Want to verify Chinese education qualifications? Verifile China is the official agent for CDGDC in the UK….

Ms. Spellings had two missions, math and reading. I think since she never taught she never learned to integrate skills and enhance reading through other subjects. I always used science as a motivator. We read, we used those icky reading books that if you really use them in the way they ask you have an all day boring task. Here’s the deal. Most reading textbooks are the middle of the sandwich. Children don’t learn to wade into the story. Textbook writers take the best part of the story and then make workbooks and puzzles around it. Oops, forgot the phonics book and the word list.

Teachers have to correct these workbooks. Most of the texts have a number of things to add to the story an maybe even a DVD. If you do all of these things your class will be busy all day, well, don’t forget about math.

We have math as a long highway that never ends. It is a mile long and an inch deep. Panicking began for me in February when the yearly test began. I had not finished the book of course and I was going to be measured by the outcome of the work of the kids for this year in FEBRUARY.. why can’t they test in June or at the real end of the year?

Math in most American school is drill and kill. I loved problem solving so I taught it too. I am sure that there is a kind of problem solving but I mean real problem solving, and extended math, thinking math beyond memorization. I did not make kids do 250 long diivision problems if they understood the process and could demonstrate it. I also used math games, math sofrware and http://www.shodor.org ( Interactive math) Algebra was a natural progression. Not hard at all.

More than that we played some math as a group against the computer. You betcha we knew the factors of numbers. There was a game that would challenge us to gve the prime numbers. I think it was called the prime number generator. All I know is that kids wanted to stay down from lunch to beat the computer.

Men’s ideas of geography are great. I once turned down a chance to live a summer on a glacier, with no makeup and scare contact with people. I would have liked it for a week maybe, But I did spring to learning about cultures and travel and mapping the world to learn about people.

I probably would have been an anthropologist had I been exposed to the right mentors. But have been to 22 countries. Geography however is not a subject taught in schools either. Go figure. The world is smaller we need to know things and we talk about places around the world every day.
Do we know our geography skills. I think not and the reports show us that most American citizens DO NOT KNOW geography. So ? Ethnobotanical studies come to mind. I fell in love with that kind of learning on Earthwatch expeditions. I learned to think of cultures in a different way exploring archaeology. American social studies is often quite truncated. We go from Greece to Rome, to Europe , Medieval Studies, to the US and then.. we learn about the USA. Maybe now they include the African Diaspora. Sometimes we include Egypt because everyone is fascinated with mummies. Even girls. Did I say that? What I mean is geography is not always adventure living. I also never wanted to BE an astronaut. I just wanted to KNOW about it. Isn’t that ok?

Biology and botany. Reading it is not that much fun. But I had a parent who plowed up a section of the play ground ( back forty) and we did early yield crops. While doing this we also hatched chickens, raised frogs, raised butterflies, tilapia, and did some bottle biology. Then there is the NASA stuff. I used to do an after school program because I had the stuff and the kids would not go home. Now there is money for after school program. Lots of money. Girls will attend those. I know one that really works. Afterschool Universe, NASA
the kids make a spectroscope, a telescope and do hands on things. At the high school level we at the Thornburg Institute have a total hands on curriculum and the girls ( teachers) do very well. I had a growing chamber for hydrophonics but some parent said that people in California used it for growing dope, so my principal made me get rid of it. It was great for raising tomatoes. I see that thing in the airline catalogues all the time. Must be used for lots of things.

Courses for Dummies?

One reason teachers don’t know good STEM skills is because of teacher courses designed for teachers. They might as well put science for dummies, or physics for dummies or , biology for dummies on the label.

I am an accidental lover of science. I went to Catholic schools so I didn’t get much in the way of science except reading about it. I wen to a Black school where they probably decided that we didn’t have the smarts to learn science. My science education has been with NSTA, with NASA, with lots of different organizations who really teach the sciences. I am proud to say that I took my astrophysics at Berkeley . Ironically, since I took so many institutes and workshops and special programs I don’t have a degree in a particular discipline. Maybe that;s a good thing. Geography, Geology, Astronomy, Archaeology, Field Studies, Ecology, the Globe Program
all fun and wonderful experiences.

