Walt was sitting in his graduate level class listening to a debate over the differences between school climate and school culture. Now…perhaps Walt was just angling to get an answer because he was too tired to pay attention and found it more interesting to surf the internet reading blogs! (That’s OK Walt as long as it’s this [...]
Entries from October 28th, 2009
Do you feel disheartened and disappointed in your job?
October 22nd, 2009 5 Comments
How do you feel about your job? How do your teaching colleagues feel about theirs? Education Week recently reported on a survey asking teachers about their job satisfaction. Here is a quote:
Two out of five of America’s 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons [...]
Tags: teacher morale · teacher satisfaction
National Assessments on the Horizon
October 21st, 2009 3 Comments
A former colleague of mine returned from a big meeting of Chief State School Officers and their Departments. The topic was the Common Core of Standards. Today this release came out informing everyone about a competition to create a “Common Assessment” to go with the “Common Standards.”
Word on the street has it that officials feel [...]
Tags: national standards · national testing · Race to the Top
Classroom Websites
October 19th, 2009 3 Comments
Walt Sutterline has been a regular reader since What’s Working on Schools went live here at the HOPE Foundation blog site. I haven’t met him except through email and blog comments but today I am going to hold his website up as a public example of a teacher comfortable with technology. Walt doesn’t know I [...]
Tags: teacher's websites · teachers · technolyg
What would you tell a group of superintendents about the use of technology and social media in education?
October 14th, 2009 4 Comments
I am waiting in the airport (fog delays in Denver) to fly to Houston, Texas. I will be the keynote speaker for the Houston area school superintendents at their annual fall conference.
What message would YOU share with superintendents if you had the chance, especially as it relates to Social Media and the use of technology [...]
Tags: school superintendents · social media · technology
A real story about formative vs summative assessment
October 11th, 2009 2 Comments
The tension in the room was real. As a new professor to the university setting, my colleague had drug me along to a statewide task force meeting to discuss our statewide assessment problems. It was clear from the anxious faces around the room that people weren’t seeing eye-to-eye on how our statewide assessment system was [...]
Tags: accountability · assessment · national standards · school improvement · standardized testing · testing
More on formative vs. summative tests
October 10th, 2009 3 Comments
Matt asked a great question in the comments section. The essence of his question is..”isn’t how a teacher uses the test really what makes a test formative or summative?”
I would say it depends. To be truly formative, I believe an assessment has to be clearly aligned with good instruction and be the type of assessment [...]
Tags: assessment · teachers
James Popham on formative assessment
October 8th, 2009 5 Comments
I am blogging live from the Snow King Resort in Jackson, Wyoming at the Northern Rocky Mountain Education Research Association Conference.
Dr. James Popham was the keynote speaker. Here are a few key points for you to chew on.
Formative assessment cannot raise scores sufficiently on instructionally insensitive accountability tests such as those so widely used these [...]
Tags: assessment · formative assessment · testing
More on Charters
October 4th, 2009 1 Comment
I don’t know how you feel about charter schools, but for the most part the research on them is quite mixed. Certainly it is safe to say that there haven’t been too many studies that have convinced the scholars that simply labeling something “charter” makes it better.
But a new study from New York that appeared [...]
Tags: charter schools · public schools
