Background I remember when Oprah premiered on television, somewhere around the 2nd grade. I grew up watching Donahue at 3:00 and Oprah at 4:00 with my grandmother after school. I watched for many years though I started to lose track somewhere around high school. I must confess that as I got older I found the …
Category: Educational Policy
How to Encourage Parental Involvement
While some education reformers might argue that poverty is not a reason for students’ lack of success, I haven’t heard anyone claim that parental involvement doesn’t impact student learning. As a matter of fact, I would argue that a students’ best chance of overcoming poverty is parental involvement in their education. While we have little …
How to Reduce the Amount of Teacher Talk
Pair Sharing: A Best Practice Pair Sharing is generally acknowledged as a best practice in education. In classrooms I visit, however, I rarely see it used, let alone integrated into lessons as a regular practice. Reducing the amount of teacher talk and getting students to talk to each other is one of the cheapest and …
The Pop Culture Guide to Standardized Testing
It’s Spring Break now but in two weeks comes the start of standardized testing in California—we call it the CST. Here are my pop-culture suggestions for doing well on the CST: 1. Don’t work too fast and furious. Have a good attitude and don’t expect to work quickly. The test requires you to stop and …
Should Kindergarteners Use iPads?
Much fuss has been made on Twitter recently about schools, such as one in Auburn, Maine, giving iPads to all students in kindergarten with former Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch (@dianeravitch) exclaiming on Twitter that she hoped the kindergarteners would break the iPads and that the students should be out playing instead of using …
Mythbusters: Education Edition
Here are two must-see items for teachers before going in to your next staff meeting. The first is an article from researcher, Will Thalheimer, that suggests that the pyramid that claims we remember 90% of what we teach others and only 10% of what we read is fabricated. Yes, we are more likely to remember …
Angry, Pink Slipped Teacher Rap Songs
As in many districts across the country, LAUSD has been faced with huge budget deficits and approximately 5,000 teachers (including my wife) have been served with pink slips. A district colleague of mine and former elementary school classmate has created two rap songs about receiving his own pink slip. If you’re a teacher anywhere, they’re …
Common Core Digital Storytelling Educational Policy Educational Technology Video in the Classroom Workshops Upcoming
Higher Level Technology Use
For my upcoming presentation, “Digital CPR: Bring Your Reading Series to Life with Technology” for LAUSD’s Best Practices Conference on March 19th, I created this illustration which I will use to talk about higher level technology use. I will talk about incorporating multimedia in the classroom as something all teachers should be doing but I …
Close the Computer Lab
Let me preface this by saying: 1) In a perfect world every school would have both a computer lab and computers in their classrooms. 2) If you have an innovative teacher like Alice Mercer in your computer lab I would surely keep it open. But if you have a school with a computer lab like this, …
What Value Do Teachers Add to A Classroom?
Happy New Year, Readers! As 2011 begins I have been reflecting on a question I’ve been pondering for some time. You may have noticed a lack of blog posting in the past few months. There’s no excuse for that (though I did get married, graduate from my masters program, write a chapter in a book …