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I’m still not sure how I feel about the concept of the flipped classroom … or at least, its typical implementation. My major concern is the assumptions made about students’ time. If a student is taken seven courses, and all seven students decide to “flip,” that student could end up with nearly seven additional hours of work at home. No one should have to work a 14-hour day. I realize that’s likely the extreme scenario, but it’s not impossible. And even a more-likely addition of three hours is still asking too much.

I absolutely agree we should take advantage of the variety of excellent and varied resources online and use them to support instruction. I agree that the power to pause and re-watch is helpful and empowering. I agree that, often times, an engaging video, article, or other resources is going to be a far better alternative than what I can present from the front of the classroom. I just don’t think any of that justifies off-loading that onto students’ already over-booked schedules.

I’d prefer a way to achieve more by doing less, and using the best, engaging online resources to support that. I’ll have to write more about this last concept later, but it’s connected to coyote teaching.

We’ve forgotten that assessment doesn’t require measurement, and, moreover, that the most valuable forms of assessment are often qualitative

A good teacher knows, within a few months of working closely with students, where their strengths are and where they need to improve. And this can be known without any “quantitative measurements.” But the lack of such measurements doesn’t mean that assessment hasn’t been happening.

If you grumble in the faculty lounge or on Facebook or wherever you grumble, that the “students get worse and worse every year,” then you have to be introspective about what you are doing, what they are doing, and fix the situation.

The last clause there is important, though. She isn’t anti-term paper, but she is against formulaic writing, assigned and executed mechanistically, that proves frustrating and unhelpful to both the student and the teacher.

I highly recommend reading the whole piece (and the resources she references), but I pulled the quote above because I think it’s the underlying message, even if it’s mentioned almost as an aside: if you and your students are finding the writing they’re doing in your class “frustrating and unhelpful,” then you should take a closer look at what you’re assigning and why.

… the schools the DOE chooses to shut are simply those that dare to teach the students with the city’s highest needs. There’s nothing terribly nuanced about it at all. ~ Jackie Bennett

Nonsensical, but a great strategy if the ultimate goal is to privatize education and shuffle the less fortunate into ever-more-concentrated holding cells.

Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.

The article makes other important distinctions between the Finnish and American education systems, most of which are ignored by the majority of American education reformers. A few:

• Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play
• All Finnish schools are public (pre-K through University)
• Teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and responsibility (see the above quote)
• Cooperation, not competition, is the driving force
• Equity, not excellence, is the goal

This last point ties into other studies that reveal how large an impact socio-economic factors have in the current American education system.

However, the ultimate conclusions the film draws seem to be disconnected from the very data it provides. (And I won’t even address the whole Michelle Rhee fiasco.)

Many posts and articles have been written in response to the film (like this one), which I won’t rehash and can’t add much to. Instead, I’ll give my summary of the argument as I heard it: we spend nearly four times as much on prisoners than it costs to send a student to private school, and there’s a strong correlation between school success and socio-economic status, therefore the main problems with education are unions and bad teachers, and charter schools will fix that.

If the second half of that sentence feels disconnected from the first, then you’re feeling what I felt as the credits rolled.

Hat-tip to Joe Bower, who rightly says: “This is precisely what test-based accountability looks like in the classroom.”

[Literacy in 2011] is transliteracy. Thinking beyond the format. Literacy has evolved, to not be defined or confined by container or format. It’s not just reading words on a page. It might be decoding graphic novels, it might be decoding video. It will be literacy in forms we haven’t even dreamed yet. We should encourage kids now to get their literary riches in formats that appeal to them and that they are comfortable with, whatever it may be. That is the future. The literacy of the future is finding meaning in many forms.

There’s not much need to say anything here, is there? [source]

Pet dogs failed basic intelligence tests that wolves and wild dogs passed with ease but proved more adept at social interaction, according to the research … Dogs are great at social tasks … wolves are much, much better at general problem solving.

Are we training dogs or raising wolves? Wolf pups need freedom to explore and learn the environment and to practice the skills they’ll need as adults. They also need plenty of play in which they can safely make mistakes.

There’s a balance, of course, like the one that exists between shepherds and coyote teachers, but the current system is shepherding our students into helpless domestic dogs, to mix the metaphors.