Month: November 2017

GLOBAL
Education International. Cease funding Bridge International Academies, says British parliamentary committee Bridge teachers use a tablet pre-loaded with lesson plans to teach classes aligned with the national curriculum of each country, ensuring consistency of learning across classrooms.

The Open University. Teacher Education in sub-Saharan Africa: Reach and teach thousands of teachers and children

Transforming Teacher Education and Learning. [Ghana] 1st Challenge Fund End of Project Learning Event: Told in tweets!

 

UNITED STATES
Education Post. It’s Not Enough to Know the Content, Teachers Also Need to Know the Context of Their Students’ Lives …we, as teacher educators, become students and members of the context, ourselves. We teach within communities, not just classrooms, and give teacher candidates opportunities to learn alongside community members, inside community-based organizations.

Education Week.
1) Here Are Six Strategies for States to Build Stronger Teacher Pipelines 4. Bring more diversity to the teaching workforce… CCSSO points to grow-your-own programs to prepare community members or those already working in the school, like paraprofessionals, to become teachers. And some states and universities have created residencies that better support prospective teachers—those have been shown to increase diversity and lead to better retention rates.
2) Virginia Becomes First State to Require Computer Science Instruction It’s notoriously hard to tell what, specifically, candidates are learning in their preparation programs, but this data does suggest that the teaching force will need some ongoing training in order to turn the SOLs into good teaching.

edTPA/AACTE. State Policy Currently there are 764 Educator Preparation Programs in 40 states and the District of Columbia participating in edTPA. 17 states now have policies in place requiring a state-approved performance assessment as part of program completion or for state licensure and/or state program accreditation/review. 

Network for Public Education. Charters and Consequences: An investigative Series …we support all legislation and regulation that will make charters better learning environments for students and more accountable to the taxpayers who fund them… A rejection of all ALEC legislation regarding charter schools that advocates for less transparency, less accountability, and the removal of requirements for teacher certification.

NYTimes.
1) Most Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong High school textbooks are particularly bad about stating absolutes because these materials “teach history” by giving students facts to memorize even when the details may be unclear…
2) Questioning Evolution: The Push to Change Science Class A new generation, he said, is being taught that “the scientific method and the scientific community is not to be trusted.”

Public History Weekly. Focusing on Democracy: A Teacher Educator’s View

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED. New York State My Brother’s Keeper Community Network Reaches Significant Milestone with More Than 20 Member Communities Across New York State NYSED awarded $3 million in Teacher Opportunity Corps II (TOC) grants to increase the participation rate of historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals in teaching careers.

 

NEW YORK CITY
Inside HigherEd. CUNY Chancellor Will Step Down

NYTimes. Head of City University Will Step Down

U.S. News and World Report. Innovating Education: Eva Moskowitz, the founder of Success Academy Charter Schools, is a polarizing figure but she says her way works. But if you compare our writing to the writing of the most affluent kids, there is a difference and it’s a struggle for us. It also has to do with a teacher shortage. If you look at who works at elite private schools or those at affluent urban schools, those teachers tend to be very educated themselves.

 

 

GLOBAL
Center for Education Innovations. Luminos Fund’s Speed School [Ethiopia] We hire our teachers from the community as well and train them in the Speed School pedagogy.

EdWeek. New Data Detail Effect of Inclusion on Teaching Time  Data from a survey of educators in more than three dozen countries and regions, … the pace of inclusion has outpaced the number of teachers trained to teach students with special education needs.

Helsinki Times. Researcher: Finland’s basic education in state of confusion after reforms  Teachers have not been offered enough training opportunities to help them adapt to the emphasis placed on digital learning in the new core curriculum…

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE. How Community Partnerships Can Combat the Teacher Shortages The new video educates viewers on how university, school, and community partnerships aid in creating a robust pipeline and conditions critical to recruiting and retaining teachers.

Deans for Impact. Learning about the wondrous American experiment  And we hope those of you in the field of teacher preparation will consider working alongside us so that we can strengthen teaching, strengthen the opportunities for the next generation of students, and in so doing strengthen the wondrous experiment that is the United States of America.

