Month: June 2019

GLOBAL
Education Week  Three Big Questions on Artificial Intelligence and Schools   Innova Schools in Lima, Peru are using IBM’s Watson to scan resumes for teacher hiring, he said. “They discovered that credentials on a resume can’t tell them how well a teacher will do in their environment,” he said. But they’ve trained Watson to spot those qualities.

New York Times.  [YAKAWLANG, Afghanistan]  A School With No Heat or Computers but Many College-Bound Students. Mostly Girls.   The fourth-grade math teacher, Ms. Joya, who is 28, did not begin school herself until the Taliban fell when she was 11; she could not read or write, and her only schooling had been sewing class. 

Quartz. Japan is trying really hard to persuade women to start having babies again   The government has said it needs to create 320,000 new public day care slots by 2021, which will mean hiring and training 77,000 more teachers. Filling these slots with highly-educated early childhood caregivers won’t be easy.

UNITED STATES
CBS News. Two-thirds of American employees regret their college degrees   At least one sector of employment bucked the trend: Teachers and other professionals in education, which isn’t typically a high-paying profession, were the second-least likely, after engineering grads, to have any regrets tied to their major, with 37% saying they had no regrets.

Chronicle of Higher Education.  What You Told Us About the Challenges of Training Grad Students to Teach   Training, he wrote, improves performance. But becoming a good teacher also requires “educational and professional formation” that improves the mind. Those two ideas, he said, might be combined into teacher preparation.

Clarion Ledger. Over 240 Jackson Public School District teachers’ licenses affected by policy  MDE allows non-certified teachers to apply for a temporary one-year license with renewal contingent upon meeting certain requirements. To renew the license for a second year, license holders have to show proof of enrollment in an alternate route program or that they’ve passed a content test called the Praxis.

Education Week.
1) A District Knew It Was Failing Some Students. How It’s Using Parents to Help   It also collaborated with the teacher’s union to include language in its most recent contract that will give some protections against layoffs for teachers who are graduates of the district’s local teacher-recruitment program, who tend to be from more diverse backgrounds.
2) Young Teachers May Be ‘Digital Natives’ But Need Support in Using Tech, Studies Find   One study, by Kristin Weber, a professor at Edinboro University in northwestern Pennsylvania, found that students set to teach elementary school were less confident that they knew how to use tech in the classroom when they finished their student teaching than before they began. 

Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy [David Steiner, Dir.]. Providence Public School District: A Review   ·Inadequate preparation and support for teaching and learning. Members were very clear that “individual teachers are heroic,” but that many are “cynical and worn down.” They acknowledged that the social context of Providence has changed, and that teachers are not prepared.

KQED. How Preschool Teachers Leverage Student Curiosity into Early STEM Exploration   At Educare New Orleans preschool teachers have been trained to teach STEM ideas through play. 

New York Times. Year-End Roundup, 2018-19: All Our Lesson Plans, All in One Place

Romper.  The Best Time To Teach Baby A Second Language Is Earlier Than You Think  When it comes to the best time to teach your baby a second language, Erika Levy, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Teachers College, Columbia University says, “The earlier the better! Even within the first 6 months of life, babies become keenly aware of the speech sounds in the languages that surround them.”

The74. The Mentor: One Year, Two Teachers and a Quest in the Bronx to Empower Educators and Students to Think for Themselves  Mentoring can’t fix everything, and it’s only one part of a comprehensive induction program to support new teachers, researchers argue. But as teacher walkouts across the country this past year show, teachers are feeling drained and demanding support.

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED Office of Higher Education.  June Newsletter
1) New York State teacher certification examinations (NYSTCE) safety nets expiring. Critical information for your candidates
2) Request for proposals for a speech-language and bilingual speech-language personnel development center

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. Stringer calls for paid teacher residencies — the latest piece of a burgeoning education platform as he eyes a run for mayor  On Monday, Comptroller Scott Stringer released a proposal that he hopes will significantly reduce that rate by funding year-long residencies, arguing that training teachers more like doctors could help save the city money, attract a more diverse teaching force, and fill shortages in hard-to-staff subjects and schools.  

