The Newly Ancient blog recently covered what they find to be the top traits possessed by “quality teachers.” I have quoted a snippet of each below:

#1 Passion

Without this, it is impossible to become a great teacher. If you don’t love your subject, how can you expect your students to? I don’t think this is an issue for most teachers. Still, it is always important to emphasize.

#2 Creativity

With the onslaught of standardized testing and curriculum this might be getting harder, but it is still very important. Regardless of discipline, creativity is paramount. Sure, you can be a good teacher by taking prepackaged material and efficiently transmitting it.

#3 Flexibility

Students have complex lives, as do you. If everything is set in stone, you’ll eventually crack. When an A student fails a test, you have to be ready to be flexible.

#4 Integrate

I am a firm believer in integrated curriculum and content. Life isn’t in isolated boxes, so learning shouldn’t be either. I often hear the complaint that there isn’t support from administration or other teachers. To that, I say “So what?”

#5 Connect

Information can’t be transmitted without a solid connection, and neither can knowledge. You need to form a connection with each and every student. Technically speaking, the knowledge has to form a connection to the student, but you are the representation and medium of that knowledge.

DISCUSSION: Do you agree with these? Do you disagree with any? Is it wrong to boil down the traits of teachers down to any top five list?

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent piece profiling Doug Lemov, previously a teacher, charter school founder and currently an educational consultant to help teachers become more effective. With so many failed attempts in the past by the government, Lemov took it upon himself to make a change:

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently.

Although my experience is limited to that of a student, effective classroom strategy seems to always be a priority of educational organizations but rarely one that shows any progress. Why is this?

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting…But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.

The question I keep coming back to is: do we help the teachers or the students? The answer floats somewhere in between. The temporary solution is outlined as this:

Yet he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own. And the stakes are too high: while student scores on national assessments across demographic groups have risen, the percentage of students at proficiency — just 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading — is still disturbingly low. And there is still a wide gap between black and white students in reading and math. The smarter path to boosting student performance, Lemov maintains, is to improve the quality of the teachers who are already teaching.

Thus, the responsibility rests on the teacher. This is one reason we have profiled various teachers on this blogs with their tips for improving. If you have any tips, please leave them in the comments.

During the last election one of the major issues relevant to my peers and I was Obama’s plan for education. As current students we realized that any projects Obama planned to fund and execute would have little to no affect on our college experience. However, it was still important to us as students to see progress in any area we felt so strongly about.

A recent piece in E School News analyzed Obama’s latest plan thoroughly:

The Obama administration is offering a $900 million carrot to the nation’s school systems to tackle what many view as an abysmal dropout rate that threatens America’s ability to compete in the new global economy. But it’s the “stick” portion of the administration’s plan that has rankled many educators.

Districts would get the money only if they agree to one of four plans to dramatically change or even shut down their worst performing schools. One of these plans involves firing the principal and at least half of the staff members at a struggling school—a turnaround plan that captured national attention when it was tried by the Central Falls, R.I., school system last week.

How bad are dropout rates?

The White House says 1.2 million students drop out of school each year, and only about 70 percent of entering high school freshmen go on to graduate. The problem affects blacks and Latinos at particularly high rates. About 2,000 high schools turn out half of all dropouts, and the administration says it will work with states to identify those schools with graduation rates below 60 percent.

With Obama’s 2011 budget proposal including $900 million for School Turnaround Grants, I hope the money is put to good use. Where would you recommend the money is invested?

The Buck Institute for Education analyzed various educational frameworks relevant to the 21st Century.

Why the 21st Century? I believe the digital age presents a unique opportunity for students to leverage their career in new ways, specifically by accessing online resources. I found the data visualization curated by the Buck Institute for Education proved helpful for understanding the connection between the new skill sets and how they can be used.

See below for more information:

In 2008, BIE analyzed selected frameworks for 21st Century Outcomes. The columns represent the different frameworks which fall into the focus areas of workforce readiness. The number in each cell represents the number of components for each sub-domain within each framework.

The internet’s expanding collection of useful materials for education has just become richer. Take a look at Instructional Strategies Online that includes information across:

• Direct Instruction
• Interactive Instruction
• Indirect Instruction
• Independent Study
• Experiential Learning
• Instructional Skills

The sections are instructional, helpful and include actionable classroom insight. For example, see below for a snippet from the page on narratives:

What are Narratives?

Narrative essays are told from a defined point of view, often the author’s, so there is feeling as well as specific and often sensory details provided to get the reader involved in the elements and sequence of the story.

What is its purpose?

Since a narrative relies on personal experiences, it often is in the form of a story. When the writer uses this technique, he or she must be sure to include all the conventions of storytelling: plot, character, setting, climax, and ending. It is usually filled with details that are carefully selected to explain, support, or enhance the story. All of the details relate to the main point the writer is attempting to make.

How do I do it?

Students can “tell what happened” by introducing the situation (who, where, and when); relaying events in a logical order (firstly, after that, next, etc.); and concluding by giving the last important event (e.g., at last …).

These are definitely useful classroom strategies regardless of your field or level of education. Please share any stories of using any of these or additional internet resources rich in content.

Graduating in 2009, as I did, was a difficult time for many of my peers. The rough, volatile economic conditions forced many graduates to reevaluate their post-college plans. Without a job, what would they do? Find an internship? Start a company? Job hunt? Sit at home? Go to law school or grad school?

I’d argue that the additional education argument, such as law school or grad school, felt the most productive my peers because they are safe options (at least temporarily). You’ll pay a large sum of money to continue and hopefully advance your undergraduate studies.

