In Feb 2009 Educational Leadership
titles for faculty book groups
Alexie - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian
Gurian -- Boys and Girls Learn Differently
Gardner -- Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligence
Barth - Improving Schools from Within
Levine, Mel - A Mind at a Time (differentiation)
Charney - Teaching Children to Care
Tatum, Beverly Daniel -- Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
DuFour, Marzano "High Leverage Strategies for Principal Leadership"
found in the Feb 2009 Educational Leadership
p. 65 look at article for Marzano's "Generic Scale for Developing Common Assessments" (4.0 scale)
support collaborative teams by..
66 Collaborating on common assessments. Several questions to guide this work: How wil your team monitor the learning of each student on a timely basis? Do your common assessments reflect the characteristics of quality assessment that we have identified? How are we using the results from assessments to support stduents who are experiencing difficulty? What criteria are the members of your team using to assess the quality of students' work? What evidence do you have that members of your team apply the criteria consistently?
"a team that asserts it is committed to helping students learn to write 'a good persuasive essay' must be prepared to define the elements of a good persuasive essay; distinguish among essays that are good as opposed to great, fair, and poor; and practice applying the agree-on indicators of quality until they can provide students with consistent and precise feedback (that is, team members establish inter-rater reliability.)
role of principal - "monitors the ongoing work of teams by asking them to submit the products that flow form their collective inquiry and collaborative dialogue -- products such as the guaranteed and viable curriculum, pacing guides, common assessments, analysis of results, and so on. The principal also meets with each team quarterly to review its work. Together they examine the content, pacing, assessments, and, most important, the evidence of student learning from the assessments."
p. 65 look at article for Marzano's "Generic Scale for Developing Common Assessments" (4.0 scale)
support collaborative teams by..
- time for collaboration embedded into the routine workweek
- resources to examine curriculum, such as state standards, curriculum guides, analysis of student performance on past assessments; examples of rubrics that specify the criteria to be used in judging the quality of work
- vertical articulation with teachers in the next higher grade level to ID knowledge and skills those teachers have specifed as essential for students entering the course
66 Collaborating on common assessments. Several questions to guide this work: How wil your team monitor the learning of each student on a timely basis? Do your common assessments reflect the characteristics of quality assessment that we have identified? How are we using the results from assessments to support stduents who are experiencing difficulty? What criteria are the members of your team using to assess the quality of students' work? What evidence do you have that members of your team apply the criteria consistently?
"a team that asserts it is committed to helping students learn to write 'a good persuasive essay' must be prepared to define the elements of a good persuasive essay; distinguish among essays that are good as opposed to great, fair, and poor; and practice applying the agree-on indicators of quality until they can provide students with consistent and precise feedback (that is, team members establish inter-rater reliability.)
role of principal - "monitors the ongoing work of teams by asking them to submit the products that flow form their collective inquiry and collaborative dialogue -- products such as the guaranteed and viable curriculum, pacing guides, common assessments, analysis of results, and so on. The principal also meets with each team quarterly to review its work. Together they examine the content, pacing, assessments, and, most important, the evidence of student learning from the assessments."
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
How We Were Ruined & What We Can Do
How We Were Ruined & What We Can Do
By Jeff Madrick
(article in the NY Review of Books)
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
by Charles R. Morris
PublicAffairs, 194 pp., $22.95
Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis
by Mark Zandi
FT Press, 270 pp., $24.99
The Reckoning
a series of articles by Gretchen Morgenson et al.
The New York Times, September 28–December 28, 2008
This long review article gives me the clearest picture I've had yet of the cause of the financial meltdown. The essential part, according to Madrick, is the rise of CDOs. Investment banks and even commercial banks were packaging not only residential mortgages but also equipment loans, commercial mortgages, credit card debt, and even student loans—known in general as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Madrick notes that, "Morris writes that 80 percent of all lending by 2006 occurred in unregulated sectors of the economy, compared to only 25 percent in the mid-1980s." The CDOs produced high profits and high risk, and were unregulated. Banks were purchasing them with huge loans from Cayman Island banks, sometimes 30 - 40x their own capital. When the CDOs went bad, the big banks didn't have the capital to cover them.
By Jeff Madrick
(article in the NY Review of Books)
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
by Charles R. Morris
PublicAffairs, 194 pp., $22.95
Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis
by Mark Zandi
FT Press, 270 pp., $24.99
The Reckoning
a series of articles by Gretchen Morgenson et al.