EdWeek.
1) Educating for a Digital Future: Thoughts on Curriculum [M. Tucker blog]  Seeing this emerging picture, educators could prepare to sort our young people into two bins,  a small one big enough for the super rich, their professional retainers and their children, who would need or would be in a position to demand a fine education, and all the rest, who, as ‘surplus labor’ live on the dole, who would need and could afford, very little education.
2) Give Teachers a Voice in Education Reform: Four principles for a more robust public education system
3) Groups Share Resources to Help Teachers Fight Fake News in Class
4) Holcomb’s 2018 education goals skip some of Pence’s most controversial priorities  Holcomb’s 2018 agenda includes: Requiring every Indiana school to offer at least one computer science class by 2021, as well as training for teachers in computer science… Broadening teacher licensure requirements for people interested in teaching career and technical education classes.
5) Learning About Training Needs of Online Teachers  …only a handful of states required training or professional development for online teachers in 2012, even though a large body of research demonstrates the importance of high-quality teaching for student learning…

National Education Policy Center. Education Interview of the Month: Greg Smith Interviews Ken Zeichner on Independent Teacher Prep Programs

New York Times. House G.O.P. Tax Writers Take Aim at College Tuition Benefits  … many doctoral students would see huge tax increases, since the tuition that universities waive for them in exchange for working on campus as researchers and teaching assistants would be deemed taxable income. At expensive research universities like Stanford and Harvard, the new tax bills could swamp graduate-student stipends.

nprEd. Here’s How The New Tax Plan Could Hurt Graduate Students

 

NEW YORK STATE
City and State New York. The charter school standoff, explained The charter schools committee of the SUNY board of trustees recently approved a controversial new plan to revise teacher certification requirements for charter schools that it oversees.

Legislature.
1) A.3676 (Glick)/S.2487 (LaVall) Passed Senate and Assembly, Delivered to Governor Relates to admission requirements for graduate-level teacher and educational leader programs for certified teachers already holding a graduate degree
2) Senate Bill S6791 Introduced June 18, In Senate Rules Committee  An act to amend the education law, in relation to requiring persons applying for a certificate or license to be a teacher to receive a passing score on the academic literacy skills test and the teacher performance assessment

New York State Education Department.
DASA Task Force  The New York State Education Department received a recommendation from the Legislature that the Dignity for All Students Act (Dignity Act) regulation be amended and syllabus changed so that the training becomes a three-credit course that places the social patterns of harassment, bullying, and discrimination in an appropriate context of multicultural education. In response, the Commissioner reconvened the DASA Task Force to examine the amount of training and content of the DASA curriculum.

NYSED Regents Meeting  November 2017 agenda
1) State Education Department Proposes Regulation Changes to Expand Opportunities To Obtain A Transitional G Teaching Certification Beyond STEM Areas
2)  Update on the edTPA Standard Setting Committee and Amendment to §80-1.5 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education to Extend the edTPA Safety Net and Revise the Eligibility Criteria for the Multiple Measures Review Process

NYS Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching. November 2017 meeting [agenda]

UPDATE: Public Debate on SUNY Charter Institute Certification Policy
NYT Editorial – The Best Charter Schools Deserve More Leeway on Hiring, Nov. 3, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/opinion/charter-schools-hiring.html

Responses to NYT Nov. 3^rd editorial
a) From Susan H. Fuhrman, President, Teachers College, Columbia University
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/opinion/charter-school-teachers.html

b) From Betty Rosa, Chancellor of the NYS Board of Regents
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/opinion/new-york-state-regents-teaching.html

http://cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/education/charter-school-teacher-certification-controversy-regents-chancellor-betty-rosa.html#.Wg78rLQ-fBK

c) From Jason Zwara, policy manager for Northeast Charter Schools Network
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/opinion/guest-column/2017/11/11/stop-fighting-charter-schools-learn/107524150/

d) From Alan Singer, Hofstra Univ. teacher educator
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5a043a3ce4b0c7511e1b3a27

e) NY Post OpEd in support of charter schools
http://nypost.com/2017/11/10/two-telling-ways-to-address-a-teacher-shortage/

 

NEW YORK CITY
ABC Eyewitness News. NYC program inspires youth to pursue careers in education  “I am actually on a mission not just in this school, I have asked all high schools in the city to have future teachers’ clubs in their high schools,” Chancellor Carmen Farina said.

EdTech. VR Gives Student-Teachers a Taste of the Classroom  A University at Buffalo virtual reality training program lets educators deepen their pre-service experiences.

