I have a former student with whom I worked during student teaching who made the local news for starting a garden at her middle school. This is great. A couple of years ago, I taught a social studies methods course that consisted of a curricular core of food related issues, urban agriculture, our food system, all […]
Our humble website was followed by an entity mysteriously named The American Board. Interesting. I checked it out. I don’t have time or patience for a crazy amount of research or digging. Perhaps the reader can help me. Nevertheless, ABCTE is an alternative teacher certification program. Oy. I start taking a look. Let me see. […]
All right, so I’m trying to keep it together before this all day CCSS seminar that I have coming up next week. I have that burning feeling in my chest already. I put teacher educators on notice earlier this week, NOT ONE of my teacher ed friends responded. So, I’m doing it again. There is […]
A new NCTQ report is out once again telling us plebes what we should have already known: teacher preparation programs are in the toilet, now because of poorly preparing candidates to use data to drive instruction. I even have some problems with the central thesis of this report. One, assessment is not the most important […]
One of the classics in the history of American education is Raymond Callahan’s 1962 EDUCATION AND THE CULT OF EFFICIENCY. In the free Chapter 5 available here, you can read about the various strategies and tactics that were devised a hundred years by the social control and social efficiency zealots who were attempting to take […]
The Answer Sheet reports on the potential use of test scores and value added models to evaluate college teacher preparation programs. Two things. One, how do you account for folks who attend multiple institutions, transfer, and so forth? Two, what about those TFA folks who go through a five week workshop? Can we evaluate them […]
And this time it’s on what preparation programs do or don’t, emphasis on don’t, teach regarding assessment and data-driven instruction to pre-service teachers. Reports of this kind clearly espouse a particular ideology with respect to education reform, one that adheres strictly to quantitative assessments and high-stakes standardized tests. This isn’t a long or particularly evokative […]
Social studies educator has a great post about the embarrassing RESPECT initiative released this week by the DOE. When will they learn that these silly grant competitions don’t work? Folks don’t reform their systems because they believe in what they’re doing. They do it for the money, that’s it, because they’re already starving for funds. […]
A second post in recent weeks from Inside Higher Ed on teacher preparation, this time on a new program called TeachingWorks out of the University of Michigan. You know, I’m not saying that I have all the wisdom and knowledge there is to know about teacher preparation. I’m just a humble former public school teacher […]
Inside Higher Ed has a post today on evaluating and defining high quality teacher preparation. Theres a panel or a committee or what have you assembled to define how we define the definition of high quality teacher preparation and what kind of data will be collected to define it. The bottom line for me, […]
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has an excellent piece on the Finnish system, including the video that you see below. As you watch the short video, listen for how the special education teacher in the poor Finnish school talks about the basic skills that all their children get–it’s a very different conception of what is “basic” when […]
How many times do we have to remind reform apologists like @alexanderrusso?
According to Mr. Russo, 2013 may be the year of teacher preparation. Too bad it’s half over. To wit: Since 2009, the California-based NewSchools Venture Fund, with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has been convening Learning to Teach, a 40-member group of teacher prep organizations that includes both traditional and alternative providers. […]