New York City Comptroller. Teacher Residencies: Supporting the Next Generation of Teachers and Students. Another successful collaboration between the City and higher education can be seen at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Teaching Residents at Teachers College (TR@TC) is a robust teaching residency that prepares participants through a year-long, paid residency. As of 2017, the program reported retention rates of 94 percent among program graduates.

New York Post.
1) City teachers fleeing New York at an alarming rate: report   To better train teachers, Stringer is calling on the Education Department to adopt a “residency” program that would offer aspiring instructors a $30,000 stipend to work in a city school during their final year of graduate school.
2) Education nonprofit moves into historical Cunard Building   This is just what the city doctor ordered: More space for training teachers. The Relay Graduate School of Education is opening downtown this week in larger space at the historical Cunard Building at 25 Broadway.

New York Times. The Late Bloomer: Learning About the Birds and Bees in College: My Orthodox Jewish education skipped sex ed, and I didn’t have “The Talk” until I was 24.   The person who was supposed to be teaching us 10th grade science was untrained as an educator, teaching until he found a full-time job as a computer programmer.

Teachers College. Class Action: The case for empowering our teachers   In the following three-part special report, you’ll meet Teachers College alumni nationwide who are applying their creativity, resilience and TC preparation toward engaging students as citizens in the making. You’ll also meet TC faculty and alumni in school leadership positions with ideas for restoring a noble profession to the standing it deserves.

GLOBAL
Association Montessori Internationale (AMI).  Training of Trainers Programme 2019 [multiple venues and formats]

Pursuit/Univ. of Melbourne. What Does A Great Teacher Look Like?: Teachers with a strong belief in their own ability to ‘get the job done’ have the biggest impact on a student’s learning   Our previous research (which was launched by former Federal education minister Simon Birmingham last year) found that this practice of teaching should be considered separately from teacher quality, or the personal traits of teachers that contribute to effective teaching. These traits also have an independent impact on student, teacher and school outcomes.

The Centre for Education and International Development (CEID). Colloquium on Teacher Education in sub- Saharan Africa [25 June, Univ. of London]

Univ. of Chicago/Delhi. Reimagining Teacher Training in India Conference Report

UNITED STATES
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). May Federal Update Webinar Recording

Association of Teacher Educators (ATE). Summer Induction Symposium For New Education Professors [July 27, Burlington, VT]

Central Michigan University. Teacher ed grows in many ways: Program adds students, expands support for current and future educators

Daily Herald. Career Pathways program helped Elk Grove senior thrive   Samantha Pelaez, a Harper College Promise Scholar, is excited for her future as a teacher, a career which she explored while taking part in District 214’s Career Pathways program.

EdWeek.
1) A Gap in Teacher Training: Working With Students Who Have Concussions   A growing number of children have experienced a brain injury—yet most teachers have never learned in preparation or professional development how to work with them.
2) Stop Trying to Standardize Your Students’ Language [commentary]  As educators, we’re especially attuned to the labeling and categorization of language. With honest intentions, we take up what we’re taught in our teacher preparation: that language can be standardized.
3) Want Teachers to Motivate Their Students? Teach Them How to Do It   A study released in May by the Mindset Scholars Network, a collaborative of researchers who study student motivation, found most teacher education programs nationwide do not include explicit training for teachers on the science of how to motivate students.

Honolulu Civil Beat. Students Thrived At This Maui School In Territorial Hawaii   A widely known “best practice” was the Columbia University Teachers College mission of “cultural understanding as an essential element of teaching and learning” in New York City — where Lower East Side immigrants spoke German, Italian and Yiddish.