Spectrum News. Nicola Clarke: Math teacher divides her time to help multiply success of others  In addition to teaching full-time in the program, she is a mother to four girls and a full-time student, a double major in math and education at Hunter College. 

WNYC. As City Recruits Male Teachers of Color, Retention Challenges Persist  …new male teachers of color in the NYC Men Teach program. Since 2015, the initiative added 900 men of color into the teacher “pipeline,” which includes college students who have expressed a commitment to becoming teachers, according to a spokeswoman at the Department of Education. 

GLOBAL
Education International. Yemen’s education crisis deepens as unpaid teachers continue to strike  Making matters worse, the government is now asking for unqualified volunteers to fill in for the striking teachers. At least two million children are not in school.

Hechinger Report. OPINION: Known for its intense testing pressure, top-performing South Korea dials it back [by TC Prof. T. Hatch] …professional development providers and teacher education institutions are focusing on helping teachers develop new instructional methods and career-related activities…

LGiU Scotland. Training about mental health for teachers is one part of the puzzle  The Scottish Association for Mental Health recently surveyed over 3,000 school staff and found that two thirds of teachers (66%) felt they lacked training in mental health to carry out their job properly, with only 12 per cent saying they had received enough training in issues such as self-harming and eating disorders.

TC Record Book Review. Enhancing Teacher Professionalism: Global Lessons From High-Performing Education Systems by L. Darling-Hammond; A. L. Goodwin, K. Hammerness, K. Zeichner, et al., 2017

Washington Post. Early childhood education expert: I saw a brilliant way to teach kids. Unfortunately it wasn’t in the United States.  The Nova Scotia Framework (similar to those of other Canadian provinces) was written by a broad network of early childhood professionals. These educators know how young children develop and learn, and they share common principles and values about child development.

UNITED STATES
AACTE. Urge Congress to Pass a Budget Deal and Increase Education Funding

Better Life Lab. There’s a Stigma Around Men Teaching Young Kids. Here’s How We Change It.  … this could be a crucial opportunity to encourage more men to enter the important field of early childhood education, particularly since the United States lags behind most other industrialized countries in access to early education.

Education Week.
1) This Group Wants to Be the Match.com of Teacher Shortages in California  The center will also guide interested people—whether high school students, college students, or people looking to switch careers—through the process of training and certification via a “vortal” (vertical digital portal).
2) Want to Protect Money for Teachers in Trump’s Washington? Good Luck.  The House spending proposal for education for the next budget year eliminates about $2 billion in Title II funding that goes towards teacher training and a reduction in class sizes. 

Edutopia. What Can We Do About Teacher Turnover? Controlling for other factors, three major things emerged as predictors of turnover: teacher preparation, school leadership, and compensation.

Hechinger Report.
1) Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not: U.S. education system is failing students with special needs.  Yet general education teachers rarely have much training in special education. Few teacher education programs require more than one class on students with disabilities. Meanwhile, special education teachers have to balance completing extensive federal paperwork with planning lessons and teaching classes.
2) How preschool teachers feel about science matters, new research finds  Most Head Start teachers hold a bachelors degree and that held true for Gerde’s sample but she and her team found previous education had no effect on the amount of science instruction teachers offered.

HuffPost. Transforming Teacher Preparation: How States are Leading the Way

Teaching Tolerance. Presenting Teaching Tolerance’s Digital Literacy Framework The need for digital literacy is acute and vital in today’s world. Our new initiative can help prepare students to navigate this world.

U.S. News and World Report. Best Graduate Schools of Education 2018

Washington Post.
1) A quarter of the schools Betsy DeVos has visited are private  DeVos proposed drastic cuts in money for after-school programs, career and technical education, and teacher preparation in favor of dedicating $400 million to expand charter schools and private school vouchers and more than $1 billion to push states to adopt policies friendly to school choice.
2) The real reasons so many young people can’t write well today — by an English teacher  The overall decline in student writing ability cannot be attributed to one cause. Recent studies have shown that many teachers are ill-prepared to teach writing when they enter the classroom.

