Teaching

Background

Merit pay; eliminating tenure; new teacher evaluations — how are school, district and state policies affecting how educators and their students perform?

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July 11, 2013

Classroom Contemplations: Overlooking The Value Of Veteran Teachers

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. A student went home to complain to her mom about Mattie Williams, her social studies teacher. The mother went straight out to the school for a conference. To the mother’s surprise, she found herself sitting face-to-face with her own former teacher from a generation before […]

July 8, 2013

Classroom Contemplations: Little Books, Big Statement

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Ms. Roberts left teaching ten years ago, but she remembers very clearly a day in class that changed her and her students. It was her first year and she was teaching English to over two hundred kids a day in Room 100, also known as […]

July 5, 2013

Why One Principal Thinks The Common Core Is Part Of An Equitable Education

Florida schools have just one more academic year to phase in a new set of education standards under the Common Core—and Principal Angela Maxey is ready. “I’m truly a proponent for standards-based Common Core education. I’m passionate,” says Maxey, who works at Sallye B. Mathis Elementary School in Duval County. Her school is a math, […]

July 3, 2013

Classroom Contemplations: When Students Recognize A Teacher’s Value

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. One of the first people I talked to about the different ways teachers add value to students’ lives was Mr. Bernard. He is now retired and he told me a story that had happened a few weeks before. He was at a party when Mark, […]

July 2, 2013

Classroom Contemplations: The Teaching That Evaluations Ignore

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. One of the things I want to do through this series is to expand the discussion of a teacher’s value. We cannot let the worth of teachers be defined narrowly by the test scores of their students. We need to consider all of the different […]

June 27, 2013

Classroom Contemplations: Testing Reinforces Bad Behavior

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. There are some real perils to systems which try to reduce teacher performance to a single number, such as many of our new “value-added” formulas. The first is that whatever you decide to measure — and, implicitly or explicitly reward — is what you are […]

June 25, 2013

Classroom Contemplations: The Worth of Value Added

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. The new term of art within the educational conversation about how we sort the good teachers from the bad is “value added.” We stole the phrase from economics. But in the educational context, it brings to mind the great George Orwell quote: “The slovenliness of […]

Common Standards, New Lessons May “Weed Out” Some Teachers

Before she retires, Shara Holt is getting teachers around the state ready to use Common Core standards. Holt is a literacy coach in St. Johns County who’s spent 41 years as an educator. Florida is one of 45 states transitioning to Common Core State Standards right now. It’s a new way of teaching that focuses heavily […]

June 21, 2013

Classroom Contemplations: What Do Test Results Really Tell Us?

Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed. Let’s take a moment to look closely at test scores, which are the basis of our new “teacher accountability” system. I just got back the test results for the students at the magnet school where I taught this year, and I honestly don’t think they […]

Common Core Math Lessons Designed To Create A “Puzzler’s Disposition”

“Boring.” “Wah wah wah.” “Monotone.” “Confusing.” That’s how math teachers training in Common Core standards this week near Pensacola described their own childhood math lessons. These teachers are learning how to make math an interactive, engaging experience for students under the new Common Core State Standards. They were led by Ilea Faircloth, a staff […]

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