guest blogger
Occasionally we will feature posts by guest bloggers who wish to submit a post on a particular topic, but who are not part of regular blog team. If you have an idea for a post, contact Aimee Craig at craig@chalkboardproject.org.
Sarah Pope is the publications editor for the Arbor Center for Teaching. The ACT is a non-profit organization created to train teachers in the educational philosophy of the Arbor School of Arts & Sciences, an independent elementary school in Tualatin serving grades K-8 in mixed-age classes. ACT apprentices teach alongside master teachers for two years while they earn MAT’s and licenses. The ACT’s mission also includes offering guidance to school leaders and publishing material underpinning the Arbor School curriculum, which is designed to foster active engagement in learning, concrete experiences, and interdisciplinary work. For more information on the Arbor Center for Teaching, please visit arborcenterforteaching.org. We are currently accepting applications for the 2012-14 cohort of apprentices.
Play at school conjures images of raucous playgrounds, of children freed from the constraints of the classroom for twenty minutes of exuberant, noisy fun to burn off steam so they can return to the important work of learning with fewer fidgets and greater focus. Recess is a necessary period of release during the school day, of course. But the faculty at Arbor School in Tualatin recently devoted some energy to considering the ways in which play is embedded in all that we teach in grades K-8. We find that when we bring play into the classroom it provides a means to push for greater depth in students’ development of intellect, character, and creativity. Play in the service of rigorous thinking, of developing the mastery and imagination necessary to improvise and innovate, and of making us better humans permeates our teaching from mathematics to music.
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Category: student achievement | 1 Comment »
Tags: ACT, Arbor Center for Teaching, Arbor School of Arts & Sciences, Cara VanGorder-Lasof, Daniel Shaw, Laura Frizzell, Leigh Wood, Lori Pressman, MAT, play, play at school, recess, Sarah Pope, Tualatin
Sharon Baum spent thirty-three years in public education as a physical and health education teacher, a school counselor, an assistant principal and principal. She has worked in several districts in Oregon and taught high school in Winterhaven, California. She retired in 2010, and finished her career with the North Marion School District as the principal at North Marion Middle School from 2000-2010.
Alex Haley said that folks like to hear a story over hearing a lecture. He shares that you should start out by saying “I have a story to tell.” People like stories. I would like to tell my story.
I was a middle school administrator for 16 years. Two of those years were as an assistant principal, and the remaining 14 years as a principal. Prior to that, I had been a teacher and a counselor. I went into administration because I wanted to be a teacher of teachers, and I felt that the time I spent as a counselor helping teachers with students and observations would benefit me as an administrator. I felt I had a good foundation in observational skills and I loved to observe teachers teaching, and help out where I could in improving the delivery of curriculum. I kept abreast of all the teaching strategies through professional development activities, workshops and books, and felt I had a good handle on how to help others be the best they could be. I also loved having conversations with students about the importance of learning and finding their niche to embrace their own style of learning.
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Category: curriculum, professional development for educators, teaching strategies | 2 Comments »
Tags: Alex Haley, budget cuts, drop-in visits, observation, professional development, Sharon Baum
Carol S. Witherell began her career in education teaching primary grades in the Fountain Valley Public Schools in California in the 1970s. She earned her M.A. degree in social ecology and human development from the University of California-Irvine and her Ph.D. degree in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota. She retired from the Graduate School Education Faculty of Lewis & Clark College in 2005, where she chaired the teacher education program for 8 years. Today she is an avid supporter of the arts and a volunteer with the City Club of Portland.
A Series of Four Film-Dialogue Evenings sponsored by City Club of Portland’s Agora Programs Education Committee
This series aims to activate a deeper, sustained educator-student-citizen dialogue about what a good education for the 21st century looks like. The series includes portraits of highly successful schools and classrooms, both in our region and around the world, followed by presentations by a panel of educators, students, and community leaders and dialogue between audience participants and our panelists. Portraits like these can inspire ongoing civic dialogues on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as educators and citizens alike rethink and transform our educational system so that all students can enjoy excellence, engagement, and equity in our schools.
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Category: professional development for educators, research, student achievement, Student Success | No Comments »
Tags: 2 million minutes, Carol Withrell, Chalkboard Project, City Club of Portland, Communities and Parents for Public Schools, COSA, Ethos Music, Film Series, Friends of the Children, I have a dream foundation, IDEA, PPS, Project-based learning, PSU, stand for children, The Finland Phenomenon, Volunteers of America
Jen Barth, preschool parent, co-founder of “Books Make it Better,” and blogger, shares what she is doing to make education better in Oregon.
I’m writing this post on the final stretch of a plane ride back to Portland from Washington, DC, returning from a UN Foundation conference, where I was invited to speak on a panel about Books Make It Better, a grassroots early literacy program I started last Fall. As our plane heads home towards Portland, it strikes me what a difference just one year can make in the realm of personal activism.
