It was President Eisenhower who warned our country of blindly falling victim to a military industrial complex as an unintended consequence of the relationship between government and defense contractors.  He spoke of this as a grave threat to our democracy. Today, we face a different insidious threat from within, cloaked in the false clothing that masquerades as new and improved commercial products and technical fixes to an organic problem.  We hear…

Can tests motivate students? It depends on the test - and the student

Learning Should Be Creative

I recently had a lengthy discussion, ironically on Twitter, with a very tech-savvy educator friend about his concerns that big ideas in education might be getting drowned out as a result of the continuing discussions about Social Media and connectedness for educators.  I hope I am categorizing that correctly. My friend felt that Social Media is a powerful medium that can be used to learn, but too much attention is given to it at the expense of other powerful ideas. According to him,” it's…

It’s Not a Race to the Finish Line—It’s Finishing

Dr. Larry Aronstein

My 50- Year Perspective on Teaching, Learning and the School

Let’s start with the basics! Teaching involves creating meaning for others by presenting, applying, modeling, explaining and providing examples, clarifying, correcting, and reinforcing.  Learning is the knowledge and skills that are added and remains in people…

Ten Pieces of Advice for Rookie Teachers

From the Marshall Memo #437

(Originally titled “The Don’ts and Don’ts of Teaching”)

In this Educational Leadership article, New York City high-school teacher Gary Rubinstein lists the mistakes he wishes he’d been warned not to make in his rookie year:

• Don’t try to teach too much in a day. Teachers are…

Tagrid Sihly

Tagrid corrected identified the following (and gets a free one-year extension on membership):

Thoughts on Racial and Economic Integration in Schools and Classrooms

From the Marshall Memo #437

In this Education Gadfly article, Michael Petrilli knits together several important demographic and pedagogical themes that have been in the news recently:

• For the first time, reported The New York Times last week, nonwhites account for more than half of U.S. births.…

The benefits of being underestimated by the nuns at St. Petronille’s

Dumb Kids’ Class

http://www.wiziq.com/course/4264-teaching-online

Course Objective

Participants will identify and describe online learning, facilitating online learning, and enabling attitudes to learning, and create student activities on a personal learning environment such as a blog, wiki, Moodle, Blackboard, Edmodo, Canvas, Ning and so on.

Course Layout (June…

• 
• Complete Coverage 

What Teacher Leaders Learned This School Year

What is the most significant lesson you learned this year? I posed this question to members of the Teacher…

When you sit down in a quiet moment of reflection and consider all the insanely ill-conceived, demeaning, and downright wrong things that are happening to educators, you begin to ask yourself what happened??

How did we go from a profession in which people showed a modicum of respect for us, to be blamed for the bad economy, not being good at our job, and unworthy of a pension? What did we do to deserve the “gothca” mentality that is pervasive from SED? How did we allow people who are so…

Robert Caro's Lessons From Lyndon B. Johnson About How To Lead In A Crisis

BY DAVID D. BURSTEIN | 05-21-2012 |Fast Company

Have you ever gotten behind the steering wheel of your car and ended up somewhere without recalling much about the journey except where you started and ended? Do you ever go through a specific routine or experience (i.e. - getting ready for work in the morning) and before you know it you're done and ready to move on to the next thing without being able to recall everything you've done? I don't know about you, but that happens to me on a regular basis. I have a 25 minute ride to work that…

A Significant Error That Policymakers Commit

by Larry Cuban