New NYC social media policy
Gotham Schools’ Phylissa Cramer saved me from having to write a response to the new NYC DOE Social Media Policy that was released yesterday:
Stephen Lazar, a high school teacher, said he was relieved that the department had not gone so far as to ban online communication between teachers and students, as has happened in other school districts. But he said the guidelines showed a lack of understanding about a basic reality: Students often see no distinction between email and other forms of online communication, including Facebook and Twitter messages…
Lazar said his personal policy was not to accept students’ online friendship requests — unless they are his advisees. Then he makes sure he is friends with them.
“If I am responsible for their social and emotional wellbeing then I should know what is going on in their life,” Lazar said, adding that Facebook posts have in the past alerted him to students’ mental health problems and allowed him to get help for the students.
(Full disclosure: I serve on an informal reader advisory board for Gotham)
How we should teach economics
Great stuff from Ukiah Coach Brown:
I start every semester of Economics with the statement that the students have been totally shafted by not being taught the most basic theory in their twelve years of education; every choice has a consequence. That’s why the subject has been given the name “the dismal science”. People don’t like the idea that they control their own destiny a lot more than they are told, or that they are responsible for their own actions. However the idea of choice is rarely what’s discussed when Economics takes the stage. Occupy, the Great Recession, income inequality; all of it becomes politicized to the point that we forget that people make choices and choices have consequences.
In New Federal Program to Reward Teachers, Flawed Assumptions
I wrote my latest piece for the New York Times in response to a focus group on the US Department of Education’s proposed Project Respect in which I participated last month. Like far too many education policies, in Project Respect I saw some good ideas poorly implemented:
Project Respect calls for a three-pronged reform of the teaching profession. It envisions a reorganization of schools that would use technology and aides to put more effective teachers in front of more students, coupled with a longer school day to give teachers more time for professional growth.
To find more effective teachers, it calls for an expansion of entry points into the profession, with a higher bar for earning a permanent position. Finally, it calls for increased compensation for career teachers who both stay in the classroom and take on various teacher-leader roles.
That prong shares much with the insightful prescriptions of the book “Teaching 2030,” written by the Center for Teaching Quality’s Barnett Berry and a group of 12 teachers that included my New York colleagues Jose Vilson and Ariel Sacks.
Establishing a variety of advanced teacher roles, with appropriately high compensation, is a necessary move toward professionalizing teaching in America, and I applaud this move.
Giving highly effective teachers more time to serve in roles other than classroom teachers is an important step toward improving our system. However, it is imperative to remember that the qualities that make me a highly effective teacher are not necessarily those that would make me an effective teacher-leader.
Read the piece here, and I hope some people will join in the comments.
How We Can Teach Social Studies More Effectively
I was humbled and honored when Larry Ferlazzo sent me an email a couple of months ago to answer one of the questions for the wonderful teacher advice column he does at Education Week. I’m even more humbled to be featured in a column with Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and co-director of the Zinn Education Project, whose work I have long admired. The question for this week is, “What’s the best advice you can give to Social Studies teachers who want to be more effective?” An excerpt from my response:
The best advice I can give Social Studies teachers who want to be more effective is to remember that we teach students, not content.
While standards may dictate that students be able to explain the Green Revolution, the human beings in our classes demand that the information we help them learn also help them develop as people. Students may enter our rooms asking, “when am I ever going to need use this information?” We need to help them leave wondering, “what lessons can I learn from the past to help myself and our society make better decisions in the future?” A study of the Green Revolution, then, becomes a lesson in how a seemingly wonderful solution to problem (hunger) can have unintended consequences that are potentially far more catastrophic (overpopulation, increased reliance on polluting fossil fuels). By focusing on transferable goals, students will not only be more engaged, but will better remember and understand the content.
The rest is here. Part two and three to come, and they’re still looking for answers, so please contribute your suggestions!
Must Read: Distractions Drastically Effect Learning
I shared this from “Attention Alert: A Study on Distraction Reveals Some Surprises” with my students last week, telling them it was perhaps the most important lesson I had to share with them. From Dr. Larry Rosen (emphasis added):
Recently my research team observed nearly 300 middle school, high school and university students studying something important for a mere 15 minutes in their natural environments. We were interested in whether they could maintain focus and, if not, what might be distracting them. Every minute we noted exactly what they were doing, whether they were studying, if they were texting or listening to music or watching television in the background, and if they had a computer screen in front of them and what websites were being visited.
The results were startling. First, these students were only able to focus and stay on task for an average of three minutes at a time and nearly all of their distractions came from technology. [By the way, other researchers have found similar attention spans with computer programmers and medical students.] The major culprit: their smartphone and their laptop were providing constant interruptions. We also looked at whether these distractors might predict who was a better student. Not surprisingly those who stayed on task longer and had study strategies were better students. The worst students were those who consumed more media each day and had a preference for working on several tasks at the same time and switching back and forth between them. One additional result stunned us: If they checked Facebook just once during the 15-minute study period they were worse students. It didn’t matter how many times they looked at Facebook; once was enough.
Many forward looking educators are placing greater emphasis on teaching students how to use information, rather than just helping students gain information. This research, which adds to a growing body showing similar negative side-effects of our technology use, shows us that we need to teach the responsible and effective use of technology as well.
Why working longer doesn’t help much
One of the themes that goes throughout my writing is that teachers and schools should do less, but better: we should teach less content, focus on fewer skills, and attempt fewer initiatives in schools, so that we can do all of them to a much great extent. In a great piece from the Lifehacker blog, Manuel Kiessling convincingly argues this logic applies universally:
Let’s face it, doing about 30% better isn’t going to get you anywhere significant. And I’m not even talking about why working 30% longer of course won’t improve anything significant in your company by 30%—much has been written about this already.
Here is what I propose: Rather than ask people to work longer hours, tell your people that you want them to become 300% better at what they do! That you want the whole company to become 300% better than it is right now. And don’t even mention working longer.
Because if you tell people this, everybody is going to understand that this goal won’t be achieved by working 300% longer, because 8 (hours a day) x 300% is 24 hours, and for obvious reasons, working 24 hours a day is not going to work out.
Incredible Free Conference in Tribute to Manning Marable
I hope many can join and spread the word about the incredible Manning Marable Memorial Conference: A New Vision of Black Freedom. Dr. Marable, as I’ve written about before, was my teacher and mentor while working on my masters in African-American Studies at Columbia. I will be moderating the panel , “Parents, Organizers & Educators Discuss the Education Crisis” on Friday morning. This is a once-in-a-lifetime collection of scholars and it is FREE! Registration and more info here.