The hard part was getting permission to actually teach science. I learned to write grants for the resources I needed. I learned to invovle parents so that the school board would not say no. I stood on the shoulders of NSTA, and NASA and other groups . I still had a hard time in the culture of schools as they are today.

We must be more creative, innovative and imaginative in teaching STEM science, technology , engineering and math. Did I tell you about the project in engineering that became a school playground that we and parents designed. A little reality helps. I am not about mountain climbing, but I have flown as a passenger near Mt. Everest and even then I was scared. Adventure for me is a different thing. Learning to cook Pho noodle soup. Thinking about how the slaves lived and died. learning tesselations. Maybe we need more women to teach STEM in different ways,or not. The exposure is a problem.

Who ever glued rocks in a box. I am sure that I am infamous for freeing the rock from glue so that kids could actually handle and test them. You get the drift? Hands on minds on for all. Abolish the gating factors of NCLB.
If everyone and his mother has a GPS, shouldn’t we teach geography? Just a thought.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/03/girls_in_stem_roundup_study/

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/03/girls_in_stem_roundup_study/
Study: Girls still not swarming into sci-tech, dammit

I wish I could go!

» Links to this article
By Michael Casserly
Sunday, September 7, 2008; Page B02

In 1962, after the New York Mets had lost a record 120 games in the franchise’s first year, Casey Stengel, the team’s legendary manager, walked into the locker room and reportedly said, “I don’t want you boys to feel bad about this. It’s been a team effort. No one or two of you guys could have done all this by yourselves.”

That version of a pep talk is useful to remember now, as students in the District trundle off to schools that members of both political parties call failures. That’s a fair assessment of the situation, but it’s wrong of members of Congress, or anyone else, to assert that the school district reached this sorry state of affairs all by itself. It had plenty of help along the way. As Casey would say, “It was a team effort.”
Let’s begin with the starting lineup: the school district. The system has done more than its fair share to earn a reputation as hapless and ineffective. Until recently, the school district has not been able to tell how many students it served or how many adults it employed. It sometimes couldn’t pay people on time or in the right amounts. And it couldn’t teach most of its children to an acceptable level. In short, the district has been a central player in its own losing streak.

