Pontiac Promise / Update!

Bill may bring tuition help for Pontiac district students

Friday, December 26, 2008 10:22 AM EST
By RANDAL YAKEYOf The Oakland Press

Students in the Pontiac School District could get a boost from legislation passed in Lansing.State Rep. Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, chairman of the House Education Committee, said the Michigan Promise Zone Act has passed the House and Senate and is headed to Gov. Jennifer Granholm to become law.

The plan is designed to increase the accessibility of higher education by providing tuition assistance.“In order for us to grow Michigan’s economy and create good-paying jobs for our workers, we need a strong and vibrant workforce,”

Melton said.Melton said the plan was not meant to be the cure-all for college funding woes for Pontiac students, but that it was a good first step in getting money for students who otherwise would not be going to college.“There will be an 11-member authority board established,” Melton said.

“This will not be run by the school district or the city, because we have several different cities in the Pontiac School District.”The geographical boundaries of the Pontiac School District include all of the city of Pontiac, portions of Auburn Hills, Lake Angelus and Sylvan Lake, and the townships of Bloomfield, Orion, Waterford and West Bloomfield.

The Pontiac School District superintendent will establish the requirement for students receiving the funding. The requirements will most likely be based on how long the student lived in the district, grade-point average and ability to secure scholarships and grants.“We limited it to the 15 Michigan public universities, and some private colleges and community colleges,” said Melton.

“If you go to a private school like Baker or Lawrence Tech, we cap the tuition you can get at the average you pay at a public university.”The authority board will also have to raise the first two years of funding on its own.Melton said he has already contacted Oakland University, Oakland Community College, Fifth Third Bank and Flagstar Bank authorities about helping with funding.

He has also contacted Chrysler Corp. and General Motors.Under the legislation, up to 10 Promise Zones will be authorized throughout the state in areas that have a combination of low rates of educational attainment and high rates of poverty and unemployment.

The Pontiac School District has already submitted an application to be the state’s first Promise Zone.

Melton’s plan is based on the Kalamazoo Promise — the nation’s first Promise Zone plan — which guarantees graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools free college tuition at any university or community college in Michigan. The Kalamazoo plan was funded by a wealthy benefactor.

Melton said after two years of raising money for the district, other sources will become available.“After the third year, we will be then be able to capture half the state education tax in the zone,” Melton said. “That money can then help this Promise Zone authority capture some revenue.

We may also have to continue to raise money.”

According to the House Fiscal Agency, the legislation could capture over $46.2 million based on data on the Kalamazoo Promise Zone.

The Fiscal Agency said that the legislation could have a significant effect on the School Aid Fund.

Melton said he did expect Granholm to sign the legislation sometime before the end of the year.

GIVE STUDENTS ALTERNATIVE ENERGY EDGE by DESIGN!

Photos by ANNIE O'NEILL/Special to the Free Press

St. Clair County students work on a solar-hydrogen fuel cell car. From left: Jason Hoogerhyde, John Freeman, Cody Benedict and Evan Miller. Rather than learning TV repair, students are getting trained in alternative energy.

Schools to invest in alternative energy, give students edge

BY PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI • FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER • December 27, 2008

St. Clair County RESA Career Technical Center students will be calculating actual energy outputs from school-owned windmills, solar panels and a hydroelectric plant.

In Warren Consolidated Schools, students will find lessons from a district-owned wind power station integrated into their classes.

Both programs are the result of a trend by a growing number of schools to meld alternative energy into their lesson plans.

"I think kids are interested in this type of thing. And a lot of us see it as the future, to lessen our reliance on nonrenewable sources. And there are going to be jobs there," said Dan DeGrow, superintendent of St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency.

St. Clair RESA plans to invest up to $450,000, depending on how much grant money it receives, in three wind turbines -- each about 100 feet tall -- solar panels next to the turbines and a mini-hydro plant. It will be working with local governments on getting site permits.

Gone are the days of students taking high school electronics to become TV repairpeople. The jobs are moving to other categories, such as alternative energy technicians.

"What we decided was we wanted a way to teach traditional electronics but within a more current context," said Pat Yanik, director of career and technical education for RESA.

Beginning next fall, students will monitor the electricity generated by their three alternative energy sources, learn how to convert the power to actual energy and make decisions on how to distribute their self-generated electricity to RESA facilities. The actual energy generated will be small, but the lessons will be huge.

"With the energy crisis and the government push for it at the federal level and the state level, alternative energy seemed to be a pretty going item that students and parents can understand," said electronics teacher Zack Diatchun.

The Warren Consolidated Schools Board of Education has approved up to $9,000 for a wind spire -- a smaller (30-foot high) version of the windmill-style turbine -- to establish a district-wide alternative energy institute, said Superintendent Robert Livernois. Like St. Clair RESA, Warren Consolidated also hopes much of the cost will be offset by grants.

"The sky's the limit for us. That's what's so exciting about it from a K-12 perspective, you can talk to a second-grader and a 12th-grader," Livernois said. "Our belief is you've got to start somewhere, so as we launch this institute, it's really designed to begin cultivating awareness."

Students at St. Clair RESA have been told their program will open in the fall.

"It doesn't seem like something that they put into a high school-type course, but it's a really good idea they're putting it in," said Cody Benedict, 17, a senior from Yale High School who will be going to school for another year and taking the energy program. "It's going to be a larger range of stuff to learn for jobs."

There's no timetable for the Warren Consolidated program yet, but Livernois expects there will be varying components of alternative energy that will be applicable to most grades.

"We're going to use it in a study of just how much energy you can produce in the community," said Mark Supal, a technology teacher at the Macomb Mathematics Science and Technology Center, where the wind spire will be located.

Even students who won't be around for the new programs recognize the possibilities.

"I got accepted to Michigan Tech ... and I'm probably going to take electrical engineering, but I'm probably going to branch into some kind of alternative energy," said Dalton Pelc, 17, a senior from Kimball Township attending Port Huron High School. "That's what we need, and that's because that's what the economy needs."

Contact PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI at 586-826-7262 or mmwalsh@freepress.com.

Pontiac Schools Restructuring Update

PONTIAC CENTRAL to Close?

December 17, 2008

By DIANA DILLABER MURRAY
Of The Oakland Press

Teens in the Pontiac school district can pretty much assume they will be going to class at Pontiac Northern High School in the fall.

Although the Pontiac Board of Education will not approve a district restructuring plan until Jan. 26, the majority indicated in a study session Tuesday that they have accepted the recommendation of a community advisory committee to consolidate Central and Northern high schools at Northern’s campus at Perry and Madison.

They also are leaning toward a proposal that would keep Madison and Jefferson open and about half the district’s elementaries.

However, there may be disagreement on which elementary schools should remain open before a decision is final.

The recommendations of the Pontiac Redesign Committee for Instructional Effectiveness and Financial Efficiency were presented Monday night and discussed by the board at a study session Tuesday afternoon.

During their two months of work, the goal of the committee was to downsize buildings to better fit a reduced enrollment of 6,700 students, offset a projected $10 million deficit and improve instructional programs.

The committee made its recommendations after weeks of study and input from three public forums.

“During this process, many meetings and many hours were dedicated to developing this advisory recommendation,” acting Superintendent Linda Paramore said.

