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.
Steve Nelson is co-director of the Oregon Schools to Watch Program. Mr. Nelson is also the principal of Leslie Middle School in Salem, Oregon and the President of the Oregon Middle Level Association. He has worked in the field of education for 26 years as a teacher, assistant principal and principal in the Dayton School District, Salem-Keizer School District and at the American School in Puebla, Mexico.
The Oregon Middle Level Association is excited to announce that Oregon is now an official “Schools to Watch” state. The Schools to Watch (STW) initiative, sponsored by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, is an effort to ensure that young adolescents are prepared to be lifelong learners ready for college, career and citizenship. The STW initiative accomplishes its goal by identifying high-performing middle-grades schools that are on a solid upward trajectory in regard to academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, social equity and organizational effectiveness. Over the last ten years hundreds of middle-grades schools throughout the country have been designated as “Schools to Watch” because of their commitment to these STW core beliefs. (more…)
Category: Teacher advocacy | No Comments »
Tags: dayton school district, intermediate school, middle school, National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, Oregon Education, Oregon Middle Level Association, oregon schools to watch, Salem-Keizer, salem-keizer school district, schools to watch, Steve Nelson, STW
Rachel Fortgang is a former student of Shawn’s, and a current student teacher.
Harvard University professor Jal Mehta recently penned an editorial for the New York Times in which he argues, essentially, “American education is a failed profession.” His contention rests on the falsity of most reform propositions, that whether we are asked to take sides in the Michelle Rhee vs. Diane Ravitch debate, or whether we follow Waiting for Superman into a charter vs. public contest, we are operating in a place that will not lead to long-term, effective solutions. Interestingly, Mehta reasons that the major solution rests in the professionalization of the teaching profession, something that has been promulgated in books like Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan’s Professional Capital but has remained an elusive position for teacher leadership and reform advocates alike.
Rachel, who is finishing up her student teaching, has noticed the relatively strange position of teachers since she decided to join their ranks. Both highly educated and a veteran of programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, Rachel is one of those that the profession should be trying to attract. Yet, her initial foray has introduced a distinct conundrum. She notes:
“It’s been strange telling my friends, most of whom at this point are finishing up law school, med school, or writing for prestigious news outlets, that I am going to be a teacher. There is, I think, an unspoken disappointment that this is what I ‘have come to,’ that if I cannot be a famous writer, I will resort to standing in front of a classroom intoning the difference between a metaphor and a simile for a group of adolescents who may not care less, year after year, for the rest of my life. What I’ve been coming up against, as I just dip my toe into this profession, is the largely unspoken reality about American society’s perception of the amount of skill, or to put it more bluntly, the intelligence, that is required to be an effective teacher.”
Part of Rachel’s issue is the fact that the teaching profession occupies a strange zone within the range of professions. In Shawn’s Issues and Ethics in Education class, he often muses about “what collar” a teacher wears. Rooms are often divided between those who argue blue and those who argue white, although the final denouement usually finds the class realizing that it is neither. The teaching profession straddles a line between these two worlds, and as long as it does so, it will perpetually face the labor strife that accompanies working class positions while seeking the protections normally associated with other career fields. Mehta suggests that teachers have to work harder to have teaching be seen as a “profession on par with fields like law and medicine.” (more…)
Category: teacher appreciation, teacher preparation | 2 Comments »
Tags: Concordia, harlem children's zone, jal mehta, new york times, Oregon Education, Shawn Daley, student teaching, teacher appreciation week, teaching profession
Dr. Judith A. Ramaley is President Emerita and Distinguished Professor of Public Service at Portland State University in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government and President Emerita of Winona State University in Minnesota and The University of Vermont. Dr. Ramaley holds an appointment as a Senior Scholar with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She is also a member of the board of Second Nature, an organization committed is to create a healthy, just, and sustainable society through the transformation of higher education and Oregon Campus Compact. She has worked with preK-12/higher education collaborations for many years.
Read Dr. Ramaley’s paper in its entirety.
In brief, not yet, but read on. A flurry of articles and books in the 1970s and 1980s explored concepts of professionalism. Educators have followed a path similar to other fields but K-12 teaching is still not seen as a true profession by many. There are several reasons for this, including how education itself has developed over the last century, where teachers receive their education (largely in less prestigious institutions) and who enters the field (mostly women).