A piece from Swarthmore’s website provides unique perspective on the Grad School dilemma:

Should I go to graduate school?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: maybe, but only if you have some glimmering of what you are about to do to yourself. Undergraduates coming out of liberal arts institutions are particularly vulnerable to ignorance in this regard. For four years, they’ve been asked to take chances, experiment, change course when it suits them, freely enrich their minds and their hearts. Most such students then approach careers with something of the same spirit, and generally, they should. Take some chances after you graduate, try different things. Why not?

Just don’t try graduate school in an academic subject with the same spirit of carefree experimentation. Medical school, sure. Law school, no problem. But a Ph.D in an academic field? Forget it. If you take one step down that path, I promise you, it’ll hurt like blazes to get off, even if you’re sure that you want to quit after only one year.

Two years in, and quitting will be like gnawing your own leg off.

Past that, and you’re talking therapy and life-long bitterness.

It’s not because academia is so great that anyone denied it is forever shattered. Don’t get me wrong: as one of the lucky few to get into a tenure-track position, I am loving it. Every day is a hoot: this is a truly privileged situation. I love my job, and my job is my life, or a big part of it. But the problem here is that academia is also insidious. If its peculiar subculture suits your personality and your skills, then grad school is worth enduring.

If you and academic life are a mismatch, then grad school won’t help you discover that. It will just confuse you even more.

What do you think?

Read the rest here.

I remember in elementary school I was forced, or highly encouraged, to learn twenty or more vocab words for a weekly vocabulary quiz. The quiz would be a mix of fill in the blank, matching and context questions that I’d cram to study for the night before. As I think back on my study methods, which always included flash cards, I distinctively remember “moving around” while I studied.

This may have included a walk down my driveway, around the neighborhood block or simply around my house.

A new blog post by Seth Roberts discusses the theory of movement learning:

Five years after my own experience as a third-grade teacher in Illinois, I was training teachers at the University of Washington and received a federally funded grant to conduct research in the Seattle Public Schools. During the 1977 school year, 250 students from four elementary schools studied language arts concepts through movement and dance activities for twenty weeks. The third grade students involved in the study increased their MAT [?] scores by 13 percent from fall to spring, while the district wide average showed a decrease of 2 percent! The primary grade project [?] students also showed a great improvement in test scores. Most significant was the direct relationship the research showed between the amount of movement the classroom teacher used and the percentage increase of students’ test scores.

It turns out my elementary school theory wasn’t necessarily correct, but it’s been shared and possibly been reinforced elsewhere.

Learning takeaway: encourage students to experiment with study methods that include a second variable besides blankly reading or memorizing, such as walking, lifting weights or running on a treadmill.

A college education should be viewed as an investment. Will you earn more than you spent on receiving the diploma? In most cases, the answer is yes.

However, new research covered in Newsweek finds an emerging link between education and marriage, perhaps a profit channel ignored from the college investment. Although I’m a bit late for Valentine’s Day, here are a few highlights I pulled from the article:

• Stevenson said the data indicate that modern college-educated women are more likely than other groups of women to be married at age 40, are less likely to divorce, and are more likely to describe their marriages as “happy” (no matter what their income) compared with other women.
• The marriages of well-educated women tend to be more stable because the brides are usually older as well as wiser.
• College-educated couples are also more likely to marry for companionship and love and compatibility rather than for financial security.
• Today, educated women are a lot less concerned about how much their husband earns,” she said, and more interested in whether “he is willing to share child care and housework.”

The final point of the article sums up the major beneifit:

If you’re looking for another reason to encourage a young woman to get her college degree, add this one to the list: chances are, you’ll be luckier in love.

The Highland School, described as a “democratic day and boarding school,” summarizes nicely its school’s thesis on its homepage. My favorite passage covers the individualistic aspect of effective learning.

It is literally impossible to entice, to cajole, or to discipline a child into maturity. Maturity and personal responsibly can only be learned with freedom, time, and the democratic process. Respecting that fact allows children to appreciate that they are individually responsible for what they know now and for the rest of their lives.

I think this is an interesting approach by the Highland School. Rather than just describing their coursework, they took the initiative to define, through their eyes, what learning is and how it’s most effective per student. They continue:

Alternatively, the students who, for various reasons, perform well in traditional schools don’t realize the downside of their structured education until they have successfully navigated it, graduated from it, and entered the ‘real world’. It is only at that point that many admit that much of their education was pointless. Others are left lacking in important abilities: confidence, self-direction, and the ability to move on after failure.

While they make a point to emphasize how other schools “are doing it wrong,” individualized learning is a process that plenty of universities are catching on to. During my senior year at my university, a large majority of my coursework was dependent on activities I was already doing, and learning from, by choice.

This post is part of the Teachers Certification Map’s “discussion series,” a collection of posts featuring highlights and questions around the evolving state of education aimed at enlightening young teachers as they embark on their careers.

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A New York Times economix column looks at whether the “success” of city is tied to how entrepreneurial it is:

The answer should matter for two reasons: local policy makers are constantly looking for ways to rev the economic engines of their cities, and the ingredients of success at the local level can help inform national policy. Just as city-level evidence on the connection between education and urban growth helps build the case for a national schooling agenda, city-level evidence on the determinants of entrepreneurship should help guide federal policies toward new businesses.

My first thought of skepticism to this claim was regarding “measurement.” Apparently, it’s being thought about a few ways:

One route is to use the self-employment rate, but self-employment doesn’t capture the scale of the enterprise or its success. It also creates some anomalous results.

If the self-employment rate captures entrepreneurship, then West Palm Beach is by far the most entrepreneurial place in the country and the San Jose metropolitan area, that home of Silicon Valley, is one of the least.

Discussion: Do you think the location of a university have any indication of how “entrepreneurial” the coursework, students or teachers are?

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Do you know someone with great insights to share with young teachers, or do you want your material considered for a discussion topic?

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