The board favored the committee’s “Option One,” which proposed to retain the current alignment of three types of schools: kindergarten through sixth grade, seventh through ninth grade, and 10th through 12th grade.

“Last year, we went toward K-6 buildings, and we even said we wanted the ninth grade by itself and even a 10th-12th grade high school,” said board President Damon Dorkins. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Schools recommended for this configuration are Northern; Madison and Jefferson middle schools; and Herrington, Rogers, Lebaron, Emerson, Owen, Alcott and Whitman elementary schools.

The other option would feature only two types of schools, kindergarten through eighth grade and ninth through 12th grade.

Under that option, the district would keep open Northern and five K-8 buildings; the combined Jefferson/ Whittier and Lincoln/ Whitman; and Madison, Herrington and Rogers elementary schools.

Whether the school would have a new name for the single high school with which all the district’s students could identify has not yet come up publicly as a topic. Key instructional decisions and budget amendments cannot be made until the board votes on the building configurations.

During Tuesday’s fourhour discussion, trustees also appeared to favor a variation of option one suggested by board Vice President Gill Garrett. He proposed moving all seventh and eighth graders into Madison Middle School, which is on the same campus as Northern and moving elementary students from Crofoot, Longfellow, Franklin and Whitmer Human Resource Center to the Jefferson Middle School/Whittier Elementary campus.

Garrett suggested Central and Northern ninth-grade academies — which all trustees want to continue — be brought together at either a wing of Madison or a wing of Northern.

“We would have the ninth-grade academy on the same campus as Northern, and if you want summer school between eighth grade and high school, you could have it at Northern. You would have continuity and the parent piece is important,” he said.

Both options by the committee recommended that Northern be operated by a private entity, something the board did not discuss Tuesday.

Paramore said committee members used only data that included capital outlay per pupil, energy cost per pupil, building capacity, feasibility, whether the building would need retooling, and the density of the student population around each building to make their recommendations about which schools to keep in use.

The first time they voted “blind” without knowing the name of the school. They voted a second time with the names of the schools.

Trustee Christopher Northcross said the data provided to the committee to make the decision on which schools to close was from two separate entities and did not agree. He and other board members asked the board for more concise information on which to make their decision on school closings.

In addition, several board members wanted to consider the demographics of which schools they leave open.

Trustees agreed with the committee’s recommendations to keep Frost open for the preschool academy and the Kennedy Center for special education.

The committee also recommended the alternative high school now at Bethune school continue as a separate entity at an alternative site. But neither the committee nor the board said where that site would be, other than it won’t be at Bethune.

Important considerations were given to conditions of each building, adequate space for elementary playgrounds, bus and car student drop-offs, athletic grounds for secondary buildings and adequate land for expansion when enrollment begins to rise again, including space for gymnasiums and cafeterias.

Safety was also a large concern for all sites, both in terms of egress and community conditions.

Both Central and Northern have pools, gyms, strong technology infrastructure and cafeterias. Positives for Central are a bigger kitchen, central location and more air conditioning than Northern.

But at Northern, there is more acreage, windows that open, a more secure site, track and other athletic fields and a proximity to Oakland Schools Technical Campus-Northeast.

The negatives for Northern include projections of higher capital outlay costs over the next three years. But Central has windows that do not open, little to no acreage and some questionable building conditions for which costs to correct are not yet determined.

FYI

The board will vote on the option for restructuring at the regular meeting at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 5; will hold a study session on data to determine which buildings should remain in use; will hold a public forum on the recommendations at 6 p.m. Jan. 13 at Whitmer Human Resource Center; will hold a study session at 12:30 p.m. Jan. 15 and will vote on a plan at the 5:30 p.m. Jan. 26 meeting.

Immerse Students in 21st Century Real-World Digital Learning Environments

Real World, San Diego: Hands-On Learning at High Tech High

Students prepare for the real world through technology-enabled projects.

by Grace Rubenstein

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AUDIO SLIDE SHOW: All Together Now: A Teacher's Life at High Tech High

Photography by David Julian. Writing and audio editing by Maya Walden and Allie Richardson. Produced by Grace Rubenstein. Postproduction support by Shari Wargo.

As I navigated her busy classroom with a microphone this fall, sophomore Maya Walden paused in researching the root causes of genocide to ask what I planned to do with my recordings. I explained that I would use editing software to meld the best clips into a soundtrack for an audio slide show, to appear online.

"Oh," she said. "We could probably do that for you." (And they did. Check out their work.)

The episode reflects not only the confidence and abilities of one good student but also the entire attitude of High Tech High. The San Diego charter school exists to prepare students -- all kinds of students -- to be savvy, creative, quick-thinking adults and professionals in a modern world. It has scrapped a lot of what's arbitrary and outdated about traditional schooling -- classroom design, divisions between subjects, independence (read: isolation) from the community, and assessments that only one teacher ever sees. (Watch a series of videos about High Tech High.)

Instead, the textbook-free school fosters personalized project learning with pervasive connections to the community. Any visitor can see the evidence in the students' engagement and the eye-popping projects that adorn almost every corner and wall -- many of which the teens have exhibited to local businesspeople, not just teachers. As the school's name implies, technology enables many of the projects students create. And teachers routinely craft lessons that blend subjects, reflecting how interwoven they truly are.

Newcomers to the robotics elective learn the basics of building an axle.

Credit: David Julian

On all fronts, the teaching and learning experience here is keenly attuned to the demands of today's world, not the industrial world that existed a hundred years ago when the American school model came into being.

"How many teachers have heard those questions: 'Why are we learning this?' 'What does this have to do with what I want to do in my future or my life?'" says Spencer Pforsich, Walden's humanities teacher. "When students see the interconnectedness of the subjects they're learning, they feel it's more relevant, more meaningful, and more authentic than if they're working in isolation."

A coalition of San Diego business leaders and educators, led by former Qualcomm executive Gary Jacobs, launched High Tech High in 2000. The institution has expanded from a single school with 200 students to a network of eight schools spanning grades K-12 and serving 2,500 students. It has become a school-development organization trying to grow the number of schools built on the same model, and its connection to local businesses has remained a defining feature. Admission is via random lottery. So far, 99 percent of graduates from all the campuses have entered college.

At the original campus, the Gary & Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High, housed in a former U.S. Navy training center near the San Diego airport, the building itself invites inquiry. Most classrooms are glassed-in pods within a single open space, a design that makes all the classrooms and common spaces feel connected while still providing a quiet space for work. The transparency is no accident; administrators here value teacher learning as highly as student learning -- so highly, in fact, that High Tech High has started its own graduate school of education -- and they want students to see that. The 35-foot ceilings and the skylights and exposed metal beams make the space industrial yet inviting, a combination that evokes a sense of people and machines working in harmony.

The expansive main hallway.

Credit: David Julian

Projects form the core of the learning experience at High Tech High. In some classes, like Jay Vavra's junior biology course on conservation forensics using DNA barcoding, a full five-week period consists of a single project. In many cases, community members participate as experts, clients, or final judges. Teachers try to design the projects to mesh multiple subject areas, allow students the flexibility to choose their own focus and approach and, ideally, serve a useful purpose beyond schoolwork.