Let me back up and introduce myself. I’m not an educator. I’m not a policy maker. I haven’t even been to Salem (yet). I’m simply a preschool parent, and relative Oregon newcomer, who decided last year to choose action over apathy as I began learning more about the many challenges facing Oregon’s schools.
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Category: community involvement, Early Learning, education reform | 4 Comments »
Tags: Books Make it Better, Jen Barth, Mom Congress, OregonMom1, Reach out and read, The children's book bank
T.J. Chandler is the founder of EdZapp, Oregon’s statewide online employment application, and is now the Regional Director of Operations for Netchemia, LLC working with K-12 teacher and administrator evaluations. T.J. was formerly the Director of Business Applications for the New York City Board of Education, and has worked with over one hundred school districts across the country on operational and human capital issues. T.J. holds degrees from Willamette University and Princeton University.
As some celebrate the 10th anniversary of NCLB and others curse it, I ask, “What have we learned from it?” In particular, I am intrigued by certain parallels between evaluating “student achievement” and “teacher performance.”
Some Parallels
Like the discussions 10-15 years ago about students “falling behind” and “dropping out,” policy-makers realize that there is a problem with teacher effectiveness and attrition. The tough part for both problems, of course, is specifying–in meaningful and legally-defensible terms–which individuals are having trouble, and even more importantly how to help them improve.
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Category: curriculum, Early Learning, education achievement gap, education reform, student achievement, Student Success, Teacher Effectiveness, teacher performance evaluations, teaching strategies | 1 Comment »
Tags: Danielson Framework for Teaching, EdZapp, Head Start, INTASC, NCLB, New Teacher Project, T.J. Chandler, teacher evaluations, value-added model, VAM, Widget Effect
Eduardo Angulo, Executive Director of the Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality, shares his thoughts on public education reform in Oregon.
Oregonians’ drive for public education reform has taken many years to arrive at its climax. Finally, we are in the middle of it and are being driven by Governor Kitzhaber’s bold actions. He put it best when he said; “I am intending to wear out my welcome to make sure we have equal education for all our children in Oregon.”
In the past four years, I have been in the middle of it all by being part of the three-year Harvard-Wallace Foundation Education Reform Initiative with the four largest school districts in Oregon and Massachusetts. I was also part of the Oregon Race to the Top Design Team to develop the state’s federal school reform grant application. This past August, I was part of the Governor’s LearnWorks Team to develop the new Outcome Based Budgeting and Proficiency Based Teaching and Learning Framework to guarantee that every student is successful – from birth until college graduation.
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Category: education reform | 5 Comments »
Tags: Eduardo Angulo, education reform, Salem-Keizer Coalition for Equality
Originally a part of the New Teacher Center’s November Policy E-Newsletter, the following commentary is from Liam Goldrick, the Director of Policy at NTC. Archived newsletters can be found here.
Liam Goldrick joined the New Teacher Center as director of policy in June 2006. In that role, Liam leads a range of initiatives designed to accelerate new teacher effectiveness and strengthen the quality of new educator induction and mentoring policies at the federal and state levels. Prior to joining the NTC, Liam served as education policy advisor to Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle and as a senior policy analyst in the Education Division at the National Governors Association in Washington, DC.
| Last week I attended a provocative event hosted by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) in Washington, DC. It featured Tom Friedman (New York Times columnist and co-author of the new book, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind In the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back) and Marc Tucker (President and CEO of NCEE and author of Surpassing Shanghai: An American Education Agenda Built on the World’s Leading Systems, released on November 10).In his book, Surpassing Shanghai, Tucker examines the educational policies and practices of five high-performing nations (Canada, China (Shanghai), Finland, Japan and Singapore), explores how they contribute to those countries’ successes, and defines commonalities among them from which the United States can learn. A focus on attracting, developing, supporting and rewarding quality teaching looms large.
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Category: education reform, teacher compensation, Teacher Effectiveness, teaching strategies | 1 Comment »
Tags: Liam Goldrick, Marc Tucker, New Teacher Center, Tom Freidman
David Mandell has been with the Children’s Institute since 2006. He leads the Institute’s major research projects and is integral in developing the organization’s policy agenda and strategies. Prior to joining the Children’s Institute staff, David was a visiting assistant professor at Reed College and adjunct faculty at Portland State University. He completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. David recently served on the Governor’s Early Learning Design team.
On October 17th, Oregon submitted its application for the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Grant.
I had the opportunity to work on Oregon’s application, and witness the dedication that went into it. We had just eight weeks to put together a 300+ page comprehensive plan for Oregon’s early learning system.
If Oregon wins the grant, the benefit for the state will be significant. The grant, a collaborative project of the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services, is designed to spur states to build comprehensive early care and education systems that promote the school readiness of all children (with a focus on those with high needs). Thirty seven states applied for the small handful of awards. The winning states will be announced before the end of the year and, if chosen, Oregon will receive $50 million over three years.