NEW YORK STATE
HuffPost. Times Editorial Hypes Charter Schools  [Rebuttal to NYTimes editorial below] But the real reason charter networks can’t fill positions is because of high teacher turnover. I know that, because I read it in the New York Times. Charter networks treat teachers as interchangeable parts that can be plugged into classrooms where they follow scripts and can be repeatedly replaced by other untrained personnel.

NYSED. Regents Meeting for November 2017 [agenda]  Update on the edTPA Standard Setting Committee and Amendment to §80-1.5 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education to Extend the edTPA Safety Net and Revise the Eligibility Criteria for the Multiple Measures Review Process

NYTimes.
1) The Best Charter Schools Deserve More Leeway on Hiring [Times Editorial Board] The national scope of this problem was documented a decade ago in a devastating report by Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, who criticized universities for using teacher-training programs with low or no standards as cash cows…But what’s beyond doubt is that the state certification process is failing to provide strong teachers in sufficient numbers to fill the demand.
2) New York State Regents on Teaching [Rebuttal to Times Editorial Board]  Relying on a decade-old study and research by an organization with a clear political agenda, you buy into the flawed notion that rigorous teacher training programs, including those offered by SUNY and CUNY colleges, don’t result in better qualified teachers.

Poughkeepsie Journal. Dutchess teaching workforce lacks diversity: Report  The state should “improve the educator preparation pipeline, strengthen supports for educators of color, and make schools more inclusive environments in order to better serve our students and educators.”

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat.
1) What I learned about the limits of school choice in New York City from a mother whose child uses a wheelchair  Teachers should learn to include children with different abilities in their classrooms. Such a commitment means recognizing the value of inclusivity — not viewing accessibility as something ADA says you must do.
2) Why do some New York City schools get to choose their students? Here’s the case for and against ‘screening.’  …there’s a more practical reason to advocate for screening, said Samuel Abrams, a researcher at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Selective schools are a way to keep middle-class families worried about the quality of the average public school from opting into private school or decamping to the suburbs.

Teachers College.
1) CRACKING THE CODE: Teaching STEM for Citizenship in the 21st Century [Nov. 18, 9am-5pm]
2) Making a Federal Case: Michael Rebell and his students hope to convince the Supreme Court that education is a Constitutional right  Teachers no longer receive preparation in leading discussions of controversial topics and are often expressly barred from doing so.
3) Mitigating the Misreading of Boys of Color in Schools  This event is intended to ignite discussion on how educators can work with Black and Brown males in high schools to reimagine the educational landscape.  [Dec. 9, 10am-1pm]
4) State of the College 2017  Felicia Moore Mensah received the 2017 Outstanding Science Teacher Educator of the Year Award from the Association of Science Teacher Education… Susan Recchia’s article on “Preparing Early Childhood Professionals for Relationship-Based Work with Infants” received the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education Distinguished Article award.

GLOBAL
The Guardian. Your child’s teacher could soon be an undergraduate on £3.50 an hour  Fifteen years ago when Teach First began, the training programme that carefully selected graduates to train on the job, the teaching unions went ballistic because children were to be taught by teachers who had degrees but had not yet completed their teacher training. Now parents in England could find their child’s teacher is a first-year undergraduate on terrifyingly low wages.

International Society for Music Education. The Music Educator and Policy: Bystander or Participant?  Literature on collaborative practice, teacher leaders, school/community-level activism, induction and teacher education are pointing out how ineffectual and disempowering traditional models of policy action have been… Places as distinct as Finland, Brazil or the United States are seeing the pendulum shift back, away from high centralisation and enforcement of draconian accountability models.

TES. Every teacher must be trained in mental health first aid, academy chain says

UNITED STATES
AACTE.
1) Federal Updates Webinars for October & November
2) One Size Does Not Fit All: What It Means to Serve All Learners  We cannot assume that teacher candidates are aware of this need for flexibility, nor can we expect it to resonate after one course or one quarter or semester. Instead, schools of education must infuse these concepts throughout curricular and cocurricular experiences and course content.

Center for American Progress (CAP). The Progressive Case for Charter Schools  Several high-quality networks, such as High Tech High, KIPP, and Uncommon Schools, are pioneering an effort to recruit and train alumni interested in becoming teachers. [rebuttal below from Truthout]

Chalkbeat. Hey, we heard you. You had a lot of questions about TNReady. We found answers.  The model itself is sophisticated and complex to be as fair and nuanced as possible for each teacher’s situation, and we are working with our educator preparation providers as well as district leaders to provide more training on specifically how the model calculates scores.

