to think about and many things that made me stew. The beginning of the article mentioned how local and national attention on elementary schools continues to be directed at making an education system that is educative, meaningful and positive. My first thought is how can learning be meaningful is all that we are doing is testing. That isn't meaningful or positive. It is an education in how to take a test. It also mentioned how our schools still resemble the "vernacular of colonial America." How can this be a good thing? It's a little concerning that our schools still resemble those schools. I think the basics of some of those schools were sound and important, but we should be much further along.
The article gave a new definition of curriculum I had not previously seen, "Curriculum may be looked at as a negotiated set of beliefs about what students should know or be able to do." My first response in my notes was, "Hmmm...." I am still not sure what to make of it, but it is giving me something more to think about. It also goes on to mention the current testing environment and standards based movement that some people in the business world think that this testing is necessary to make sure that all children master at least the basic essentials. I immediately cringed at this because they aren't mastering anything except how to take a test. Mastery learning occurs when the learning experience is meaningful and mastery involved higher level thinking. Mastery is not memorization.
I could go on and on. There was mention of poor student performance as being a failure of the education system, the idea that 87% of all U.S. teachers believe the standards movement is movement in the right direction, the immigrant population and how this effects our education system, all of which I had some thoughts on, but I will stop.
I'm not sure where we are supposed to mention the article we found about current trends in curriculum in elementary education, but I am posting the link of my article here: http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edexcellence.net%2Fdoc%2FMoats2007.pdf
This is a fascinating article about the movement in reading toward "scientifically-based" reading instruction as a better and more "proven" method toward the instruction of reading. It is interesting the number of schools abandoning their own curricula for these "scientifically-based" basal reader programs with their scripts and assessments. This is a movement I don't support and this article provides more information about this.
* blur the boundaries between school and life
* aware, enable, empower
* i can
* children as protaganists
* you have got to believe....you can
All of these things are so simple yet form the foundation of a very powerful curriculum that engages students and provides in depth learning experiences that are meaningful. I hope our education system can aspire to be this.
The article Elementary Education: Current Trends from Answers.com left me with many things to think about and many things that made me stew. The beginning of the article mentioned how local and national attention on elementary schools continues to be directed at making an education system that is educative, meaningful and positive. My first thought is how can learning be meaningful is all that we are doing is testing. That isn't meaningful or positive. It is an education in how to take a test. It also mentioned how our schools still resemble the "vernacular of colonial America." How can this be a good thing? It's a little concerning that our schools still resemble those schools. I think the basics of some of those schools were sound and important, but we should be much further along.
The article gave a new definition of curriculum I had not previously seen, "Curriculum may be looked at as a negotiated set of beliefs about what students should know or be able to do." My first response in my notes was, "Hmmm...." I am still not sure what to make of it, but it is giving me something more to think about. It also goes on to mention the current testing environment and standards based movement that some people in the business world think that this testing is necessary to make sure that all children master at least the basic essentials. I immediately cringed at this because they aren't mastering anything except how to take a test. Mastery learning occurs when the learning experience is meaningful and mastery involved higher level thinking. Mastery is not memorization.
I could go on and on. There was mention of poor student performance as being a failure of the education system, the idea that 87% of all U.S. teachers believe the standards movement is movement in the right direction, the immigrant population and how this effects our education system, all of which I had some thoughts on, but I will stop.
I'm not sure where we are supposed to mention the article we found about current trends in curriculum in elementary education, but I am posting the link of my article here: http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edexcellence.net%2Fdoc%2FMoats2007.pdf
This is a fascinating article about the movement in reading toward "scientifically-based" reading instruction as a better and more "proven" method toward the instruction of reading. It is interesting the number of schools abandoning their own curricula for these "scientifically-based" basal reader programs with their scripts and assessments. This is a movement I don't support and this article provides more information about this.
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