But the D.C. public schools had lots of unnecessary coaching. City Hall, historically, has pushed relatives and friends onto the school payroll, whether qualified or not — a practice that eventually prompted D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to fire staff she thought did not measure up. The media has fallen in and out of love with any number of superintendents before running them out of town. Congress has overstepped its oversight role repeatedly, passing legislation that often had little to do with improving the schools and more to do with the pursuit of one political agenda or another.
One of Congress’s most controversial intrusions into the city’s educational system was the legislation that opened the District to charter schools, passed in April 1996. The legislation included a compromise between the newly emboldened, pro-voucher Republican majority in Congress and a Clinton White House that knew reform was needed. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed on charter schools even if they couldn’t settle on vouchers. The D.C. Council, for its part, also authorized charters over the objection of the D.C. Board of Education, signaling a split among the city’s political leadership that continues today. Some 12 years later, nearly a third of the city’s children go to a charter school.
The 1996 compromise was not the end of the voucher issue, of course. In 2004, Congress passed legislation that created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the organization that administers public funds for tuition at private and parochial schools. The bill had the support of then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams but not of other political leaders. Today, some 1,900 mostly low-income students citywide attend private schools with public money. Parents say they like having the choice of schools, but recent evaluations show that the program is having no significant academic effects.
The issue here is neither the voucher program nor charter schools themselves. It is a Congress and other political leaders who have established two alternative systems that now run parallel to the D.C. school district without boosting its capacity to get better. If this arrangement created competitive pressures to improve, it would have worked in the students’ favor. But there is little to suggest that is happening here or in other cities. Instead, D.C.’s educational system is more fractured than ever, with little common ground among boosters of either strategy.
Congressional intrusion goes beyond what kinds of schools students can attend — whether charters or using vouchers at private schools — to affect what programs students use inside classrooms themselves. In recent years, Congress has approved funds for a number of programs — from literacy to anti-violence programs — without always knowing whether they were the right fit for the school system. It also has trespassed into management areas by alternatively approving, then disapproving, caps on attorney fees charged by lawyers suing the District over services to students with disabilities, raising the costs of special education.
At this point, the school system has been overruled and overrun, picked clean, pulled and pushed, poked, prodded and experimented with until it was not clear where it was going or why. In the process, schools effectively lost or silenced the voices of parents and community members, people whose involvement is desperately needed to offset the constant churn of leadership and sustain the reforms.
The point here is not that Congress and others should leave schools alone. The schools — and the students they serve — need all the help they can get. The point is that the larger community should be working in tandem to make the schools better.
Improving education is a community effort. The research is clear on that. Leaders must work in the same direction for a prolonged period of time toward the same overarching goals. This is more than sloganeering; it requires real leadership from the top in order to break down the distrust at the heart of all the pulling and tugging.
During the last year, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Rhee have pumped substantial and commendable energy into remaking the school district. They are generally on the right track. But, as I have seen in countless other cities, it’s in the second and third years that reform efforts can falter. The political consensus for improvement often falls apart. Signs of this happening in D.C. are already emerging. So the city’s leadership must now articulate a clearer vision for where it is taking the school system and rally people around that vision. The hardest reforms are yet to come.
One may remember that the same New York Mets who were so roundly disparaged in 1962 went on to win the World Series in 1969. They did it because, over the intervening years, they began playing like a team rather than like a group of individuals out for themselves. The District of Columbia Public Schools are far from being champions, but they could be in a few short years if the full roster of players — Congress, the city council, the business community and others — finally decided they wanted to play together for the whole nine innings.
mcasserly@cgcs.org

Michael Casserly is executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation’s largest urban public school systems.

She is correct when she says that the Stellanbosch Declaration by IFIP puts succinctly what many of us wish to achieve, but also wonder fearfully how and when to take steps forward.

I’d like to note that a small step taken by my colleague Leah Keino with my support was to lead a study abroad service learning to Rwanda in May 2008 and they took with them laptops to gift. They worked hard in schools, rich and poor, an orphanage, and in the Kigali Institute of Education. Things change so fast in Rwanda that, while learning with and serving them brings additional challenges, the passionate belief of young population in the President’s Vision 2020 makes it possible. Have a look at Rwanda for yourself online and see the Stellanbosch Declaration in action in a country that appears to me to have been shocked into some of the most sensible actions worldwide by its genocide.

Niki

Possibly the first program was created by the Open University in the UK and Michelle Selinger (a past SITE Keynote) was the person who led the use of the online discussions for the first time. You can read about those, e.g. in the Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education (JITTE), which I edited at that time.

In the USA the University of Phoenix is another virtual university that has developed and online program. There are also several programs in New Zealand, including Massey University and my new one, the University of Canterbury. In Canterbury we have blended written materials with an online course management system, a similar approach to the Open University but instead of local tutors our staff travel out to regional centers in both island.

So yes, we know it can be done and it can serve a rural and mature population thus bringing more teachers into the field. It does have challenges, including the breadth and supervision of field experience among others. We can share information on those too!
Niki

I’m sure it can be, and is being, done but I expect we may not yet be doing it as well as we might like. That will come as we learn through experience.

At USQ we have offered our one-year PG teacher preparation program (GDTL) online for the past couple of years. It includes required residential schools during which students come on campus for a total of 10 days. The rest of the time they spend mostly on attachment to a school with study and support online.

Peter

Regarding the first point: as assistant chair of the ePortfolio and assassment SIG, I have to admit that there is not much action in this SIG. Is that me or???
Best regards,
Hans van Bergen