The collaboration that went into this effort exemplified what we want to see happen in Oregon’s government. Folks from education, health, human services and employment worked together to plan for:
- Common early learning standards that will support the school readiness of all children.
- An integrated data system that will track children’s progress and support quality improvements for programs.
- Early childhood professional development system that will build the skilled and knowledgeable workforce that is needed to deliver results for children. (more…)
Category: Early Learning, education achievement gap, equity | No Comments »
Tags: early learning, Governor, Race to the Top
Sunny Petit is the Associate Director for the Center for Women, Politics, and Policy which promotes the education and empowerment of women and girls through civic leadership programs and research. Prior to joining the Center, she was Regional Director for a counter-human trafficking organization in South Asia and ran programs in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. She lives in North Portland with her husband and two children.
Remember the posters of US Presidents on your wall in your middle school? It’s the literal evolution of executive leadership in our nation on display. In each photo, you saw the changing social fabric of our country, you saw military leaders and governors and great orators, but there was always something missing. I didn’t see any women on those posters, and thus, I didn’t see myself. While I loved hearing about women like Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks, the role models offered for girls were minimal- segments on women’s history often felt like a footnote. I managed to make it through a complete K-12 education in Oregon, never knowing the name of Oregon’s first female Supreme Court Justice Betty Roberts, let alone the names of the Oregon suffragists who made that historic event possible.
A few years ago as the Center for Women, Politics & Policy at PSU started planning around the centennial for Oregon Women’s Suffrage in 2012, we discussed what other women’s stories were out there to discover and share. Over the past year, I’ve worked together with Gayle Thieman, an expert curriculum designer and Past President of the National Council for Social Studies, to develop a grade 6-12 curriculum that brings to life the stories and achievements of Oregon’s women pioneers who have shaped our state for generations. (more…)
Category: curriculum, equity | 1 Comment »
Tags: inspiration, Oregon women
Mandy Zatynski writes for Education Sector’s blog, The Quick and the Ed.
Education Sector is an independent think tank that challenges conventional thinking in education policy. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to achieving measurable impact in education policy, both by improving existing reform initiatives and by developing new, innovative solutions to our nation’s most pressing education problems.
There’s a lot of talking that goes on here in Washington. Policymakers, state leaders, nonprofits, and think tanks (like us) all have an opinion about education, its current state, and how to make it better. But there’s often an essential voice missing from this conversation, the point-of-view from the front of the class, next to the students, in front of textbooks, and inside the person that matters most: teachers.
As a former ESL educator, this baffles me. I am surprised by the amount of conversation and decision-making that takes place regarding the role of a teacher without a single, working educator present or weighing in at any point of the process.
Washingtonians can talk about the realities that a teacher faces daily, but an educator knows them, lives them, battles them every day. Washingtonians can break down budget cuts and how they will increase class size; but a teacher can show us what the cuts look like, from students two-teaming a single desk to cramped, overheated spaces that lead to uncomfortable, disruptive students.
In Washington, we like to talk about reform. We need to better train our teachers. We need to better assess our teachers. We need to better track our teachers from graduate programs to first jobs.
How about: We need to better listen to our teachers?
Because the fact is, we cannot talk about improving training for our teachers without first asking current educators how they could have been better prepared for Day One. And we shouldn’t talk about budget cuts or make assumptions on the effect of larger class sizes without consulting the folks who are actually affected.
We talk about teachers like they’re the big elephant in the room, and they’re not. There’s 7.2 million of them, in fact. They’re in metropolitan cities and country towns; affluent areas and poverty-stricken neighborhoods; from the snow skis of the Appalachian Mountains to the surf boards of the Pacific coast. And with today’s technological wonders – from live webcasts to video conferences, from Twitter feeds to blog posts – there’s absolutely no reason why teachers shouldn’t be included in the conversation.
That’s why my organization, Education Sector, has launched a Facebook group for just that. Called Teacher Sector, this page is for educators only. Here, you can weigh in on one of our poll questions or respond to the day’s top news in the education world. Or maybe we’re missing the big issue altogether, so post your own thoughts. Tell us how those new teacher evaluations are going. Are they fair? Are they useful? Or just come and network with other teachers. We designed this space to get a pulse, if you will, on the teaching industry; to make sure our work is improving your work; and to collect feedback along the way. The bottom line is: Your voice is missing, and it’s desperately needed.
As we’re just beginning our outreach efforts with Teacher Sector, we’ve added a limited time incentive for participants: like us on Facebook, www.facebook.com/TeacherSector, and answer a quick poll question to enter a drawing for a year’s worth of school supplies ($450, to be exact). Only the first 500 teachers to do so will be included in the drawing, so hurry!
Category: Teacher advocacy, Teacher Effectiveness | No Comments »
Tags: Teacher advocacy, teacher appreciation, teacher engagement
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