Category Archives: Uncategorized

I Got Schooled – Practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership

So, here is I Got Schooled practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership.

Through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan spent five years studying what is succeeding in closing the education gap that depended only on factors inside the classroom itself and that were scalable. He discovered closing the achievement gap can’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself; five things must be implemented together to have any substantive effect.

Shyamalan uncovers five factors present in schools he found were significantly closing the education gap for inner city children and children of color. He provides just tons of example schools, clinical studies, data and statistics, detailing each of these five factors.

These posts are highlights for each of these five factors for folks who might feel they are too busy to read the whole book … and strongly whet your appetite for doing so. The five factors are:

  • Effective teachers – dropping poor, hiring good
  • Right balance of leadership
  • Feedback that is timely and consistent
  • Smaller schools
  • More time in school

A large number of successful schools and programs are covered in the book, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.

Factor #2 – LEADERSHIP, the right balance of

  • School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an influence on learning
  • “Superman principals” are not scalable
  • There is not a single documented case of a school successfully turning around its achievement trajectory in the absence of strong leadership
  • First, leaders vary in large and consistent ways – the most successful teams work under the most successful bosses (McKinsey & Company study)
  • Second, the boss’s most important job isn’t communicating strategy or even hiring and firing – it is teaching skills that persist
  • Motivating a team of subordinates isn’t nearly as important as improving their skills
  • The difference between a good principal and a mediocre one is nearly as big as that between a great teacher and a poor teacher
  • A principal effects hundreds of students, instead of a few dozen
  • Principals are profoundly important
  • The most effective principals are also the ones engaging in the most “negative teacher selection,” i.e., firing the lemons
  • The most effective principals also improved the instructional success of existing teachers
  • Least effective principals seldom leave the system – they just move to different schools, further widening the achievement gap
  • Existing, thorough application processes do not insure a consistent level of success
  • Principals should be primarily responsible for the instruction of teachers
  • But the typical urban principal spends less that 20 percent of their workday on instruction
  • Principals in the top systems around the world spend 80 percent of the school day on improving instruction in the classroom (McKinsey & Company study)
  • Schools need an Operations Manager to handle food service, discipline, custodians, paperwork, to free principals to help teachers help students learn
  • Such an administrative management model is scalable
  • Brett Peiser founder of Uncommon Schools network, on leaders: “Great leaders know culture eats strategy for lunch.”
  • Culture is everything distinctive to a place; it’s every way you know you are in an uncommon school; it’s rigorous in involving and aligning everything and everyone
  • Culture is beyond advertising brochures, it must have enough force and buy-in to overwhelm its students’ environments outside the school
  • A culture of high expectations seems almost important enough to earn a place as one of the keys to closing the achievement gap
  • Someone has to make certain that all teachers understand and support a uniform school culture in their bones
  • Again, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
  • Consistency in students’ experience from class to class and grade to grade;  and quality control of this consistency is really important
  • Both unquestioned authority and humanity are equally important, i.e., caring and respect for students
  • There are techniques and behaviors that produce desirable results consistently, like Lemov’s Taxonomy, Teach Like A Champion, and they should be known and used
  • See also The Wooden Way, the legendary UCLA basketball coach’s system
  • And these practices are scalable

Hoping you are finding these interesting and perhaps useful.

Up next:  Factor #3 – Feedback

Tom

The Real Reasons Children Drop Out of School

A very insightful view of the challenges by Franklin Schargel, a Former Teacher, School Counselor and School Administrator, appeared in a recent Huffing Post. In it Schargel names and discusses 5 main reasons kids drop out of school:

  1. The students themselves
  2. The families they come from
  3. The community they come from
  4. The school they attend
  5. The teachers they have

Read the full article here.

 

 

Research on Grit and Self-Control Recognized in “Genius Grant”

JTF Grantee Awarded 2013 MacArthur Fellowship

As an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Angela Duckworth’s work focuses on studying competencies beyond general intelligence and opportunity that predict academic and professional achievement. She is perhaps best known for her work surrounding the concepts of self-control and grit, and how those personality traits are better indicators of success than factors such as IQ and socioeconomic opportunity.

Click here to see 5 videos of Dr. Duckworth answering these 5 questions about her work and findings:

What is grit?

Are there virtues that are precursors or closely associated with grit?

What role does humility play, if any, in cultivating grit?

