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| | LATEST NEWS FOR PRINCIPALS |
Education Week
A national study shows that principals regularly clock more than a standard, full-time workload every week. On average, principals work nearly 60 hours a week, with leaders of high-poverty schools racking up even more time, according to the first nationally representative study of how principals use their time. It was released last month by the federal Regional Education Laboratory for Northeast and Islands.
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eSchool News
Educators often talk about 21st-century skills and the benefits of incorporating communication, creativity, collaboration, problem-solving, and critical thinking into lessons. These are skills students rarely learn straight out of a textbook. The best way to teach them, we've found, is by making these skills a relevant part of their active lives. If that sounds daunting, rest assured, it doesn't always have to be. One way we have taught these skills is through project-based learning, where students apply what they've learned during a hands-on project that is relevant to the real world — and their lives.
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Edutopia (commentary)
Ben Johnson, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "I was nervous about how the ninth-grade students would react. All the tables were either against the walls or used to create the sides of a tour bus. The chairs that normally surrounded the tables were set in rows facing the projector screen as if they were looking out the window while seated on a bus. My concern was that with the chairs so close together — and no separating tables — the students would lose focus and want to talk, not listening to the tour guides as they presented on Spanish speaking cities, markets, museums and zoos."
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The Conversation
The tone of this presidential election, often called "uncivil," has led many to call for an urgent improvement of civic education in America. Civic education can teach citizens how to deliberate, even when they have political differences. It can enable citizens to find solutions to many problems such as school attendance, economic development or community safety.
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THE Journal
A new survey of 4,000 middle school students indicates that personalized learning approaches can have a positive impact on students as independent learners. The study was conducted by New Classrooms, a nonprofit organization that provides a model and curriculum for personalized learning in math. Called Teach to One: Math, the model involves a range of techniques, from classroom design to mini low-stakes assessments, but at its heart is providing individualized pathways for each learner to progress in mastery and develop as motivated thinkers and collaborators.
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MindShift
Schools are beginning to recognize that arts education is not merely a nice addition to the learning experience, but rather an important vehicle for kids to learn skills that can also be applied to their other academic studies. Arts integration has become increasingly popular because educators are finding that when art is meshed with content learning, students are more engaged and interested. However, some schools have used arts integration as an excuse to sideline trained arts teachers, a mistake if the program is truly going to uphold rigorous artistic standards alongside academic ones.
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Chicago Tribune
Tell someone at home the value of different coins and practice counting change. Retell a story you learned at school today. Play "I Spy" using only short-vowel words. Some students at Covington Elementary School in Oak Lawn are bringing home optional "un-homework" assignments like these instead of traditional worksheets this year. Second-grade teachers Jacquie Darge, Lisa Beatty and Andrea Saucedo have retooled their expectations of what kids do after school and adopted the "un-homework" approach. Darge said she found the ideas from a teacher's blog and bought materials from the teacher who designed them. "Kids say they love it," Darge said.
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Edutopia
The number of English Language Learners in the United States is growing rapidly, including many states that have not previously had large immigrant populations. As teachers try to respond to the needs of these students, here are a few basic best practices that might help. We have found that consistently using these practices makes our lessons more efficient and effective. We also feel it is important to include a few "worst" practices in the hope that they will not be repeated!
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[FreshGrade Education Inc.]
Encourage your students to guide their own learning and begin to master their destinies. In this free eBook from FreshGrade, you’ll learn how to reclaim assessment, create purposeful assessment, and implement innovative approaches with real examples of innovation from schools across the United States. EdTech RoundUp described FreshGrade as uniquely combining student-led portfolios with flexible, custom assessment and parent engagement in one. FreshGrade is used by teachers, parents, and students in all 50 states and in more than 70 countries around the world.
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Edutopia
Starting at 3 years old, students learn the critique protocol at Two Rivers Public Charter School, a pre-K to eighth-grade Expeditionary Learning Education school in Washington, D.C. By analyzing and identifying high-quality aspects of a piece of work, students can apply those high-quality attributes to their own work. The critique protocol can be done as a whole class, in small groups or in pairs.
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NPR
How do you judge how good a school is? Test scores? Culture? Attendance? In the new federal education law, states are asked to use five measures of student success. The first four are dictated by the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. Three are related to academics — like annual tests and graduation rates. The fourth measures proficiency of English language learners. The fifth is the wild card — aimed at measuring "student success or school quality" — and the law leaves it to states to decide. There are many ideas out there for what schools could choose — including suspension rates and school climate surveys.
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EdTech Magazine
As a tool for schools, the internet can be fantastic for encouraging collaboration and accessing resources, but it can also be ripe with threats. Cyberbullying. Scams. Hackers. Technological advances, like "safe search" tools and devices with built-in security protocols, have done much to help combat these issues. However, as ISTE notes, the first step is teaching kids and teens how to make the most of digital resources while staying safe.
