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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
District Administration Magazine
Few teachers receive individualized professional development, though many are expected to personalize learning for students. Microcredentials — digital badges that teachers earn by learning a skill and demonstrating mastery through student results — offer a PD pathway designed to be highly differentiated and engaging. The microcredentialing process starts with teachers choosing a skill they want to develop. They take an online course from a company such as the nonprofit Digital Promise, which offers free skill development; or they can choose a course created within the district.
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The Hechinger Report
Yazoo County School District Superintendent Becky Fischer said the lights in the high school in her district were so old, they could not even find bulbs for them when they went out. Electric equipment, decades old, fell repeatedly, meaning constant maintenance and repair for the district's schools in a county where 36.2 percent of citizens live in poverty, 2010-2014 U.S. Census data show. So this past February, the Yazoo County School District made a $4.2-million deal with Schneider Electric, a global company that specializes in automation and energy, to make its schools "greener" in savings and in energy consumption with an Energy Savings Performance Contract.
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MindShift
Fractions come up all the time in everyday life, and yet, they are often a difficult concept for elementary school-aged children to grasp. One way to help kids understand fractions as concrete things is to give them real world examples. In this Teaching Channel video, third grade teacher Maria Franco teaches a lesson on equivalent fractions in which she tries to give more space for student thinking and discussion.
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Education Week
Students in Rhode Island and Michigan will learn about genocide, after governors in both states signed laws this month that require schools to teach about the history of events like the Holocaust and the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenians. The states are the first to add such a requirement in nearly 20 years. While many textbooks and state standards in social studies include genocides, just five states (California, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida and New York) specifically require students to learn about the Holocaust.
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WBUR
Massachusetts public schools may start using new digital literacy and computer science standards as soon as this fall. The state board of elementary and secondary education unanimously approved the standards, which are voluntary, at its monthly meeting. "Today's vote recognizes the importance of digital literacy and computer science to modern life, work and learning," board chairman Paul Sagan said in a statement. "These standards will help our students think about problem solving in new ways and introduce them to valuable skills they will need in today's economy."
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Edutopia (commentary)
Melina Uncapher, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "A growing body of behavioral and neuroscientific evidence is revealing the positive benefits of action video gameplay for improving a wide range of abilities, from simple perceptual and motor skills to higher-level abilities such as cognitive flexibility, attentional control and learning. However, a troubling body of evidence shows that the violence found in most commercial action games is associated with an increase in aggressive thoughts and behavior. Researchers are working diligently to maximize action video games' positive benefits and minimize their adverse effects."
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eSchool News
Overworked teachers and overburdened curriculum makes improving STEM programs a challenge, but there are solutions. Knowledge has become a commodity. We live in a society today were facts are at our fingertips through ready access to the internet and search engines. To keep pace, our educational system needs to focus less on memorization of facts and more on how to use facts and how to ask the right questions.
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Medical Xpress
Telling yourself I can do better, can really make you do better at a given task, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found. Over 44,000 people took part in an experiment to discover what motivational techniques really worked. In conjunction with BBC Lab U.K., Professor Andrew Lane and his colleagues tested which physiological skills would help people improve their scores in an online game.
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Edutopia (commentary)
Adam Bellow, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "Technology in the classroom brings out interesting things in teachers. Some, like myself (and likely you as well), are eager to learn and do more because the technology and its uses interest us. Others are uncertain but willing to learn if given some help. And, sadly, some people write off technology as a chore or passing fad."
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eSchool News
Educators from Pre-K up through higher education most often prefer to participate in professional learning opportunities that focus on training for online software and digital resources (34 percent), classroom management strategies (34 percent), and digital device training (33 percent), according to a new survey released during this year's ISTE conference. The 2016 Vision K-20 Professional Learning Survey Report is the ninth annual national K-20 educator survey from the Education Technology Industry Network of SIIA, and also is the first survey focusing on online professional learning.
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
Education Week
The top GOP Senate lawmaker for education criticized accountability proposals from the U.S. Department of Education that would require summative ratings for schools, saying such a requirement is not found in the Every Student Succeeds Act and would infringe on state autonomy. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the Senate education committee chairman, told Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. in a hearing here Wednesday that he was also worried that the proposed ESSA accountability rules might give the department improper oversight over states' content standards. And both Alexander and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the committee's ranking member, expressed concerns the draft rules would make states and schools shift to the new law too quickly.
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McClatchy Washington Bureau
Senate Republicans strongly criticized Education Secretary John King, saying he'd failed to follow the intent of the act that replaced No Child Left Behind, which was designed to give states more control over measuring school performance. "The words we used were carefully and deliberately chosen," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the lead sponsor of the Every Student Succeeds Act. "We meant for the words to mean what they say — nothing more, nothing less ... Any regulation has to stay within those words. The law did not envision or invite the secretary to legislate more requirements."
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The Washington Post
In April, an appeals court in California upheld the state's laws regarding teacher tenure, dismissal and layoffs by overturning a lower court's earlier decision to scrap job-protection statutes in the highly publicized Vergara v. California case. The plaintiffs in Vergara were public school students backed by a school reform advocacy group called Students Matter, and they claimed that job protection laws for teachers are the reason that poor and minority children wind up with more ineffective teachers who are hard to fire. The court found that "the evidence did not show that the challenged statutes inevitably cause" the impact the plaintiffs claimed. Reform and anti-union activists have promised to continue the legal fight against teacher job protection laws that they say work against students.
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NAESP
Successful collaboration between school administrators sets a positive tone and helps model communication practices that can be implemented schoolwide. Principal JoVon Rogers and assistant principal Kristen Rudinski began working together three years ago when Rogers arrived at Gunston Elementary School in northern Virginia as a new principal. Since that time, the two have developed a highly collaborative leadership style. In an interview, Rogers and Rudinski shared their strategies for collaborating as a team and with teachers and staff to create a culture of communication throughout their school. Here is what they had to say.
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NAESP
To keep NAESP's publications at the forefront of education issues and trends, the Association has established a group of editorial advisors. This group assists NAESP by suggesting themes and articles for Principal and other publications; writing articles and one book review per year; contributing to conference news; and providing honest feedback on publications and other NAESP services. Interested NAESP members are encouraged to submit on NAESP's website using the form provided.
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