The New York Times, September 28–December 28, 2008
This long review article gives me the clearest picture I've had yet of the cause of the financial meltdown. The essential part, according to Madrick, is the rise of CDOs. Investment banks and even commercial banks were packaging not only residential mortgages but also equipment loans, commercial mortgages, credit card debt, and even student loans—known in general as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Madrick notes that, "Morris writes that 80 percent of all lending by 2006 occurred in unregulated sectors of the economy, compared to only 25 percent in the mid-1980s." The CDOs produced high profits and high risk, and were unregulated. Banks were purchasing them with huge loans from Cayman Island banks, sometimes 30 - 40x their own capital. When the CDOs went bad, the big banks didn't have the capital to cover them.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Barack Obama Stands Up for Libraries
Obama's kenote speech at the Opening General Session at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, June 23-29, 2005. Read whole speech here.
50 "Reading is the Gateway Skill that makes all other learning possible"
50 "Whether it's software design or computer engineering or financial analysis, corporations can locate these jobs anywhere in the world, anywhere that there's an internet connection. As countries like China and India continue to modernize their economies and educate their children longer and better, the competition American workers face will grow more intense, the necessary skills more demanding. These new jobs are not simply about working hard, they're about what you know and how fast you can learn what you don't know. They require innovative thinking, detailed comprehension, and superior communication."
51 "It's not enough just to recognize the words on the page anymore. The kind of literacy necessary for the 21st century requires detailed understanding and complex comprehension. And, yet, every year we pass more children through schools or watch as more drop out. These are kids who will pore through the help-wanted section and cross off job after job that requires skills they don't have.... We have to change our whole mindset as a nation. We're living in the 21st century knowlege economy; but our schools, our homes, and our culture are still based around 20th century and some cases 19th-century expectations."
52 "What if instead of a toy in every Happy Meal there was a book?"
50 "Reading is the Gateway Skill that makes all other learning possible"
50 "Whether it's software design or computer engineering or financial analysis, corporations can locate these jobs anywhere in the world, anywhere that there's an internet connection. As countries like China and India continue to modernize their economies and educate their children longer and better, the competition American workers face will grow more intense, the necessary skills more demanding. These new jobs are not simply about working hard, they're about what you know and how fast you can learn what you don't know. They require innovative thinking, detailed comprehension, and superior communication."
51 "It's not enough just to recognize the words on the page anymore. The kind of literacy necessary for the 21st century requires detailed understanding and complex comprehension. And, yet, every year we pass more children through schools or watch as more drop out. These are kids who will pore through the help-wanted section and cross off job after job that requires skills they don't have.... We have to change our whole mindset as a nation. We're living in the 21st century knowlege economy; but our schools, our homes, and our culture are still based around 20th century and some cases 19th-century expectations."
52 "What if instead of a toy in every Happy Meal there was a book?"
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Music Quickens Time by Daniel Barenboim
"How do we live with discipline and passion? How do we make the connection between our brains and our hearts?" Barenboim asks towards the beginning of this collection of essays, interviews, and appreciations. Barenboim argues throughout the book, against the commonsense idea that gaining life experience can make you a better musician, that music has much to teach us about life. For example, we learn about relationship of parts to the whole, about how music integrates many voices in producing a whole, and how music can contain the tragic and the comic always. Barenboim distinguishes between "strategic" and "tactical" thinking about music... the strategic has teh end in mind, is relating the current moment of music to the whole; the tactical is about performing the moment. This, too, is about negotiating through life's contract. He defines thinking as a marriage between intellect, emotion, and intuition. (Intuition is what you get, I think he means, after studying something for a long time... it's like improvization.) Barenboim claims that we (and musicians in general) have become overly specialized. Conductors know only their own repertoire... the know Schubert's symphonies, but not his piano sonatas intimately. The book is an appreciation, too of several musicians, including Boulez. Barenboim cites Arnold Schoeberg, "The middle way is the only way that does not lead to Rome," in calling for "courage" in performance. "Each performer must find within himself the will required for this process, perhaps apdopting the line of most resistance outside the world of sound as well." Finally, I really like how this is phrased: "The unwillingness to ask these questions is symptomatic of thoughtless faithfulness to the letter and an inevitable unfaithfulness to the spirit."
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Academic Responsibilities
Stanley Fish, in his NYTs blog, says that recent commentary about whether Barack Obama should include Larry Summers, lately fired as Harvard's president for controversial remarks about women scientists among other things, in his cabinet is wrong-headed. Most commentaries, he says, deal quickly with the question of WHY he was fired, claiming that it was because he was trying to shake things up.
Fish claims that a university professor should be one who is trying to wake people out of complacency, but not university presidents. That's the real issue about whether he should be in the cabinet: does he have people skills? Fish writes, "It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues." The more general point is that teachers have a whole different set of ethical and professional responsibilities than principals (or professors and university presidents). An academic is not an academic. Nor is it true that presidents just have MORE responsibilities -- they are qualitatively different.
