For many in the CES Network, Fall Forum is the alpha and omega, the high point in the cycle to which an immeasurable amount of collective energy builds and grows. The first key phase of the Fall Forum process, the Call for Proposals, is now open! We invite anyone who [...]
Note to readers: here’s a guest post from Annie Chien, science teacher at New York City’s School of the Future, submitted via our You Blog feature. Annie wrote this last year - we’re re-featuring it here thanks to a recent comment that made us realize Essential Blog readers [...]
If anything concerns me, it’s the oversimplification of something as complex as assessment. My fear is that learning is becoming standardized. Learning is idiosyncratic. Learning and teaching is messy stuff. It doesn’t fit into bubbles. — Michele Forman, 2001 Teacher of the Year
amateur wife stripperwomen squirting when cumming[...]Today’s Edutopia magazine arrived with lots of its usual great stuff including “Reinventing the Big Test,” Grace Rubenstein’s look at efforts to create assessment systems that will not only measure but encourage the sorts of skills, habits of mind, and knowledge base that K-12 students - and all of [...]
Yesterday’s Washington Post ran “Ways to Measure Schools Without High-Stakes Testing,” by Jay Mathews. The ways are based on four key ideas from Sharon L. Nichols, an educational psychologist who is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and David C. Berliner, Regents’ Professor of [...]
The kind of ignorance that permeates our culture, particularly from people who are supposed to know a few things, is often astounding. This bit of idiocy comes from the Texas State Board of Education who recently issued a recommended reading list, which has been criticized for lacking diversity. Okay, that’s [...]
Senator Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech on racism last week resonated widely and sparked loads of reaction across the political spectrum.
The speech definitely provides us a teachable moment; one that I hope can extend beyond the typical duration of our collective cultural attention span and reach into [...]
Last week Presidential hopeful Barack Obama gave a speech entitled “A More Perfect Union”.
The speech has received favorable reviews with the Boston Globe declaring
“Obama took the opportunity to engage the question of race in America, starting a [...]
Nicholas Kristof shares his New York Times blog space with Chicago teacher/photographer Will Okun. The latest addition is a collage of Okun’s students. An image is worth a thousand words, and these speak with force and beauty to make us remember always and every minute who our work is [...]
Teacher Magazine is featuring an edited Teacher Leaders Network discussion on “Are Teachers Ready for 21st Century Learning?” It’s good, thoughtful reading on what the relationships among teachers, students, and endlessly emerging technology is and should be, and raises questions about the role of technology in your schools, classroom, [...]
There’s an endless supply of people telling other people to do good in the world, to translate their intentions into actions. Did you watch Oprah’s Big Give this week? There are many, many critical blog posts to be written - that have likely already been written - about the show’s pros and cons. [...]
The Essential Blog is reposting an email from Philip Kovacs concerning the journalistic integrity of Education Week’s annual Quality Counts project. Read on to find out more, and how to make your voice heard if you want to register your dissatisfaction. What follows is Kovac’s email containing the letter and information for [...]
Today, NPR aired a story about the decline of imaginative play in children. It seems that today’s elaborate toys, busy schedules, and changes in the structures of school have altered the way children play, which in turn, according to researchers, has had a detrimental effect on their emotional and [...]
Via the Consumerist blog: South Carolina has recently authorized ad sales on school buses. Read the whole post here, complete with an artist rendering of how the ads will look (prominently featured: Coca-Cola).
A significant part of health is having the ability to be a savvy media consumer and to sort [...]
Recently, in the Bridging Differences blog, Debbie Meier questioned whether small schools (in some of their iterations) perpetuate sorting, separation, and ability tracking. Here’s some of her thoughts:
In the rush to small schools we probably both decry the ways in which choice lands us back into the same “ability [...]
Valentines’ Day Special! From Manual math teacher David Singer’s Manual Math Revolution blog - great reading for daily documentation of teaching math with a focus on inquiry and discourse - students at Denver’s Manual High School write mash notes to math class!
A version of the following request for participation in CES’s National Exhibition Month has gone out to the CES network via email, and we’re reposting it here. Anyone out there ready to showcase your school’s capacity to use exhibitions to demonstrate what your students know and can do? Read on to add your strength [...]
A follow up to yesterday’s post on the impact of health care on teaching and learning. “Area Schools Set to Lose Millions Under Medicaid Policy Changes” caught my eye courtesy of This Week in Education.
Educators nationwide are protesting a Bush administration move to curtail hundreds of millions of [...]
In her Campaign K-12 blog, Michelle McNeil suggests that the costs and inadequacy of our nation’s health care system might be among the most significant threats to good school systems. She presents a sound financial argument, suggesting that school systems scramble to meet a health care costs for current retiring [...]
Doctoral student Victoria J. Maslow from the University of Wisconsin, Madison has been selected as the Winter 2008 recipient of the Theodore R. Sizer Dissertation Scholar Award!
“The American high school: Are learning communities an answer to solving inequities?” is Ms. Maslow’s topic. Her research abstract:
The purpose of this case study is [...]
April really does bring a shower of powerful CES nework professional development events. Yesterday, we featured two terrific opportunities to deepen knowledge of CES principles and practices - and the good news for the month of April keeps on coming with ”On Our Watch: Urban Small Schools Symposium,” hosted by Oakland’s [...]
CES’s Summer Institute isn’t until July, and Fall Forum happens in November, and you have some specific professional development needs that you and your professional learning community want to meet this spring. Great news! Check out these great events that deepen our understanding of how math and social [...]
Monty Neill of FairTest circulated this poem on “standardized torture” written by Isabelle Raposo, a Massachusetts fifth grader. I don’t know what school or town Isabelle is from, but her expression of how it feels to take a standardized test that doesn’t ask her to use her mind well [...]
Helen F. Ladd, public policy professor at Duke, offers “Rethinking the Way We Hold Schools Accountable,” thoughts on the role of ongoing school inspections as an alternative to the current testing system. Her idea:
Each state would establish a statewide review board that would function independently of the state’s department [...]
Tom Hoffman posted interestingly this past weekend on his Tuttle SVC blog about the historial role of the ten Common Principles. Hoffman talks about the 10CPs’ historical significance:
The individual ideas were not, in themselves, completely new or original, but my understanding is that this packaging and contextualization of them [...]
Yes, I’m copying a press release, but it’s a good one, a great initiative to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Any CES schools/students participating? Let us know! Whatever you do, do something on Monday (and every day) to make your community and world a better place.
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YOUTH SERVICE AMERICA ISSUES CALL TO SERVICE [...]
Quick item today to share a useful resource: Michele McNeil’s Campaign K-12 blog. I find myself checking it more and more often, as a way to get a more detailed grip on where various presidential candidates stand on various education issues. It’s also a great resource to understand hot education [...]
