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Testing for What Purpose?

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My son Sam just completed a music video for his IB Film Studies class. He invites his audience to consider all the academic and co-curricular work students put into applying to our top US universities. I told Sam that a documentary covers this (i.e., Race to Nowhere), so he felt validated in his effort. We also spoke about expanding his video to cover the even greater academic pressures found in many other countries. The Washington Post recently ran articles on the after-school tutoring market in Korea and Hong Kong. During our years in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and in our travels, we met many young adults teaching in the English tutoring business who spoke of the overwhelming workloads that their students experienced.

I picked up today’s Washington Post to find an opinion piece on this topic written by the owner of a Hong Kong test prep tutoring service. It is a timely article as the world academic rankings were just published. The article “China’s Academic Obsession with Testing” is a worthwhile read as the author explains how her students’ lives are so managed, controlled, and focused on taking tests that they are not learning the fundamental skills needed to succeed.

This is old news that has been thoroughly covered in the blogosphere as we work to shift our schools to what we call the “21st-century skills” model. It is helpful to hear in the mainstream press from someone in the test preparation business to say how misguided so many nations and families are. One topic that the author doesn’t cover, though, is that even if tutors were able to help develop the skills of collaboration, communication, problem-solving, etc. that they are still taking away from the everyday learning that takes place after school when students socialize, participate in activities of their choice, have jobs and learn to manage their own lives.

Oh yes, definitely look to take three minutes to watch Sam’s video. 🙂

Parent Newsletters- Structure to Communicate Learning

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Emailing or sending a paper newsletter about classroom events, student learning, parent requests, etc., is a weekly duty for most teachers- especially elementary teachers. Weekly newsletters and consistently updated class Web sites offer parents a portal to see into their child’s classroom. As with any visual communication, structure and design can make a difference in getting one’s message across.

As a PYP school at WIS, we use the Unit of Inquiry planner structure to communicate with our parents. I am enjoying the various constructs that PYP provides our students, teachers, and parents to help build a deeper understanding of the program of studies. The image above is a screenshot of one newsletter sent out by the Grade 1 teachers of a PYP school in Montgomery County, Maryland. They do an excellent job of using PYP language to help parents see what is being covered in the homeroom classroom and those of the special teachers. Notice some key PYP terms: Learning Profile, Unit of Inquiry, Central Idea, and Transdisciplinary skills. Using these terms also helps the students and parents have a common language to describe the learning that is taking place.

Here is a link to the full newsletter. Kudos to the College Gardens Elementary School teachers, as all the grade-level newsletters follow the same structure and form. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether one’s curriculum is PYP or not how and what we communicate to parents to support the home-school partnership.

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Ed Tech Co-Op Podcast Season 2 in Review

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We just wrapped up season 2 of the Ed Tech Co-Op podcast. It was a terrific year of learning and sharing with our resourceful and thoughtful guests. If you have yet to listen to any shows, look at the list of topics and themes we covered below. The season ended with three shows featuring leaders in the field of educational technology as we followed up on our mid-season shows with Peter Papas, Jeff Nugent, and Sara Dexter. So, if you also follow Jeff Utecht, Vinnie Vrotny, or Patty Carver, go to the Ed Tech blog or subscribe via iTunes.

Mark and I are excited to start season 3 in the fall. We will have an exciting announcement to share as we also will introduce a new theme to be covered during the upcoming year.

Here are topics that were covered, whether in individual or series of shows, during this past season:

Pre-service Teacher Preparation
Piloting a 1:1 Tablet Program and Writing Your Own Textbook
Using Evernote for Class Notetaking & Reflections from the Flipped Classroom Conference
Multimedia Essays in Language Arts
Universal Design for Learning
The ISTE Standards for Coaching
STEM

TPACK, Learning Activity Types & Curriculum Review
The International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme

Team-based Instructional Leadership for Concept-focused Math and Science Education
Blended to Virtual Learning in Secondary Schools and in Higher Education
Teaching for Constructivist Learning

Technology Literacy & Hardware Choices

 

Summer Reading, Writing and Sharing

With summer soon upon us, the students and staff of ACDS will continue their learning by participating in the annual summer reading and writing program. Several students will be sharing their reflections this year via personal blogs. Elizabeth Lockwood, our incredible teacher librarian, put the program together. She is building further community through a blog dedicated to sharing book recommendations.

Whether you already have a summer reading and writing program, go through the Reading and Response Journals site to get some new ideas from Elizabeth.

Festival of Learning

Learning should be celebrated and thematic. So how about having a “Festival of Learning” with all the grade levels of one’s school researching the same topic in a week-long learning celebration culminating in a greater community dinner where students share their learning projects?

The Alexandria Country Day School Festival of Learning, led by our librarian, Elizabeth Lockwood, was a wonderful experience this year, especially seeing the older students working with their younger buddies. The theme for the festival this year was endangered species. A new wrinkle to the program was having the Eighth Graders choose to work on one of three projects. The choices were to create artwork around the festival’s theme, work on the newspaper production team to report about the week, or be a member of the video production team in charge of creating a video to educate the community about our Festival of Learning theme.

If this idea of creating a festival of learning interests you and you want to pursue it further, here is how Elizabeth frames the festival’s objective.

