Articles Of Interests
Never Mind Those Who’d Do Well Anywhere
In Raehoke, N.C., 48 seniors are in a fast-track program that earns a high school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years — completely free, reports The New York Times. Most programs like these serve affluent, overachieving students as a way to keep them challenged and to give a head start on college work, but the SandHoke Early College High School enrolls kids whose parents lack college degrees. SandHoke is one of 71 “early-college schools” in the state — where high school students attend college courses — specifically designed to eliminate the divide between high school and college for at-risk kids. “Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit that spearheaded this reform. Significantly, North Carolina’s early-college high school students are performing slightly better than their college classmates. This model is now spreading in California, New York, Texas, and elsewhere, and is seen as a promising approach to reducing the high school dropout rate and increasing the number of degree holders. Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/education/08school.html?ref=education.
Play, Then Eat: Shift May Bring Gains at School
Can something as simple as the timing of recess make a difference in a child’s health and behavior? At the advice of experts, some schools are sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch, which appears to have led to positive changes in both cafeteria and classroom. Read more about pilot studies and results at
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/play-then-eat-shift-may-bring-gains-at-school/?8dpc.
Building Language Skills by Asking the Right Questions
In our program, Language is the Key we encourage adults to ask children questions in order to get them talking, and learning language. Questioning is a research-based, language-building strategy. Still, some questions elicit more language than others. Questions can be “conversation starters” or “conversation stallers.” Questions are more likely to be “conversation starters” when the question is about something the child is interested in and when the adult really wants to hear the child’s answer. But questions can be “conversation stallers” when they are just test questions that the adult clearly already knows the answer to (for example, “What color is this?”). You can also stall a conversation when you ask questions that don’t relate to what the child is interested in. Read more for some ideas from the Language is the Key program that will help you use questions to get young children talking and using language. Read more at http://www.walearning.com/articles/the-art-of-asking-questions/.
Principals Link Recess to Academic Achievement
When most people talk about how to improve education, they tend to focus only on what happens in the classroom. But elementary principals, who are the key instructional leaders in the learning process, report in a new Gallup poll that the most unexpected opportunity to boost learning may exist on the playground at recess. The first-of its-kind survey of almost 2,000 principals nationwide, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) and Playworks, revealed enthusiastic support for recess among principals, who see it benefiting kids both in the classroom and in life. Read more at http://www.convergemag.com/policy/Principals-Link-Recess-to-Academic-Achievement.html?elq=87daa1d2327a4d28a5adda69318df9c7.
Our Future Success Demands New Systems of Education
A new book by Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University proposes a clear set of policies that can be used to create high-quality and equitable schools. In The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, Darling-Hammond bases her recommendations on the successes of effective school systems in the U.S. and abroad, and looks at the roots of our modern education system and how skills required for our 21st-century global economy cannot be learned in traditional education systems. Darling-Hammond identifies an “opportunity gap” that has evolved as new kinds of learning have become necessary — a gap that leaves low-income students, students of color, and English language learners without the same access as others to qualified teachers, high-quality curricula, and well-resourced classrooms. “Once again, Darling-Hammond brings clarity to complexity, thoughtful analysis to politically charged issues, and sound policy recommendations to the hysteria of what to do to save America’s public schools,” says advance reviewer Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In this volume, the macro meets the micro on terms that lets all democratically-minded citizens breathe a sigh of relief.” For more information refer to http://www.srnleads.org/resources/publications/flatworld.html.
Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does – and Does Not – Say
This article summarizes the key findings of the reviews of the research on educating English learners by the National Literacy Panel (NLP) and the Center for Research on Diversity, Education, and Excellence (CREDE). The author first provides demographic data on English learners and charts their growth in population, especially in the Midwest and upper South. He then supplies statistics on language background and information about the students’ instructional environments. Despite the diversity of English learners’ identities and experiences, they share one important common factor: a tendency towards low academic achievement. View this article at http://www.schoolsmovingup.net/cs/smu/view/rs/18044.
Dr. Temple Grandin HBO Premier
HBO movie premier coming in February on the life of Dr. Temple Grandin. “Autism gave her a vision. She gave it a voice.” Claire Danes is the actress who portrays Temple Grandin. The following URL, http://tinyurl.com/yc2gsbx, will take you to the movie trailers for the HBO movie as well as information for the Future Horizons conferences in 2010. Temple Grandin will be a speaker at a number of the Future Horizons conferences this year.
Important Changes in Administration of FTCE and FELE Examinations
Paper based administration will no longer being offered and college based testing sites are being phased out. Testing will be computer based and conducted at Pearson VUE professional testing sites around the state. This will allow a wider range of times and days available for scheduling and quicker turnaround of scores. Please visit the website at http://www.fl.nesinc.com/ for more current updates.
Building New Theories about the Preschool Brain
For much of the past century, educators and scientists believed that children could not learn math before the age of five because their brains simply were not ready, according to The New York Times. Recent research has overturned this assumption, along with other conventional wisdom about the acquisition of geometry, reading, language, and self-control skills in class. The findings from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts. Teaching of basic academic skills, once based in tradition and guesswork, is now giving way to approaches based on cognitive science. In several cities including Boston, Washington, D.C., and Nashville, schools are experimenting with curricula to cultivate math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers are using techniques developed by brain scientists to help children overcome dyslexia. And schools in a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class. “Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.” Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/health/research/21brain.html?_r=1&em.
Superintendent Leadership: Promoting General and Special Education Collaboration
The National Association of State Directors’ (NASDSE) recent policy brief examines the role of the superintendent in promoting, developing, and sustaining a culture of collaboration between general and special educators throughout the LEA. Selected superintendents were asked to describe their rationale for advancing a culture of collaboration, the strategies they implemented, the challenges they faced in doing so, and their recommendations to other superintendents. NASDSE reported that all the superintendents interviewed for this document discussed how the RTI model has spurred, complemented, or enhanced the districts’ efforts to develop a culture of collaboration between general and special education. The document goes on to offer specific recommendations to district leaders and states that professional learning communities (PLCs), RTI, and co-teaching are strategies that demonstrate promise in raising student achievement and increasing general and special education collaboration. Project Forum at NASDSE completed this document as part of its cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). It can be accessed at http://projectforum.org/docs/SuperintendentLeadership-PromotingGeneralandSpEdCollaboration.pdf.