Learning Policy Institute. EdPrepLab Will Help Educators Develop the Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions to Support All Students in Learning Deeply   Learning Policy Institute and Bank Street Graduate School of Education announced the launch of Educator Preparation Laboratory (EdPrepLab), an initiative to help educator preparation programs ensure that new teachers and leaders are able to provide k-12 students with education that helps them develop skills like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and being able to apply knowledge in a range of contexts.

NYTimes.
1) Inside the Elementary School Where Drug Addiction Sets the Curriculum
2) What Will Teacher Raises Buy Students? [OpEd by M. Kraft, Brown Univ.] Data collected by the ACT organization show that high school students most commonly cited low pay as a reason for not being interested in teaching… The second most commonly cited reason high school students gave for not being interested in becoming teachers is the job’s lack of career development opportunities.

The Week. America’s teacher shortage  Studies have found both that under-prepared teachers are more likely to leave the profession and that some alternative pathways into teaching can produce less effective educators, as compared to traditional teaching education programs.

Tulsa World. After years of debilitating teacher shortages, some districts are seeing progress in hiring, retention  A recent career fair attracted more than 180 prospective teachers. Most were hired by the district, Kerns said. She’s confident Broken Arrow will start the school year with all positions filled in every area except special education, which continues to be an area of need across the state.

UDDaily.  Training Delaware’s Teachers  …94% of undergraduates majoring in elementary teacher education (ETE) at the University of Delaware are employed as elementary, middle school or special education teachers after graduation. In addition to traditional classroom learning, ETE majors spend much of their degree program engaged in extensive field experiences in real-world educational settings—teaching, tutoring and mentoring in local schools and community centers.

NEW YORK STATE
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Hiring teachers of color is an investment in student success, group says   Educators for Excellence has since asked the State Education Department to double the funding for My Brother’s Keeper Teacher Opportunity Corps — a state grant program that partners with teacher preparation programs to recruit, train and support new teachers of color entering the profession – to $7 million.

NYSED.
1) Public comment period is open on proposed regulatory changes that would require teacher preparation programs in certain subject areas to dedicate at least 3 semester hours to language acquisition & literacy development of English language learners.Please email comments to [email protected]by June 21.
2) State Education Department Announces Second Class of My Brother’s Keeper Fellows   Also since 2016, NYSED … awarded grants to 16 colleges and universities to help them bolster the retention of highly qualified individuals who value equity and reflect the diversity inside and outside of our classrooms, particularly in high-need schools with recurrent teacher shortages. 

NEW YORK CITY
Brooklyn Reporter. Campaign for Children holds City Hall rally for pre-K funding parity   Council Speaker Corey Johnson admitted during the rally, which was organized by Campaign for Children, that a DOE teacher with a Master’s degree who’s been in the system for eight years earns about $85,000 a year, while teachers with the same qualifications teaching at a CBO earn around $49,000 annually.

NYDailyNews. Manhattan memorial to recall forward-thinking Harlem-born educator Irving Hamer Jr.   Raised in central Harlem, the native New Yorker held a number of influential public education positions including deputy commissioner of the state Education Department and Manhattan representative to the city Board of Education… In the classroom, Hamer was a professor of education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Florida International University Center for Urban Education and Innovation and the University of Memphis.

NYTimes. Velvel Pasternak, Preserver of Hasidic Music, Is Dead at 85   He studied at Juilliard and received a master’s degree in music education from Teachers College at Columbia University…Mr. Pasternak took a sabbatical from teaching at local day schools and flew with his family to Israel, where he visited Hasidic enclaves… 

Teachers College.
1) Confessions of an Active Learner: Amity Buxton (Ed.D.’62, M.A.’52) has supported teachers as learners   Buxton was hired to train student teachers in the combined district through a state-funded program administered by San Francisco State University. With racial tensions running high (including classroom takeovers by the Black Panthers), the challenges of equitably teaching and measuring student outcomes might have proven insurmountable had not Buxton stressed assessing each child’s work on an individual basis and encouraged teachers to act as designers of curriculum and agents of individualized instruction.
2) Teaching Residents at Teachers College. TR@TC June Newsletter