In Vavra's class this fall, pairs of students were making observations about meat samples in test tubes and preparing to isolate the DNA to identify which meat was which. (Construction of Vavra's lab was underwritten by Biocom, a consortium of southern California life sciences companies.) Once the teens learned the procedure called crude cell extraction, says Vavra, who holds a PhD in marine biology, their project would be to find ways to do it more cheaply and efficiently. Ultimately, conservationists will use the improved procedure in African street markets to identify meat from illegally poached animals.

"Oh, that's strong!" says J.V. Hill, a junior with a black buzz cut, sniffing one especially pungent sample. "We have to write that down."

A biotechnology student uses a gazelle leg to study form and function in nature.

Credit: David Julian

The kids seem nonchalant about the lofty purpose of their work; this is just a regular day in class. But compared to the textbook-heavy work their friends in other schools do, they feel they have the much better deal. "The hands-on experience of being able to do it instead of just reading about it -- it's exciting to know that you're actually doing something to help an issue in the world," Hill says. "I like feeling that."

Down the hall, students in Jeff Robin and Blair Hatch's team-taught art and biology/multimedia (yes, biology/multimedia) class work at computers designing informational DVDs about blood-related health issues. By semester's end, the teens plan to incorporate the DVDs (played on laptops) into art pieces that would appear at a local gallery and potentially be auctioned to benefit the San Diego Blood Bank. (See the class's project Web page.)

That same day, David Berggren's Engineering Design and Development students are off campus meeting with community groups for whom they will spend the semester designing a customized tool. One student team plans to make dog-obedience signs for the San Diego Humane Society; two others working with the San Diego Oceans Foundation will build a fish pen to protect 11,500 sea bass from avian predators.

In Pforsich's humanities class, the genocide research under way by Maya Walden and her peers is a lead-up to the Waterways to Peace project. The joint effort by Pforsich and math/science teacher Andrew Lerario will require students to research the African political struggles caused by a scarcity of natural resources (such as water) and create a documentary film and a model water-purification plant. As usual, students will exhibit their final work before peers, teachers, parents, and members of the community.

John Andy Phillips of the Zoological Society of San Diego mentors students on a biomimicry project.

Credit: David Julian

High Tech High educators shore up this real-world connection with personalization, paying attention to individual students' needs and empowering them to match their projects to their passions. Juniors spend a full semester, eight hours a week, working at internships tailored to their needs and interests. Almost every adult at the school serves as an adviser to ten students, meeting at least weekly with the group and keeping each advisee for all four years. Pairs of core-subject teachers (one humanities, one science/math) share the same two classes of students so they can collaborate on cross-disciplinary projects and better support students and each other.

Frequent assessment also underpins the work done here, where even a D is considered a failing grade. Rob Riordan, a school founder who holds the self-created and slightly tongue-in-cheek title emperor of rigor, explains that at High Tech High, "assessment is an episode of learning. It's not an endpoint. It's going on one way or another just about every day." These episodes take the form of everything from quizzes to oral presentations to peer review. For the big projects, students exhibit their final product to the community.

It sounds surprising, but 98 percent of the school's funding comes from its $6,900-per-pupil allocation. An influx of start-up grants and private donations helped the original High Tech High get off the ground, but now it runs on about the same budget as a traditional school. Community partnerships help, as does the administration's tight focus on empowering teachers (an energetic bunch -- the average age across all High Tech High campuses is thirty-one). Founder and CEO Larry Rosenstock calls himself "support staff."

Art teacher Jeff Robin has seen how all this hands-on experience pays off: Some of his science-minded students have gone to work in a blood lab at a nearby hospital, where Robin's father is chief of pathology. Though they've signed on as technicians or research assistants, the teens have quickly found their coworkers calling on them for skills beyond their job descriptions, such as presentations and Web design.

"They have all these skills that nobody else in the workplace has," says Robin, "and the employers need them."

Grace Rubenstein is a staff writer and multimedia developer for Edutopia.

Transition Brief: Thriving in the 21st Century

The Partnership Offers Recommendations to Help the Obama White House Forge a 21st Century Workforce

Organization Publishes Presidential Transition Brief Aimed at Ensuring Americans Thrive in the 21st Century

TUCSON, AZ — Nov. 18, 2008 — At a time when America faces unprecedented challenges to its economy, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has released A Transition Brief: Policy Recommendations on Preparing Americans for the Global Skills Race, which offers broad proposals for forging a workforce and creating an education system that will thrive in the 21st century.

The brief notes that the current economic challenges cannot be adequately addressed without focusing on America’s competitiveness, which is intrinsically tied to the ability of Americans to effectively compete in the new global economy. Consequently, the next administration must concentrate on helping every American obtain the skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving and effective communicating, that are required to be successful.

“Fundamental changes in the economy, jobs and businesses have reshaped industry and the nature of work, and are driving new and different skill demands,” said Paige Kuni, worldwide manager of K-12 education for Intel Corporation and chair of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. “Competing nations understand that the key to economic prosperity is creating a flexible, adaptable workforce with diverse 21st century skill sets. We must focus our attention on closing this international achievement gap.”

While the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) attempts to address the achievement gap between minorities and low-income students and their more affluent peers, the 21st century skills achievement gap between American students – even top performers – and their international counterparts is widening, according to the brief.

To ensure that the American economy is strong and viable and students graduate high school capable of prospering in college and the 21st century workplace, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills offers the following recommendations to the next administration:

→ Lead: Advocate 21st century skills as a major theme of this presidency, beginning with the Inaugural Address and a White House Summit on 21st Century Skills in 2009.

→ Mobilize: Coordinate the policies and actions of federal agencies in promoting and creating an aligned, 21st century public education and workforce development system, including the reauthorization of ESEA and other federal legislation.

• Establish a senior advisor for 21st century skills and workforce development at the White House.
• Form an Office of 21st Century Skills within the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Education at the U.S. Department of Education.
• Create an Office of 21st Century Skills within the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Labor at the U.S. Department of Labor.

→ Empower: Support states and communities with investments to build a strong infrastructure and capacity for preparing students, workers and citizens with 21st century skills.

• Create a significant Global Competitiveness Research and Development Fund for U.S. education, and target a quarter of the funding to innovation in 21st century skills.
• Make the assessment of 21st century skills a priority.
• Support states’ ability to meet accountability requirements and foster 21st century skills.
• Ensure that schools are equipped with a 21st century technology infrastructure and 21st century technology tools.

“The Partnership’s work in states and districts around the country has succeeded because of our unique collaboration among business, education and policymakers. We need to bring this same spirit of partnership to the federal discussion of 21st century skills,” said Ken Kay, president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. “We offer this transition brief as a constructive starting point for what we imagine will be a tremendously positive dialogue with the incoming administration on the future of 21st century skills and American education. We are prepared to help in any way we can to support the Obama administration in making education policy a central part of our U.S. competitiveness policy.”

The brief is located at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills web site.

Transformation Toolkit!

Saturday, October 25, 2008

School 2.0 Transformation Toolkit - A Recommended Resource for Innovative Educators to "Let the conversation begin!"

A long-time fan of School 2.0, I only just recently discovered their “Transformation Toolkit." It appears to be a wonderful tool to help bring teaching, learning and leading into the 21st Century and seems like a terrific guide to all the great School 2.0 tools. Below is an overview and outline of what you’ll find inside this 77 page guide.

