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Hang onto Your Hat, the Wind is Blowing...and Hard!!!
President Eagen gives his perspective on what NYS educators should know about the new administration's education funding proposals.
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NYSASCD Collaborates with Capital Region BOCES on Teach to Learn Symposium
Logic Model implemented to support Mental Health issues in Schools
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Professional Development that Sticks
I share thoughts based on research and experience that can provide educational leaders and learners with “Do Now” strategies for designing professional learning that makes a difference. In this short piece, I’m going to share three tips for creating PD with purpose (also known as PDL, or Professional Development FOR Learning).
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Get in the Feedback Loop and Improve Student Learning
As we seek to provide every child with more individualized learning, the quality of the feedback we provide must improve too. No longer can we plop a grade on an assignment with a “good job” adorned next to the name and expect students to grow or learn.
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Challenges and Successes in All Girls Inner City Schools
Student engagement is key in all learning and is the focus of most conversations about learning in this century’s schools. However, we believe, working with the students at the Young Women’s College Prep Charter School of Rochester, engagement is paramount in environments such as ours.
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Tips for Developing and Documenting District-Wide Curriculum
Why have so many districts attempted and then abandoned efforts to map district-wide curricula?
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21st Century Learning & the Role of Technology
Although the New York State Teaching Standards and the New York State Education Department's approved rubrics depict a highly-effective classroom as a student-centered learning classroom, teachers struggle with the concept. Why?
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Monitoring Student Progress With Technology
The ability to effectively assess, monitor and report progress of individual academic goals can be difficult. What if there is limited time for the special educator to directly observe the student? What if the work provided in the general education class does not specifically address the goals as written?
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Better Definitions of Readiness
The 80%/75% definition of college and career readiness in New York State does little to really describe the characteristics of a high school graduate who is ready for college and career, much less citizenship, or life.
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Either You're an Advocate or You're Not
The Great Recession shattered savings and altered lives, including school districts across the country. Those dire financial circumstances triggered one positive change, though, when it comes to the role of superintendents: We are all now fully engaged advocates.
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Communication in a Time of Change
Being an effective communicator is one of the most important requirements of being an educational leader. Communication and change are closely associated with one another; open, honest, and direct communication assists in the implementation of change.
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Trust, Truthiness and the Power of Listening
As I sat with this teacher, it became very evident, very quickly, that our trust had been severed and that before the conversation could go further, that needed to be addressed.
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College and Career READY
Changing the definition and conversation about readiness from test scores to what it really means to be ready might have an impact on the larger conversation (and drama) we hear when it comes to education these days. Using these definitions, we change the story from test scores to students’ future, which is what the story should have been all along.
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A Professional Learning Session That Did Anything But “Blend In”
Culture, Purpose, and Structured Teaching was designed to serve as an opportunity to further explore aspects of Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey’s FIT Teaching Framework. By incorporating the use of a number of technology tools and leveraging the connections that ASCD and our state-level affiliate have, the session was designed to virtually host Doug and Nancy in a number of different locations, including three in New York as well as throughout states along the Northeast corridor.
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How You Communicate with Students is Key to Their Success
Rather than plop a number or letter on something a student labored over for weeks, consider an on-going conversation that helps drive learning throughout the process.
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The Important Role of the Arts in Education for All Students
Take care not to advance the utility of music education in improving academic outcomes as its sole purpose or reason for existence. Otherwise we risk contributing to ever-reduced options for students and the narrowing of what it means to be educated.
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A Case for College and Career Ready: Pianist Christopher Bradshaw and Mezzo-Soprano Stephanie Blythe
We shared powerful experiences and learned life lessons: taking that risk to step out on stage to sing or play a solo, the nervousness, the encouragement, the successes, and even the failures.
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Using Drama to Explore Literature and Develop Deep Understanding of Craft
Too often literature is left to the flatness of the page. Letting the words languish as they lay there, eyes giving only a cursory glance. There is life to be breathed into those poetic devices and creative teachers have an exciting opportunity to create art out of mere letters.
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Integrity Should Be The Basis of Teacher Evaluation
The integrity and effectiveness of the New York State assessments has been at the center of many controversial debates for the past few years. The latest reform efforts have given the assessments a platform that has placed parents on the opposing side of the state’s agenda. The state has proposed that measuring student growth and using that skewed data to determine teacher effectiveness is the scientifically sound method to use. “We have no meaningful evidence at hand indicating that these tests can accurately distinguish between well taught and badly taught students.” So says testing expert James Popham regarding the use of tests to evaluate teachers and principals.
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Don't Allow Accountability To Diminish The Value of Observation & Evaluation
It’s time to move away from accountability being viewed as achievement and as a Sword of Damocles for all teachers and move toward a responsibility for our own growth as educators and the improvement of our practice.
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Ratings or Improved Practice: What Are Observations and Evaluations For?
We must never lose sight of the goal of observations and evaluations: to reflect, discuss and improve upon learning outcomes for all students.
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Toward a More Collegial Observation Process
As a teacher, I can recall the observation process being a generally positive experience. However, twenty years ago the mechanics of the observation process were notably “topdown." The supervisor would come to my class and I would be sure to share the materials being used, as I did my best to “ignore” the observer. The students were always quite well behaved- a pattern that remains today, in that students often want to show off how “good” their teacher is- or, for that matter, how “good” they are.