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, almost anyone could be a teacher as long as he or she had completed a level of education slightly above that of their pupils. The emergence of a formal school system throughout the 19th century carried with it both a demand for more and better trained teachers. The pathway to teaching branched in two main directions—preparation at a research university or at a regional comprehensive institution. The prestige enjoyed by research universities made it attractive to prospective practitioners of all sorts. However, research universities focused more on theory than on practice. Although these institutions welcomed the steady stream of tuition-paying students seeking to become teachers, they did not, as a rule, prepare highly qualified teachers who could both master the content of their chosen area of emphasis and practice the skills to help students succeed in school. (more…)
Category: teacher preparation | 2 Comments »
Tags: dr. judith ramaley, hatfield, judith ramaley, K-12 education, Portland State University, teacher preparation, teaching as a profession, teaching in 2013
Darren Stowell is the CEO of ActivEd, a Portland based education company developing online content for k-3 classrooms that get kids moving, while developing fundamental reading and math skills. He’s spent 15 years in the education space, most notably as a senior leader with both Teach For America and Kaplan. He lives in NE Portland with his wife and two young boys.
walkabouts.org
As a lifelong advocate for public education, a father of two boys and an avid athlete, I have experienced the many effects physical activity and inactivity can have on people—most importantly kids. Through my work as an educator working with communities around the country, one thing that holds true is that physically active kids enjoy themselves more and perform better in school.
I became acutely aware of that truth over the last few years with my four-year-old son, Isaac. Isaac is an incredible little boy, with a hunger for learning and a commitment to squeezing every second out of every day. At first, we saw this energy as a boy “just being a boy,” but after our second son was born, we started to understand that Isaac’s energy and his need to be active throughout the day was related to his unique learning style. (more…)
Category: innovation, Student Success | 2 Comments »
Tags: active ed, actived, cognition, darren stowell, importance of exercise, kinesthetic learner, movement, performance pedagogy, physical activity in classroom, public education, standardized testing, TFA
Lois Cohen is President of Lois D. Cohen Associates, a full-service communications firm. In 2005, she developed the School-based Outreach Program, a program that educates students—our future civic, community and business leaders—about the importance of projects being initiated in their communities and having project team members participate in age appropriate, hands-on educational activities. The School-based Outreach Program introduces students to the importance of civic responsibility, the complexity of public projects, and it builds community awareness and goodwill for these projects.
I have always had an interest in working with children. I often tell people that, when I eventually retire, I want to spend the majority of my time reading to and/or teaching children to read. When I started the unique School-based Outreach Program in 2005, initially for the Oregon Department of Transportation, we focused on increasing public awareness of important projects or initiatives by connecting with our future leaders and future members of the workforce—students. Since that time, we have worked with more than 3,500 students throughout the state of Oregon to impart an awareness of public and private projects, inculcate a sense of civic awareness and civic responsibility among students, develop an awareness of the various careers and associated educational paths aligned with each project, and introduce a fun, age-appropriate hands on activity to extend the students’ learning experience.
I strongly believe that students are ambassadors to their families and communities. Much of what students learn in school goes home to their parents. Connecting with students via public involvement or outreach creates a linear line of communication that will connect information from classes students attend to their families at home. Students represent an important segment of the community, as they are the ones who will grow up to ultimately lead their families, our communities, our civic institutions, and businesses. (more…)
Category: community involvement, curriculum | No Comments »
Tags: ACE Academy, Lois Cohen, Lois D. Cohen Associates, Oregon, school-based outreach programs, sellwood bridge project, sellwood bridge replacement project, T.Y. Lin International
Tyler Nice has been teaching for over ten years in the Springfield School District. He started his career at Hamlin Middle School. Tyler is currently teaching economics, government and history in the Social Studies department at Thurston High School.
“I know that we haven’t always agreed on every issue thus far, and there are surely times in the future when we will part ways. But I also know that every American who is sitting here this evening loves this country, and wants it to succeed. That must be the starting point of every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done. That is the foundation on which the American people expect us to build common ground.”
- Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, Tuesday, February 4, 2009
I remember watching the State of the Union address in the late winter of 2009. A paragraph toward the tail end of the speech caught my attention. The message was poignant and powerful. I have thoughts of the sentiment often in the years since. The message is that we have competing visions for success. We can focus on the competing methods, or we can focus on the ultimate goal: a safe and prospering nation for all. (more…)
Category: Teacher Effectiveness | 1 Comment »
Tags: economics, education, education policy, government, history, mission, Oregon Education, politics, springfield school district, thurston high school, tyler nice
Tim Nesbitt writes on public affairs, has served as an adviser to Govs. Ted Kulongoski and John Kitzhaber, and is past president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. He writes an opinion column for The Oregonian on alternate Tuesdays. This column was originally posted to OregonLive.com on April 30, 2013 and can be found in its entirety here.