The Transformation Toolkit: Let the conversation begin!

These Transformation Tools are designed to provide individual schools and school districts with a menu of meeting facilitation tools, templates, and activities that enable the broad range of stakeholders - students, teachers, principals, chief technology officers, parents, community members and policymakers – to engage in a series of conversations that support strategic planning for education and technology.

These visioning and planning activities can be used in the order they are presented, or can be selected and combined in any fashion to meet school or district needs. The capstone of this collection is a process for developing and monitoring an implementation plan that includes the identification of responsible persons and timelines.

Theses tools lead to the creation of a set of living documents that capture the community’s education vision and that serve to guide the school or district through the process of creating learning environments that are future-focused and which leverage technology to be both engaging and productive.

Table of Contents

I. Give One, Get One
This opening activity provides participants with an opportunity to get to know each other while
exploring ways that integrating technology into the instructional program can enhance learning for all students.
II. Technology Shared Language Activity
This activity provides participants with the background knowledge and shared vocabulary necessary to meaningfully participate in the technology visioning and planning activities.
III. Introduction to School 2.0 Map
It is important that participants become very familiar with the School 2.0 map. This activity provides an opportunity for participants to explore the map in depth, reflect on the interdependent components and discover new ideas and practices.
IV. People Wheel Activity
Assuming that the ultimate goal of stakeholders in School 2.0 is to design the “next generation of
school” that ultimately prepares students for the 21st century, this activity provides an opportunity for all participants to understand the perspectives of the different stakeholder groups in a school community.
V. Process Area
Now that the specific needs and roles of each stakeholder have been established, participants will identify ways technology can enable stakeholders to address the identified needs.
VI. TechTacks Activity
This activity provides participants with the opportunity to use what they have learned in the previous activities to create a technology equipped 21st century classroom.
VII. Technology Visioning Process
This visioning activity provides participants an opportunity to efficiently draft an instructional technology vision for their district or school.
VIII. Give One, Get One for Technology Administrators and Principals
This activity sets the stage for Chief Technology Officers, Directors of Technology, Principals, Lead Technology Specialists, and Central Officeb Instructional and Support Staff to participate in writing a vision statement for their district.
IX. Challenge Scenarios
This activity provides opportunities for groups to focus on and respond to some common technology challenges faced by school staff and communities, and central office and school-based administrators.
X. Introduction to Strategic and Technology Planning
Strategic Technology Plan: This activity provides a foundation for the technology planning process. It allows participants to gain the information and background knowledge necessary to begin their own process for developing their strategic technology planning. Implementation Plan: After completing the creation of the Strategic Technology Plan, use this activity to develop an implementation plan that supports the previously-developed technology vision and sets their strategic plan in motion.

21st Century Digital Learning Environments (Pedagogy)

21st Century Pedagogy

Even if you have a 21st Century classroom (flexible and adaptable); even if you are a 21st century teacher ; (an adaptor, a communicator, a leader and a learner, a visionary and a model, a collaborator and risk taker) even if your curriculum reflects the new paradigm and you have the facilities and resources that could enable 21st century learning - you will only be a 21st century teacher if how you teach changes as well. Your pedagogy must also change.

So what is 21st Century pedagogy?

Definition:
pedagogy - noun the profession, science, or theory of teaching.
Source: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/pedagogy?view=uk

How we teach must reflect how our students learn. It must also reflect the world our students will move into. This is a world which is rapidly changing, connected, adapting and evolving. Our style and approach to teaching must emphasise the learning in the 21st century.

The key features of 21st Century Pedagogy are:
? building technological, information and media fluencies [Ian Jukes]
? Developing thinking skills
? making use of project based learning
? using problem solving as a teaching tool
? using 21st C assessments with timely, appropriate and detailed feedback and reflection
? It is collaborative in nature and uses enabling and empowering technologies
? It fosters Contextual learning bridging the disciplines and curriculum areas

Knowledge
Knowledge does not specifically appear in the above diagram. Does this mean that we do not teach content or knowledge? Of course not. While a goal we often hear is for our students to create knowledge, we must scaffold and support this constructivist process. The process was aptly describe in a recent presentation by Cisco on Education 3.0 [Michael Stevenson VP Global Education Cisco 2007]

We need to teach knowledge or content in context with the tasks and activities the students are undertaking. Our students respond well to real world problems. Our delivery of knowledge should scaffold the learning process and provide a foundation for activities. As we know from the learning pyramid content delivered without context or other activity has a low retention rate.

Thinking skills
Thinking Skills are a key area. While much of the knowledge we teach may be obsolete within a few years, thinking skills acquired will remain with our students for their entire lives. Industrial age education has had a focus on Lower Order Thinking Skills. In Bloom's taxonomy the lower order thinking skills are the remembering and understanding aspects. 21st Century pedagogy focuses on the moving students from Lower Order Thinking Skills to Higher Order Thinking Skills.

The 21st Century Teacher scaffolds the learning of students, building on a basis of knowledge recall and comprehension to use and apply skills; to analyse and evaluate process, outcomes and concequences, and to make, create and innovate. For each discipline in our secondary schools the process is subtly different.

Collaboration
The 21st century is an age of collaboration as well as the Information Age. 21st Century students, our digital natives, are collaborative. The growth of social networking tools, like bebo and myspace and the like, is fueled by Digital natives and Gen Y. The world, our students are graduating into is a collaborative one.

Collaborative projects such as Julie Lindsay's and Vicki Davis's Flatclassroom project and the Horizon Project, iearns and many others are brilliant examples of collaboration in the classrooms and beyond. These projects, based around tools like ning or wikis, provide students and staff a medium to build and share knowledge and develop understanding.

For example:

My own students are collaborating with students from three other schools, one in Brisbane, another in Qatar and a third in Vienna; on developing resources for a common assessment item. Collaboratively, they are constructing base knowledge on the technologies pertent to the topic. They are examining, evaluating and analysing the social and ethical impacts of the topic. But perhaps even more holistically they are being exposed to different interpretations, cultures and perspectives - Developing an international awareness which will be a key attribute in our global future.

URL: http://casestudy-itgs.wikispaces.com


Don Tapscott in Wikinomics, gives are many of examples of the business world adopting and succeeding by using global collaboration.

In a recent blog post from the Official google Blog, Google identified these as key traits or abilities in 1st Century Employees...

"... communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn't useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions."
"... team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team's expectations. "

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/our-googley-advice-to-students-major-in.html

So to prepare our students, our teaching should also model collaboration. A vast array of collaborative tools are available to - wikis, classroom blogs, collaborative document tools,social networks, learning management systems - Many are available at no cost. If you have not yet tried them, look at:
? wikis - wet paint and wiki spaces
? Classroom blogs - edublogs, classroomblogmeister
? Collaborative document tools - Google documents, zoho documents
? Social Networks - ning
? learning managements systems - Moodle etc
These tools are enablers of collaboration, and therefore enablers of 21st century teaching and learning.

Collaboration is not a 21st century skill it is a 21st century essential.

If we look at UNESCO's publication "The four pillars of Education, Learning: The Treasure within" Collaboration is a key element of each of the four pillars.