Deans for Impact. Building Blocks [Modeling, Practice, Feedback, Alignment; digital public. based on 18 teacher prep programs in 13 states]

edTPA/AACTE. Educative Assessment and Meaningful Support: 2016 edTPA Administrative Report The disproportionate representation of White candidates and the relative small sample sizes of other groups must be considered when making comparisons or generalizations to other samples or to the general population of teacher candidates. [p. 30]

EdWeek. Rival Teacher-Prep Accreditation Group to Emphasize ‘Multiple Approaches’  The approach would differ significantly from the process used by CAEP, which is more prescriptive and requires programs to collect data on teachers after they graduate and enter the field, among meeting other standards.

Equity Mathematics Education. The Attack on Equity Mathematics Education Scholars and the #IStandWithRochelle Movement, So Far

Hechinger Report. Mississippi schools use online resources, technology to expand course offerings  The Global Teaching Project, an initiative aimed at providing high-quality content to promising students, and the Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access have launched a three-year pilot program to bring college-level AP courses to schools that lack certified teachers and course offerings.

Inside Higher Ed.
1) Free Community College Picks Up Steam  “The best part of free college is that it has the potential to have this big marketing impact,” said Judy Scott Clayton, an associate professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
2) Green Light for Competency-Based Teacher Ed  Advocates for competency-based learning, and for new approaches to teacher education, can chalk up another victory: the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education approved the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning’s application to become a degree-granting graduate institution.

Inside Philanthropy. Millions In Grants Have Gone to Teacher Preparation. What’s Needed Now?

Mother Jones. Inside Silicon Valley’s Big-Money Push to Remake American Education  “Learning is such a social activity, but tech-driven classrooms are really quiet,” says Riley, who now runs Deans for Impact, a nonprofit he founded to improve teacher training. 

NYTimes.
1) A Reporter Returns to Ohio to Discuss the Challenges of Teaching Climate Change  Ohio University in Athens has invited me to join Mr. Sutter, some of his current and former students, and professors from the science education, environmental studies and journalism schools to join a panel discussion on this sometimes-fraught topic.
2) Improving Your ‘News Diet’: A Three-Step Lesson Plan for Teenagers and Teachers

The Atlantic. The Crisis Facing America’s Preschool Teachers  Efforts to fill centers with better qualified early-childhood workers are threatening the jobs of those who can’t afford to get their college degree, and some states are turning to apprenticeships to solve both problems at once.  

Truthout. There Is No “Progressive Case” for Charter Schools  That CAP authors choose to spotlight Teach for America as an “exemplary” practitioner of teacher recruitment is laughable. While the organization has of late gotten some notoriety for recruiting higher percentages of black and Latino teachers, a national study of TFA found more than half of TFA recruits placed in low-income schools leave after two years, and by their fifth year, only 14.8 percent continue to teach in the same low-income schools they were originally assigned to. [rebuttal to CAP piece]

UW College of Ed. Doctoral student’s mission: Training the great teachers of tomorrow  After connecting with her adviser, Boeing Professor of Teacher Education Ken Zeichner, Wang started to explore various topics for her research…“The problem is that policymakers create policies that are not aligned with educational research,”…

NEW YORK STATE
Hechinger Report. VIDEO: Using the Black Lives Matter movement to train white teachers  In Rochester, educators are trying to close the achievement gap with anti-racist education

NEW YORK CITY
Politico New York. A charter school models how the city can educate autistic children  KIPP NYC has added new supports for special education students, including hiring more special education certified teachers and more training for teachers to work with students with special needs.

Teachers College.
1) CRACKING THE CODE SYMPOSIUM: Teaching STEM for Citizenship in the 21st Century  [9a-5p Nov. 18]
2) Reimagining Education, Online: Support from the Rauch Foundation  The Rauch Foundation has given Teachers College a $25,000 grant to develop curriculum for a new on-line advanced certificate program in racially inclusive education…unique connection between topics such as racial literacy, culturally relevant pedagogy, and the larger context of policy, history, race and segregation,” says Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology & Education, co-recipient with Detra Price-Dennis, Assistant Professor of Elementary & Inclusive Education, of the Rauch Foundation grant.