A few hours after Oregon House Democrats failed to pass a tax increase for high-income individuals and corporations last week, I mentioned to a staffer for one of their members that an alternative revenue package might now be in order. But when I suggested shaving personal income tax deductions by 5 percent as a better way to meet their revenue goal, the staffer surprised me by saying, “not 5 percent of my deductions.” And, having listened to the Democrats’ pleas for more revenue to save our schools, my response was just as emphatic: “Then it’s not worth it to you to pay more for schools — that’s the problem!”
This is the issue that we have yet to resolve at the state level. As I wrote in my last column, the message implicit in the House Democrats’ revenue package was that some services, such as schools, are so important that someone else should pay for them. Perhaps I oversimplified. The Democrats’ argument is that when it comes to getting back what we’ve lost — teachers, school days or shop classes — we should turn to those who used to pay more and are now paying less to support schools and services (insert your least favorite corporations here) and those who have benefited most from our economy (variously defined as the top 1 to 3 percent of income earners). That approach is arguably fair but decidedly limited if we want to secure the funding we need for our education system.
Read more.
Category: funding | No Comments »
Tags: education policy OregonLive, funding for education, Oregon Education, The Oregonian, Tim Nesbitt
Darcy Bedortha is an Oregon IDEA Sr. Organizing Fellow, a high school English teacher and long time advocate for youth and social justice. She lives and works in Prineville, Oregon.
My personal and educational path wanders from deeply rural Central Oregon to the urban streets of Portland, from a brush with homelessness to completion of a second Masters degree. I have worked in public education, in mental health facilities, with homeless youth and with privileged families. Each of these experiences is part of who I am today, and each voice informs my work as a community organizer and educator.
It’s with great pleasure that I write to inform the Chalkboard community about two upcoming events in the Eugene/Springfield area that are worthy of your attention.
The Oregon Innovation Tour provides participants an opportunity to observe four programs doing meaningful work with young people. May 1-3 in Eugene, the tour highlights the Ganas program at Kelly Middle School, the Coop Family Center, Edison Elementary School and the Academy of Arts and Academics.
Running alongside the tour is a free public forum on “The Future of Education in Oregon.” This is a dynamic opportunity for a conversation that needs to be had across our state and I hope you’ll consider attending. (more…)
Category: community involvement | No Comments »
Tags: central oregon, education, education events, eugene oregon, IDEA, Institute for Democratic Education in America, Oregon Education, Oregon Innovation tour, springfield oregon, the future of education in oregon
Lori Lynass Ed.D. has served in the role as Executive Director for NW PBIS Network for the past three years. Prior to that she was a Research Scientist for the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. Dr. Lynass has worked directly with over 300 schools on their implementation of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. Married to a teacher and the mother of school age children, she truly believes that all children deserve an excellent education.
When I was first going to look at schools in our school district when my son was about to start kindergarten, I was asked the question, “What are you looking for most in a school?” I pondered the question for a moment and then the image of my small child, whom I cherish, came to mind. I replied, “The most important thing to me is that from 8:30-3:30 each day my son is safe, physically and emotionally, and an adult knows where he is.” With my husband and I both being educators, great academic instruction is undoubtedly high on the list, but we also want our children to develop, socially and emotionally, and to learn to be good citizens while being kept safe. (more…)
Category: teaching strategies | No Comments »
Tags: education, education in Oregon, Lori Lynass, NW PBIS, Oregon, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, preventative measures, problem behaviors, safety in schools, school safety, support for students
Kelly Smith holds a Master of Public Administration from Portland State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from University of Oregon. She joined ECONorthwest in 2008. She specializes in human services and social policy, applying policy research and analysis, program evaluation, performance measurement, economic analysis and other methods to topics in education, workforce development, poverty, child support, and criminal justice.
As graduation day nears for the class of 2013—congratulations and best wishes for a bright future, graduates! —Let’s pause to think about the three in 10 students who won’t be graduating with their class. Considering the limited economic prospects for high school dropouts, not to mention the costs to society associated with students who drop out of high school, this is rightly considered a national crisis.
As it stands, only 67.7 percent of Oregon’s class of 2007-08 graduated with their class and received a regular diploma; another 4.7 percent graduated within the following year. This leaves 27.6 percent without their high school diploma (as reported by the Oregon Department of Education). Graduation rates are even lower for many demographic and socioeconomic subgroups.
(more…)
Category: education achievement gap | 1 Comment »
Tags: attendance, behavior, course performance, data, dropping out of high school, ECONorthwest, education, education policy, graduation rates, Institute for Education Sciences Practice Guide for Dropout Prevention, Kelly Smith, Oregon Education, Portland State University
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