• Learning to know
• Learning to do
• Learning to live together
• Learning to be

(http://www.unesco.org/delors/fourpil.htm)

Collaboration is not limited to the confines of the classroom. Students and teachers collaborate across the planet, and beyond the time constraints of the teaching day. Students work with other students regionally, nationally and globally. Learners seek and work with experts as required. This is 21st Century Collaboration

Real World, Inter-disciplinary & project based learning
21st Century students do not want abstract examples rather they focus on real world problems. They want what they learn in one subject to be relevant and applicable in another curriculum area. As teachers we need to extend our areas of expertise, collaborate with our teaching peers in other subjects and the learning in one discipline to learning in another.
Projects should bring together and reinforce learning across disciplines. The sum of the students learning will be greater than the individual aspects taught in isolation. This is a holistic overview of the education process which builds on and values every aspect of the 21st Century students education.

Assessment
Assessment is still a key part of 21st Century Pedagogy. This generation of students responds well to clear goals and objectives, assessed in a transparent manner.

Students should be involved in all aspects of the assessment process. Students who are involved in setting and developing assessment criteria, marking and moderation will have a clearer understanding of:
? what they are meant to do,
? how they are meant to do it,
? why it is significant
? why it is important.
Such students will undoubtedly do better and use the assessment process as a part of their learning.

Students are often painfully honest about their own performance and that of their peers. They will, in a collaborative project, fairly assess those who contribute and those who don't.

This is their education, their learning and their future - they must be involved in it.

Linked to assessment is the importance of timely, appropriate, detailed and specific feedback. Feedback as a learning tool, is second only to the teaching of thinking skills [Michael Pohl]. As 21st Century teachers, we must provide and facilitate safe and appropriate feedback, developing an environment where students can safely and supportively be provided with and provide feedback. Students are often full of insight and may have as valid a perspective as we teachers do.

Fluency
What is fluency and why is it better than Literacy? Ian Jukes introduced this concept at NECC. He asserts that students need to move beyond literacy to fluency. They need to be
fluent in:
? The use of technology = technological fluency,
? Collecting, processing, manipulating and validating information = information fluency,
? using, selecting, viewing and manipulating media = media fluency,

What is fluency compared to literacy? A person who is fluent in a language does not need to think about speech, or reading rather it is an unconscious process of understanding. A person who is literate in the language must translate the speech or text. This applies to our students and their use of 21st century media. We need them to be unconsciously competent in the use and manipulation of media, technology and information.

The conscious competence model illustrates the difference between Literacy and Fluency. The person or student who is literate is in the conscious competence category. The person or student who is fluent is in the unconscious competence category.

As educators, we must identify, develop and reinforce these skill sets until students become literate and then fluent..

Conclusion and the path forward.

To teach using 21st Century pedagogy, educators must be student centric. Our curricula and assessments must inclusive, interdisciplinary and contextual; based on real world examples.

Students must be key participants in the assessment process, intimate in it from start to finish, from establishing purpose and criteria, to assessing and moderating.
Educators must establish a safe environment for students to collaborate in but also to discuss, reflect and provide and receive feedback in.

We should make use of collaborative and project based learning, using enabling tools and technologies to facilitate this.

We must develop, in students, key fluencies and make use of higher order thinking skills. Our tasks, curricula, assessments and learning activities must be designed to build on the Lower Order Thinking Skills and to develop Higher Order Thinking Skills.

Acknowledgements:
For being a brilliant critical friend, thanks for the advise and especially for the grammar - Marg McLeod.

By Andrew Churches

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education

Reform Starts Now: Obama Picks Arne Duncan

His secretary of education selection shows education is a priority.

by Grace Rubenstein
December 16, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama talked reform while announcing Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan as the next U.S. secretary of education.

"For Arne, school reform isn't just a theory in a book, it's the cause of his life," Obama said at Tuesday's press conference. Obama specifically mentioned pay-for-performance teacher salaries and charter-schools development as strategies with strong potential.

"If charter schools work, let's try that," Obama said. "Let's not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids."

Duncan described his clear-eyed view of education in a June 2007 interview [1] with Edutopia when he said, "Quality public education is the civil rights issue of our generation."

Duncan, known for transforming underperforming schools and experimenting with new models, has a record as a pragmatist with a taste for innovations. His version of reform, judging by his record, centers on boosting teacher quality and supporting students with added services such as after-school programs. In the Chicago Public Schools [2], where 85 percent of the 400,000-plus students live below the poverty line, test scores, attendance, and teacher retention all went up during Duncan's seven-year tenure, while the dropout rate declined.

The Buzz
For weeks, pundits, educators, and education bloggers have speculated on what Obama's pick would show about his true beliefs on education.

"Arne Duncan has a type of personality that Obama seems to prefer, which is a pragmatist who will bring about change, but he'll do it in a way that will minimize confrontation in conflict," says Jack Jennings, president of the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy [3]. "He's brought about change in Chicago, but it hasn't been a head-on clash with the teachers' union. He's done it in a way that they all walk away from the table congratulating each other."

Supporters say Duncan has the right constitution for the job. On both substance and style, he has won praise from divergent interest groups, including the American Federation of Teachers [4] and the New York City-based Democrats for Education Reform [5].

Duncan shut down Chicago schools that performed poorly and reopened them with entirely new staffs. He started coaching and mentoring programs for teachers. He also supported a boom in new charter schools with diverse models, from military academies to single-sex schools, and piloted a program to pay teachers bonuses for top performance -- two controversial innovations Obama supports.

An Uncertain Future

Of course, an education secretary can't exactly dictate reform from on high. But he can use the bully pulpit to put a spotlight on certain problems and solutions, says Jennings, and hand out grants to support new innovations. He can also provoke change through regulations -- most notably those that guide implementation of the No Child Left Behind law.

On NCLB, Duncan is a middle-of-the-roader [6]; he supports the law's goals of high expectations and accountability but has challenged Congress to improve it by doubling its funding and amending it "to give schools, districts, and states the maximum amount of flexibility possible."

Not the least of Duncan's hurdles will be the nation's preoccupation with the economic crisis. In a sign of the media's interest in education, the first question at Obama and Duncan's press conference after the announcement of Duncan's nomination was about the Federal Reserve Bank lowering its interest rates.

The financial squeeze hitting schools could hinder Duncan's efforts.

Making money and resources key to success, Duncan and Obama both made the case for education by defining it as the path to prosperity; Obama called it the "single biggest determinant" of the economy's long-term health.

"We're not going to transform every school overnight," Obama said. "What we can expect is that each and every day, we are thinking of new, innovative ways to make the schools better. That is what Arne has done. That's going to be his job. That's going to be his task."

Grace Rubenstein is a staff writer and multimedia producer at Edutopia.

UPDATE!

The Oakland Press (theoaklandpress.com), Serving Oakland County

Pontiac schools try to avoid takeover

Tuesday, December 16, 2008 8:57 AM EST

By DIANA DILLABER MURRAY
Of The Oakland Press

School officials in Pontiac are taking steps to avoid Detroit’s fate of having an emergency manager appointed to take over the district’s financial operations.

State School Superintendent Michael Flanagan announced last week he will name a financial manager for Detroit Schools “to balance the district’s budget, pay its bills, manage the spending and establish strong and reliable financial systems.”