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The Atlantic
Born in the United States, Mayra Kahori Vidaña Sanchez spent most of her childhood in Juárez, Mexico. When she was around 12, Vidaña Sanchez moved a few miles north of the border to El Paso, Texas, for school. Although technically a U.S. citizen, she spoke little English and carried a pocket dictionary to class. She spent hours listening to pop music and watching American television, trying to absorb not only a language but a culture that felt undeniably unfamiliar.
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THE Journal
By a margin of about five to one, teachers prefer to solve their own tech problems without the help of the IT department. According to a survey of more than 1,300 educators by THE Journal, educators' top choice for solving their tech troubles is online searches, with 37 percent citing that as their preferred source for help with technology. Coming in second was peers, at 23 percent. The help desk/IT department ranked third at 17 percent, followed by the instructional technologist at 11 percent. Students rounded out the top 5 preferred sources of tech help at 4 percent.
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EdSource
African-American boys in elementary school are less likely to be suspended or expelled if they have a teacher who is black, a study suggests. If black male students have black teachers, their rate of removal from school for behavioral issues is reduced by 2 or 3 percent, a small but statistically significant drop, according to a peer-reviewed study in Education Next, a journal published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The findings are based on a study of elementary school students in North Carolina.
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The New York Times
Summer is the season when children play outdoors tirelessly until nightfall, burning up all the energy they had stockpiled throughout the school year, right? Reality check: According to a new national study of younger elementary school students, the risk of gaining excessive weight is far greater during the summer then when they are in school. A nationally representative sample of 18,170 kindergartners were weighed in the early fall and again in the late spring from 2010 through 2013, when they were finishing second grade. The prevalence of children who were overweight increased to 28.7 percent from 23.3 percent. The prevalence of those who measured as obese grew to 11.5 percent from 8.9 percent. Most strikingly, according to the study in the journal Obesity, all of the increases were during the summer breaks. No increase in body mass index was noted during the school year.
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U.S. News & World Report (commentary)
Ulrich Boser, a contributor for U.S. News & World Report, writes: "While balancing work and family life is never a simple task, it often seems that public schools add to the problem. A few weeks ago, for instance, the school nurse rang me up: My 8-year-old daughter had a headache. Could I come by the school with some Tylenol? Due to school policy the school nurse couldn't administer one of the most widely used, over-the-counter drugs in the world, meaning I needed to table my work and visit the school to help give my daughter a tablespoon of basic medicine. The week before that, our school closed its doors for the day for teacher training, throwing a different wrench into my schedule. My wife and I struggled to find child care for our daughters."
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| | FEDERAL ADVOCACY AND POLICY |
The Hechinger Report
A new tool from the U.S. Department of Education will help school districts rapidly measure the results of education technology. The Ed Tech Rapid Cycle Evaluation Coach was announced at the Blended and Online Learning Symposium in San Antonio, Texas. It's still in the early stages, so those interested in using the tool must apply to be part of the inaugural group.
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Politico
State chiefs take charge on Title I spending rule: The nonprofit representing state education chiefs across the country will put out its own proposal for a wonky Title I spending rule that has sparked one of the biggest debates over implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act. The Council of Chief State School Officers is expected to release the proposal this afternoon on the "supplement, not supplant" provision of ESSA, which is meant to ensure that low-income and minority students are getting their fair share of state and local funding. The provision aims to combat a historic problem: school districts underinvesting in inner-city schools, and then using federal Title I dollars for poor students to fill those gaps.
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The Seattle Times
Efforts to improve students' educational outcomes in Washington’s public schools must include a closer look at attendance. Nearly 15 percent of Washington students are chronically absent, which means they miss at least 18 days of school a year, according to state education officials. It doesn't matter if those absences include a family trip to Disneyland, chronic illness or just a lack of interest in what is happening in the classroom. Research shows a direct connection between chronic absence and dropout rates. By sixth grade, chronic absence is a leading indicator that a student will drop out of high school, according to the national organization Attendance Works. By ninth grade, attendance is a better indicator of dropout rates than eighth-grade test scores.
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WRAL
The chairman of the State Board of Education said board members "need to encourage and prod the General Assembly to take action" to increase the pay of public school administrators in the state. Chairman Bill Cobey's comments came after a presentation showing how pay for principals and assistant principals has changed over the years. North Carolina ranks 50th in the nation, including Washington, D.C., for principal pay. Under the state's pay structure, some teachers are paid more than assistant principals.
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NAESP
As principal and instructional leader, I observe classrooms daily. About three years ago, I realized that though my staff members shared ideas with one another in meetings or in the lunchroom, they didn't see what I saw on my rounds: firsthand observations, new ideas, and best practices. That changed when we came upon the idea of staff instructional rounds.
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NAESP
NAESP will be hosting a webinar intended to gather suggestions about the design of the 2018 NAESP 10-Year Study from practicing principals. Participants will be asked to review the 2008 version of the 10 year study prior to the webinar and then join other webinar participants in a discussion about suggested changes to the survey. Your input will help NAESP craft the best survey possible to gather important information from principals across the United States. The webinar takes place Monday, Nov. 14, 4–5 p.m. EST.
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