The Kindergarten through Seventh Graders used their research to produce books. This project work is directly tied to the English curriculum goal of having students better understand the nature of non-fiction text. The Eighth Grader’s collaborative work on the newspaper and video demonstrated the value of using technology in a team and project-based learning effort. So many skills were used, from organization, planning, communication, teamwork, sound design, etc., and student engagement to make the depth of commitment to the week of learning well worth it.

“The Festival of Learning is a year-long, school-wide exploration of a single topic that celebrates our world, its cultures, diversity, and rich legacies. We can examine a theme in more depth than a single class or grade level curriculum allows. The festival promotes fascinating discovery, interdisciplinary learning, cooperative projects across grades, and involvement from the parents and outside community. The culmination is an intensive “festival” of activities the week before Spring break. Each year’s topic, chosen by the faculty, enriches the curriculum by allowing our school community to explore together an aspect of our world we may not otherwise fully realize or appreciate. We strive to help students appreciate their roles in a larger world beyond the classroom, and to generate excitement for learning.”

To learn more about the activities and projects from the Festival of Learning, look at the posts from our school blog. Just scroll down the page for multiple posts displaying examples of student learning. And here is a link to Elizabeth’s website for the festival from last year when the theme was water.

A School Making the Shift

Second graders designing exhibits for the National Museum of American History, teachers dressing up as endangered species telling their stories as a part of a school-wide thematic festival of learning, and middle schoolers using the arts and multimedia to share their understanding of To Kill A Mockingbird are just a few of the highlighted instructional strategies and assessments used at Alexandria Country Day School.

My school’s blog, Adaptive and Innovative Practices at ACDS, is packed with excellent lesson and unit plan ideas this week. The blog aims to share with our parents, but it is time to share with a broader audience. Take a look!

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test.”

These words describe the goal of the Finnish educational system, as stated by Pasi Stahlberg, who is in the Finnish Ministry of Education. Read more about how the Finnish educational system is so successful in a Smithsonian magazine article that details their techniques.

Another interesting read is Tom Friedman’s revelation that parents are indeed crucial in the education of our children. 🙂 He points to recent “studies” demonstrating that we need better parenting in partnership with the efforts taking place in our schools. I enjoyed the hundreds of comments offering further insights from the article.

 

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Underage Social Networkers

Social NetworkThe Washington Post has a good article reviewing lawmakers’ efforts to pass legislation limiting online companies’ tracking of children’s online behavior. The article goes on to share information about school and parent perspectives in working with their preteens to prevent their use of social networking sites until the allowed age of 13. The author makes the point that the young users of the sites are often not monitored by their parents when they usually would be in other social environments like school, on the playground, playing with friends at home, etc.

At my K-8 school, it is evident how adults provide support and help prevent social issues from expanding. The supportive environment provides students with the skills needed to handle social issues better. One can see how online engagements can quickly erupt into cases of cyberbullying when there are no adults to step in and provide support and guidance.

The article mentions the value of school efforts to teach and empower students to make good decisions in how they use and post information on the Web and the importance of providing parents with educational support materials. This supports ongoing school efforts to develop and implement the Information & Communications Literacies (ICL) curriculum, starting with the youngest students.

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Parenting in Our Digital Age

family tech

I am a real believer in communicating to our school community about how our instructional technologists and librarians are providing the tools and various literacies (i.e., information, media, design, etc.) to help students attain the learning outcomes of the curriculum. Whether it be through blogs, weekly emails, media sites sharing student work or parent coffees, the members of one’s Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) team do need to provide the leadership to share with students, teachers, and parents how the ICL skills make a difference in student learning while also supporting parents as they decide how their children use technology in the home.

I bring up this point as our ICL team, the school counselor, and the middle school principal recently offered a parent coffee on parenting in our digital age. We gave a presentation back in the Fall, but it needed to be more of a shared discussion for our Spring presentation, especially parent-to-parent on Internet use, cell phones, texting, etc. While a part of the discussion should be about technology, parenting and the importance of good family communication should be at the center. 

We are fortunate to have an excellent counselor in Carla Belsher, who, from the start of the year, has provided the insights and resources to empower our parents to communicate better and partner with their children in making decisions about technology and social networking tools.

The coffee was well-attended, and as we hoped for, the parents provided excellent insights from their experiences. The discussion offered parents of younger students valuable real parenting experiences while giving our parents of older children several ideas on how they might work with technology use in their families.

In the Fall, we created a Web site listing multiple resources for parents to gather information. We shared our belief that creating a family technology use plan is one way to provide the structure and guidance for families to educate better and manage how everyone uses technology. The parent resources site also links to an online version of our Fall presentation. While cyberbullying is a topic of concern for our community that is also often in the press, our online presentation connects to the importance of teaching children about privacy and how it is a very different world today, with so many children having an online presence.

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Class Size & the Social Animal: The Diane Rehm Show

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Diane has two terrific interviews and discussions this week about education.

David Brooks shares insights about his new book The Social Animal in an interview that connects to so much of our teaching with our students. He shares his review of scientific, psychological, and sociological studies to stress the importance of understanding emotion and how it interacts with reason. David points out that many of our schools need to work to develop the emotional skills and other habits of mind that our young people need to live healthy lives. Check out the podcast directly from Diane’s site or via iTunes.

Diane connects to the political events in Wisconsin and other states where budget tightening will mean fewer teachers and more students per classroom. She looks into both sides of the discussion about student class size and achievement.

Check out the podcast directly from Diane’s site or via iTunes.

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