In reaction, acting Pontiac Superintendent Linda Paramore and Deputy Superintendent for Finance Felix Chow said this week they are confident the administration and school board are taking steps now that will prevent such an action in Pontiac, which is projecting a $10 million deficit by the end of the year.

“I don’t think the state will have to do that,” Paramore said. “This board has already shown they have the will to make changes and we don’t have the history Detroit has.”

Information at recent public forums indicated the Pontiac

district will be downsized from 20 buildings for 20,000 children to around half that, to be more efficient and avoid such a large deficit.

Merging of the high schools and consolidating of other schools is likely to better fit the current enrollment of 6,700 enrollment in kindergarten through 12th grade, and still allow for some growth.

“This is the first time the board has had to move in this direction, and Dr. Chow is very capable of leading us in this planned realignment and keeping us from the same errors,” Paramore said.

Board Vice President Gill Garrett, chairman of the instructional subcommittee, said the board is “taking a more proactive approach.”

“Our process has everyone involved and we are opening it to everyone before the board makes a decision,” he said.

School officials have appointed a community advisory committee that is working to come up with recommendations on how to downsize the district. The effort is expected to greatly reduce the projected budget deficit and improve educational programs by restructuring and consolidating the schools.

Garrett noted the Bloomfield Hills School District’s administrative proposal to close two more schools to maintain financial stability.

“They understand it is not the schools that educate kids. It’s the teachers who educate kids,” he said.

State Department of Education spokeswoman Jan Ellis said the department is aware Pontiac “was concerned about a deficit, as are many other districts,” but the state is not prepared to send in an emergency financial manager anytime soon.

The state has in its possession the balanced 2006-2007 audit, Ellis said, with $4 million in the fund balance submitted by the state’s Nov. 15 deadline. So there is no action under consideration, because the $10 million is only a projection, she said.

“If Pontiac does end up with a deficit, final audited numbers will not come into the department until Nov. 15 next year,” Ellis said. “We will, of course, work with the school district to develop a plan to eliminate the deficit and that is usually done over several years. The average district does not stay in deficit long, and we would hope we could work together to resolve it quickly,” should that happen.

The 1,532-student Madison school district reduced its 2005-2006 deficit of $1.6 million by $1 million last school year, Ellis said. It has had a deficit for several years, but is working with the state and Oakland Schools intermediate district toward a balanced budget.

In Detroit, the drastic action of appointing an emergency financial manager was taken because Detroit schools failed to submit a revised deficit reduction plan to eliminate a $400 million deficit, Flanagan said. The board plans to appeal.

Flanagan said the district failed to abide by the conditions and detail required by a consent agreement entered into by the district and a financial review team appointed by Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm. In addition, all budget documents submitted to the state were not acceptable, he said.

“The students’ learning and achievement are suffering because of the district’s financial turmoil,” Flanagan said.

Flanagan also said in a press release that the board did not grant Superintendent Connie Calloway authority to establish a deficit elimination plan without further involvement by the school board.

Pontiac’s projected $10 million deficit is much smaller than the $400 million projected for the Detroit district, but the Pontiac district is smaller — 6,700 students to Detroit’s 98,000.

The $10 million is about 10 percent of Pontiac schools’ budget, while the $400 million deficit is about one-third of Detroit schools’ $1.1 billion budget.

Immediately after the 2006-2007 audit was presented, Paramore advised state officials of the possibility of a deficit at the end of this school year.

The Pontiac superintendent said Chow will request a budget adjustment in early 2009 and will present the district’s financial status with more definite projections then. The district then will have 30 days to submit a deficit reduction plan to the state Department of Management and Budget to start the process, Paramore said.

Once the plan is approved, budgetary control reports must be submitted to the state for approval on a monthly basis.

In the southern part of Oakland County, Madison Heights school district also is working to eliminate a deficit and avoid the appointment of a state-appointed financial manager.

FYI

The Pontiac community advisory committee will present its tentative recommendations for school restructuring to the Board of Education 12:30 today at the Odell Nails Adminstration Building . Trustees will not vote on the fate of the school district until February, after the final in a series of public forums Jan. 13 at Whitmer Human Resource Center in the cityschool complex off Auburn Road and Woodward northbound.

BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND

Detroit News: On Educational Reforms

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Legislature should back real educational reforms

As Michigan's legislative session draws to a close this week, Lansing is a hotbed of deal-making on school reform. Everyone from Gov. Jennifer Granholm to Detroit and western Michigan lawmakers agree the state needs to act to address its growing education crisis.

But not all of the ideas on the table deliver real reform.

The new energy focused on education is sparked largely by the impending collapse of the Detroit Public Schools. State policy makers' guiding goal should be the creation of academically high-performing schools -- particularly high schools -- in all of Michigan's urban centers.

Some of the pending legislation serves that mission. Other bills would do the opposite.
Here is a look at existing or soon-to-be-introduced bills -- and which ones would best serve urban students:

• This month the House passed a bill sponsored by Rep. Bettie Cook Scott, D-Detroit, that would reward Detroit for its abysmal academic performance.

The Scott bill would reduce Detroit's state enrollment threshold for qualifying as a "first-class school district" to 60,000 students. The status provides special funding benefits and protections from more charter school creation in the city.

The threshold for such status has been an enrollment of 100,000. This fall, the district fell below that mark to about 94,000 students.

The last legacy this legislature should leave is the protection of one of America's worst school districts. The Senate should vote no.

• One of the highlights of this legislative session is the evolution of Detroit lawmakers on the issue of school improvement.

Sen. Bert Johnson, D-Detroit, is percolating on legislation that would help Detroit's remaining Catholic schools survive.

Lutheran and Catholic urban schools have significantly higher student achievement rates than other schools do, but they are losing students during this economic crisis. In Washington, D.C., some Catholic schools have been converting to charter schools while giving up their religious nature. Johnson is considering a bill to allow some Detroit parochial schools to undergo a similar modification. This makes good policy sense.

• Several lawmakers are supporting legislation to allow state Superintendent Mike Flanagan to close perennially low-performing schools. In Michigan some schools have failed since the 1960s. This is outrageous. The legislature should pass this bill.

• Rep. Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, the House Education Committee chairman, is proposing local school officials and the state superintendent be allowed to contract out the management of chronically failing schools. The Michigan Education Association is fighting this bill, because it may threaten unionized staff, bargaining and teacher tenure.

That is precisely the reason why the legislature must pass it. Failing schools need a teacher quality catalyst. The union is morally wrong to protect bad teachers.

• While we applaud new efforts to close bad schools, urban districts also need more good ones. Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, has been working to do provide more education options. His work must be supported.

• Michigan would be prudent to follow California's lead. The Golden State allows a majority of parents or teachers to vote to turnover their public school's operations to a qualified management organization.

Legislators worried about management quality should propose the state superintendent create a list of approved operators from which teachers and parents could choose.

Lawmakers are focused on education, and that's a good thing. Their challenge is producing bills that deliver real reform.