Fish claims that a university professor should be one who is trying to wake people out of complacency, but not university presidents. That's the real issue about whether he should be in the cabinet: does he have people skills? Fish writes, "It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues." The more general point is that teachers have a whole different set of ethical and professional responsibilities than principals (or professors and university presidents). An academic is not an academic. Nor is it true that presidents just have MORE responsibilities -- they are qualitatively different.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Public Intellectuals from a new Zip Code
I've been thinking about why kids at school seem to be so blatantly bored with literature. As a department chair, I watch as teachers fret about the students who don't seem to care... and about students who pronounce their not caring more and more vocally. One response is to create bigger and bigger projects that go along with the reading. Another response is to spell out (usually in 12 point font on power point slides) what's most important about last night's novel reading. Yet another response is to blame the X (kids, TV, cell phones, parents, mercury in innoculations....) I don't think that any of these responses will get to the heart of the boredom.
Instead, I think that English departments need to change: our goal should be to help kids become better consumers of text. And by text I only barely mean "novels and short stories," I really mean documentaries and informational web sites and online newspapers and blogs, etc.
I love novels myself. And I think that reading, say, The Scarlet Letter, is a pleasantly rewarding intellectual and artistic puzzle that helps me think about big ideas like idenity and social norming. But I don't think that literature has any monopoly on helping kids become better readers, thinkers, or citizens. It's ONE WAY, and a way that is probably going out of style faster than you can say "D'oh!".
Today I ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (not usually associated with flouting tradition!) which helps me make my claim in a sideways sort of way. The author, Daniel Drezner, in the article "Public Intellectual 2.0," found here, writes that public intellectuals have not died, but have migrated to the blogosphere. Drozner writes:
"To be sure, some important differences exist between the current generation of public intellectuals and the Partisan Review generation extolled by so many. In the current era, many more public intellectuals possess social-science rather than humanities backgrounds. In Richard Posner's infamous list of top public intellectuals, there are twice as many social scientists as humanities professors. In a recent ranking published by Foreign Policy magazine, economists and political scientists outnumber artists and novelists by a ratio of four to one. Economics has supplanted literary criticism as the "universal methodology" of most public intellectuals."
Drezner says, "That fact in particular might explain the strong belief in literary circles that the public intellectual is dead or dying." But for me, it also might explain why kids see, but English teachers don't, that our primary focus on literary criticism is outdated and, um, boring. English departments, even in high school, existed in their heyday after the New Critics (and New York Intellectuals) reign in the 50s and 60s.
Meanwhile, back in high school, teachers still hold novels up as holy relics. The answer, to many teachers, is to force kids to look more closely at the holy relics, and try to encourage kids to see how the old messages might still fit today. My response is that we should help kids see the holy is not just in relics!
Instead, I think that English departments need to change: our goal should be to help kids become better consumers of text. And by text I only barely mean "novels and short stories," I really mean documentaries and informational web sites and online newspapers and blogs, etc.
I love novels myself. And I think that reading, say, The Scarlet Letter, is a pleasantly rewarding intellectual and artistic puzzle that helps me think about big ideas like idenity and social norming. But I don't think that literature has any monopoly on helping kids become better readers, thinkers, or citizens. It's ONE WAY, and a way that is probably going out of style faster than you can say "D'oh!".
Today I ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (not usually associated with flouting tradition!) which helps me make my claim in a sideways sort of way. The author, Daniel Drezner, in the article "Public Intellectual 2.0," found here, writes that public intellectuals have not died, but have migrated to the blogosphere. Drozner writes:
"To be sure, some important differences exist between the current generation of public intellectuals and the Partisan Review generation extolled by so many. In the current era, many more public intellectuals possess social-science rather than humanities backgrounds. In Richard Posner's infamous list of top public intellectuals, there are twice as many social scientists as humanities professors. In a recent ranking published by Foreign Policy magazine, economists and political scientists outnumber artists and novelists by a ratio of four to one. Economics has supplanted literary criticism as the "universal methodology" of most public intellectuals."
Drezner says, "That fact in particular might explain the strong belief in literary circles that the public intellectual is dead or dying." But for me, it also might explain why kids see, but English teachers don't, that our primary focus on literary criticism is outdated and, um, boring. English departments, even in high school, existed in their heyday after the New Critics (and New York Intellectuals) reign in the 50s and 60s.
Meanwhile, back in high school, teachers still hold novels up as holy relics. The answer, to many teachers, is to force kids to look more closely at the holy relics, and try to encourage kids to see how the old messages might still fit today. My response is that we should help kids see the holy is not just in relics!
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