How has your personal story been a window into your research on grit?

What advice would you give to a parent who wanted to cultivate grit in their children?

Two upcoming meetings of interest:

On Sept 11th, 2013, more than 9,000 participants from around the state joined in a telephone town hall to express their concerns and aspirations for New Mexico Public Education. Their responses show New Mexicans are ready for change. Here is a summary.

  • 65% of participants feel students undergo too much standardized testing
  • 68% of participants indicated a greater need for student support services at school
  • 71% of participants thought class sizes are too large
  • 94% of participants thought it was important that schools teach students how to problem solve
  • 80% of participants  feel they do not have a say in education policy.

It is Time to Change the Status Quo for New Mexico’s Public Education!

Click here to RSVP TODAY

Keep The Promise For New Mexico’s Future

in partnership with
New Mexico PBS and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
presents:

Central Region –  Keep The Promise Education Town Hall


on Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

This is the first of 4 town halls across the state and will be focused on developing a community based vision for education in New Mexico. These Town Halls are opportunities for parents, students and educators to share YOUR vision for public education.

Together we can create real community-driven solutions to ensure a great education for all of New Mexico’s children.

Central Region Town Hall:

Wed, Oct. 16 from 6-7pm at the

UNM Continuing Education Conference Center Auditorium
1634 University Blvd. NE
Albuquerque, NM

Click here to RSVP!

Flipboard for Educators – cool!

mp

As students and teachers head back to school all over the country, we wanted to share some ideas on how Flipboard can be helpful this school year. Since the launch of Flipboard 2.0 this past spring, our readers can collect articles and turn them into shareable magazines. We’ve found that educators are doing this a lot—for class reading assignments, student projects and their own enlightenment.

Here’s how you can use Flipboard in teaching and learning:

1. Keep up on current events: Flipboard has more than 125 publishing partners, including the BBC, New York Times, TechCrunch, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as sections curated around topics such as News, Tech, Travel and Design—”one-stop shops” for authoritative news on a subject. Tap on the red ribbon to explore great magazines, newspapers and blogs in the Content Guide.

2. Create a class syllabus: Plan out the semester for your students by making your syllabus available in a magazine. Include articles and editorial content that your students need to read throughout the semester to ensure success in your class. You can supplement it with your own notes by using a blogging platform such as WordPress, and flipping your posts into your magazine. Encourage students to comment on articles to track engagement.

Things AP Econ Students Should Know: by Michael Brody

3. Class projects: Task your students with creating a class-project magazine. Have them compile editorial, images and YouTube videos around specific subject matter they’re studying in your class. They can do this individually, or in groups (tap “Invite Contributors” from the magazine’s front page.)

Government Class: by kimberleyscox

Mike McCue: by Brian Pinkston

4. Educational Resource Guides: The education process is never ending. Create a resource guide by compiling articles and educational materials on a single topic or general areas of inquiry and share that with your colleagues.

Science class: by Zach Morrow

EducAtion: by Brendan Gilligan

Early Childhood Education: by Jacqueline Mezquita

5. Collaboration: Teaching is all about teamwork. Invite other educators to collaborate on a resource guide or have your students collaborate on a magazine for class. Compile articles, teaching resources or how to videos related to the subject you teach or education in general and share that magazine with other educators in your school or district.

Student Blogging Challenge Sept 2013: by suewaters

Education & Educapability: by Joshua Hostetter

6. Keep parents informed: Stay in touch with your classroom parents by creating a magazine with curriculum examples, class readings, suggested at home projects, images from class and classroom updates flipped in from a personal blog. Encourage your parents to subscribe to the magazine to stay up to date on everything going on in your classroom.

7. Your school, on the go: For administrators—Flipboard is a great way for your school to stay in touch with students, parents and the community. As long as your school paper, newsletter or event images are available as an RSS feed or via social media, you can search for it on Flipboard. You can also use our Web tools to flip your school’s posts into new magazines—into which you can even mix in other content—around any topic you like.

The Paly Voice: by Callie Walker

Flipboard has previously teamed up with both TeachThought and EdReach, two great educational organizations, to teach their networks how educators and students can best use Flipboard. Check out both of these resources for some additional tips and tricks.

And to learn more about how educators are using Flipboard, from educators, check out these blog posts:

Happy school year to everyone!

~CarolynG
/flipboard
@flipboard
+flipboard