You Tube Challenge

School of the Future World Summit 2008

Evan Arthur - The Australian Digital Education Revolution

Martin Bean - What Technology Makes Possible

Randy Fielding - Design for the Creative Age - Part 1 (slides 1-49)

Randy Fielding - Design for the Creative Age - Part 2 (slides 50-75)

Randy Fielding - Design for the Creative Age - Part 3 (slides 76 - end)

Julio Fontan - Country Spotlight: Colombia

James Grant & Lee Burley - Building Schools for the Future

Bill Hill - The Digital Renaissance Age

Michael Horn - Disrupting Class

Allyson Knox - Career Forward

Victor McNair - Teacher E-Portfolios

Katrina Reynen - Innovation that Drives Transformation Across School Systems

Don Richardson - Innovation Management

Ratnasingam Selvarani & Angeline Fern - Transformational Learning - Part 1

Ratnasingam Selvarani & Angeline Fern - Transformational Learning - Part 2

Yasutaka Shimizu - NEXT Project - Part 1

Yasutaka Shimizu - NEXT Project - Part 2

Jaeshin Song - e-Learning of Korea

Wim Veen - Homo Zappiens: New Learning Strategies in a Digital Age

Tony Wagner - The Global Achievement Gap

Open OUR Minds to NEW Possibilities!

DPS Edison Elementary on the Art Road

Leverage the Digital Commons

Something LARGER then themselves

Washington Post

Applicants Flock to Teacher Corps for Needy Areas

By Megan Greenwell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 6, 2008; A01

Like many Georgetown University seniors, Olubukola Bamigboye has no shortage of postgraduate options. She has a line on an internship with a high-profile fashion magazine, is considering law school or might train full time for a spot on the 2012 U.S. Olympic track and field team.

But Bamigboye is focused on her second-round interview at Teach for America, hoping to win a stressful job in one of the nation's worst public schools, where, at best, she might earn $45,000 next year.

Her chances of landing a spot: less than 15 percent -- lower than the admission rate to Georgetown itself.

In its 18th year, Teach for America has emerged as the most popular nonprofit service organization among college seniors in the United States, with 14,181 applications received this year and as many as 23,000 more expected by the end of February -- all for fewer than 5,000 teaching spots.

In part because of the dearth of other job prospects in the sagging economy but mostly because the program has captured the imagination of a generation of student leaders bent on doing good, some graduates of the nation's elite universities are fighting for low-paying teaching positions the way they once sought jobs on Wall Street.

"We were quite hopeful that we would see an increase in applications based on last year's growth, but I don't know if anyone could have predicted this," said Elissa Clapp, who oversees recruitment for the organization, which sends recent college graduates to teach for two years in schools in low-income areas.

Experts say a 50 percent increase in applications in one year is surprising for any program, but they add that young adults' growing interest in public service organizations does not end with Teach for America. Programs such as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps also report a steady rise in applications for the past several years, though not as large as Teach for America's.

A 2007 UCLA survey of college freshmen showed that 70 percent of students say it is "essential or very important" to help those in need. And many young people became socially motivated during this year's presidential election, when record numbers volunteered for President-elect Barack Obama, inspired by his message of change.

"Teach for America may fit a perfect niche," said Peter Levine, director of a research center on civic engagement at Tufts University. "You get to work on a social problem on the public payroll, but you're going through a nonprofit, which many young people prefer to working for the government."

The program's success in attracting top talent such as Bamigboye has not silenced its critics in the world of education, many of whom say teachers need more than a summer's worth of preparation before taking jobs in inner-city schools. Lorri Harte, a 20-year teacher and administrator in New York City who writes a blog called Debunk TFA, argues that placing the least-experienced teachers with the highest-risk children is a potentially harmful combination.

"Teaching is a job where you get better as you go along, so for the first two years, people are generally not good teachers," Harte said. "The public relations blitz for the program does not address the real problems in education."

Research into Teach for America's effectiveness has been inconclusive, but at least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by its teachers score significantly lower on standardized tests than do their peers. A small handful of other studies, and the organization's own research, contradict that claim.

The latest spike in applications is only the most recent high point for the program. More than 24,700 students applied for the 2008 teaching posts, a 36 percent increase over 2007. They teach in 30 cities and regions across the country, including 416 schools in the District, Prince George's County and Baltimore, where D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee began her education career as a Teach for America teacher.

Created by a Princeton graduate based on her senior thesis, the program has built a sizable staff that aggressively recruits student leaders and has become the top employer at dozens of elite colleges, including George Washington University and Georgetown. This year's expected total would more than double the number of applications received just two years ago.

Teach for America leaders say much of the growth is the result of gradual gains in name recognition rather than circumstances specific to this year. But they acknowledge that the shortage of other job prospects has prompted applications from some students who might not have considered teaching.

Business majors are expected to make up a larger percentage of the applicant pool, perhaps in part because six-figure entry-level investment banking jobs -- until this year considered natural slots for thousands of graduates of elite colleges -- have all but disappeared during the Wall Street collapse.

"The silver lining in the economic downturn is it has provided people the chance to pursue something they've always wanted to do," said Tom Clark, Teach for America's recruiting director for Georgetown and GWU. "Even last year, there was pressure to head straight to Wall Street, and now there's a lot less pressure."

Georgetown senior John Swan, the former editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, said he didn't seriously consider applying to Teach for America when he first heard about it as a sophomore. But after an internship at Forbes magazine, he decided that an entry-level reporter's position wouldn't provide enough responsibility. He met with Clark this fall, was accepted to the program and will teach in the District next year.

Personalized e-mails to student leaders -- such as the one Clark sent Swan asking him to chat over coffee -- are the heart of Teach for America's recruiting strategy. Student council members, athletes, political group leaders, newspaper editors and others whose names are provided by alumni and professors are invited to meet with campus recruiters around the beginning of each academic year. If a student does not respond or declines the invitation, more e-mails follow, a barrage that many students call incessant and unnecessary.

Yet it's difficult to dispute that the targeted recruitment strategy has been effective in luring seniors who might be worried about finding jobs. Three of Swan's friends have been accepted to the teaching corps, and seven others are in the process of applying. All told, 13 percent of seniors at Georgetown and 10 percent at GWU are expected to apply this year, numbers that are not uncommon at the most elite universities.

One major point of criticism from many educators is that the program does not specifically recruit students who are interested in teaching full time. For many, like Bamigboye, the program is a two-year stop on the way to graduate school or a corporate job, paths that program administrators encourage with a career services office and partnerships with private firms and universities.

"I'll be done when I'm 23, so jobs in fashion and law school and the Olympics will still be there," Bamigboye said.

But many current and former Teach for America participants say their work -- whether for two years or longer -- makes a significant impact on students' lives. Most former Teach for America participants can cite the moments that made them proud of their students' gains.

"Every year, teachers see the proof right in front of them that they're helping to raise achievement," said Rachel Evans, a Texas A&M graduate who taught in Baltimore and now directs Teach for America recruiting efforts at four universities in Maryland and Delaware. "It doesn't take much to sell the fact that these jobs actually change lives."

The organization's officials contend that engaging the brightest young minds to teach disadvantaged children for two years is better than not having them at all, and some do become career teachers.

The rigorous application process, Clapp said, ensures that the program accepts only graduates who are truly motivated to serve in those classrooms.

"What we need to do now is make sure we maintain our position as one of the premier things to do after college," Clapp said. "You don't stay on top unless you continue to aggressively compete for the best people."

Pontiac schools forum is Saturday

Thursday, December 4, 2008 4:03 PM EST
By DIANA DILLABER MURRAYOf The Oakland Press

PONTIAC – The latest in the recommendations for restructuring the Pontiac school district will be presented at the third in a series of public forums Saturday.

Acting Superintendent Linda Paramore and board trustees say they want as much input on the redesign of the district as possible.The goal is to downsize the district, improve instructional programs and prevent a $10 million deficit.

Some of the recommendations considered now include the merging of Pontiac Central and Northern high schools and the closing of as many as half the school buildings.In the fall, the district could be made up of a single high school with several K-8 elementaries and no middle schools.

Another option is a privately run high school with K-6 elementaries, if some of the other recommendations are approved by the board. Nothing is final yet.

The community-school district Committee to Redesign Pontiac Schools for Instructional Effectiveness and Financial Efficiency will make its final recommendations to the Board of Education only after including input from Saturday’s forum and the final public forum Jan. 13.

The board will vote the recommendations up or down in February. It is important that residents of the school district be at the two forums to hear recommendations, contribute their suggestions and ask questions, “because it is going to be a possible change in our city,” said school board President Damon Dorkins.

“Taxpayers need to inform elected officials about how they want to see the school district run,” he said. “These committees came up with a number of recommendations and we have to vote on the best of the recommendations. “They need to be there to hear it,” Dorkins added.

The Committee to Redesign Pontiac Schools encompasses two subcommittees, one focusing on instructional concepts and the other on facilities and finance.

Acting Superintendent Linda Paramore presented the options to an audience of about 200 residents, educators, school officials, students and parents at the second forum Nov. 18 at Pontiac Central High School.

“At this point in the history of this district, we are honestly and sincerely addressing the needs of the community and the needs of our students,” Paramore said. “We owe it to our students to keep the best educational environment.

If we keep 20 buildings open, we will never be able to afford the programs students deserve,” including fine arts, she told the audience. “We have a strong committee design concept and we want input from the community and we are letting the community know what we are dealing with (at the forums),” said Trustee Karen Cain, who is chairwoman of the instructional subcommittee.

FYIA forum on the restructuring of Pontiac school district is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Whitmer Human Resource Center, in the city-school complex on Auburn Road at Woodward northbound.Contact staff writer Diana Dillaber Murray at (248) 745-4638 or diana.dillaber@oakpress.com.

OTHER 21st Century Expert Opinions

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills thanks you for your continued commitment to 21st century skills. This time of great change provides several avenues to promote 21st century skills so that they become a vital part of addressing the economic crisis and education transition. We wanted to bring to your attention a recent article by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post.

In the article, Mathews softens, albeit slightly, his stance on 21st century skills and their incredibly important presence within schools. Never, as you would agree, has the Partnership advocated for the integration of 21st century skills at the expense of core subjects, like reading, math, science, social studies, etc.

In fact, the Partnership's work has been focused on how 21st century skills fit seamlessly into core subjects because it is both easy and vital to infuse core subjects with 21st century skills. As noted in research and materials, the teaching of core subjects is enhanced when students are expected to think critically and creatively, innovate, display oral communication skills and work and collaborate in diverse team settings. Quite simply, this is important work because teachers in their specific disciplines need to know how 21st century skills manifest themselves inside their discipline.

At the end of the article, Mathews states "I will remain skeptical. I have seen too many glittery labels come to a bad end when applied to classes organized with very little thought. But...I will also welcome any firsthand observations of 21st-century skills classes readers might have. E-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com."

It would be great if you could send him your thoughts and share with him anecdotes of how 21st century skills are currently impacting teaching and learning and helping students thrive. Thank you for your time and work in championing this vital cause.

WASHINGTON POST

Why I Don't Like 21st-Century Reports

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 10, 2008; 6:20 AM

Another well-intentioned report on the future of American schools reached my cubicle recently: "21st Century Skills, Education and Competitiveness: A Resource and Policy Guide." It is available on the Web at www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php. It is full of facts and colorful illustrations, with foresight and relevance worthy of the fine organizations that funded it -- the National Education Association, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Ford Motor Company Fund and the Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a leading education advocacy organization that also produced the report and sent it to me and many other people.

So why, after reading it, did I feel like tossing it into the waste basket?

Maybe this is just my problem. Maybe everyone else who obsesses about schools loves these reports. There certainly are a lot of them. I seem to get at least one a month. There must be a big demand.

The reports are usually sponsored by energetic organizations, like the ones above, that have devoted themselves to making schools better for our children. They include business groups, teachers unions, think tanks, government agencies and universities. They have a lot of meetings about what the report should say, hire good writers, editors and graphic artists, put in long days and late nights, print up and put online the results, hold news conferences, answer questions and think about their next report.

The problem I have is that these major pronouncements often seem to have been conceived and written by people who are miles away from real classrooms. Many of the producers and writers, I am sure, have been educators. They know what it is like to work with children for whom the notion of a 21st-century classroom is as inexplicable -- and maybe as laughable -- as the school janitor coming to work in a spacesuit. But so little of that hard-earned knowledge of the grungy unpredictability of teaching ever finds its way into their big national studies.

This latest report is a perfect example. The first three paragraphs summarize its point very nicely, decorated with the ellipses that are common in this form of communication:

"In an economy driven by innovation and knowledge . . . in marketplaces engaged in intense competition and constant renewal . . . in a world of tremendous opportunities and risks . . . in a society facing complex business, political, scientific, technological, health and environmental challenges . . . and in diverse workplaces and communities that hinge on collaborative relationships and social networking . . . the ingenuity, agility and skills of the American people are crucial to U.S. competitiveness.

"Our ability to compete as a nation -- and for states, regions and communities to attract growth industries and create jobs -- demands a fresh approach to public education. We need to recognize that a 21st century education is the bedrock of competitiveness -- the engine, not simply an input, of the economy.

"And we need to act accordingly: Every aspect of our education system -- preK--12, postsecondary and adult education, after-school and youth development, workforce development and training, and teacher preparation programs -- must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st century skills they need to compete."

Okay. Sounds good. I kept reading. There was much detail, accompanied by pie charts and graphs and photos of smiling children, about the growth of information service jobs, the lagging improvement in student proficiency and the changing demographic character of the country. It listed the "21st century skills" that our children need for the rapidly evolving labor market. These included thinking critically and making judgments, solving complex, multidisciplinary, open-ended problems, developing creative and entrepreneurial thinking, communicating and collaborating, making innovative use of knowledge, information and opportunities and taking charge of financial, health and civic responsibilities.

Good stuff. I liked all of those suggestions. I had only one question: How in the name of every teacher who has ever contemplated suicide during the unit on fractions are we supposed to make those things happen?

Tragically, the report ran out of steam at that point, as do most of these heavily promoted studies. It said that we need to get support from voters, employers and educators. Fine. It recommended new positions and budget items in federal, state and local offices, for instance, a senior adviser to the president for 21st-century skills, 21st-century skills offices at both the education and labor departments, a $2 billion research and development fund, and so on.

I looked carefully, but it never explained how teachers are going to find the time to introduce all these skills to students who, at the moment, are still struggling with plain old reading, writing and math.

Maybe that will be the topic of the next report. Maybe I am not appreciating the importance of painting the big picture so everyone knows where we have to go. I showed a draft of this column to a spokesman for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. He said many schools are already successfully incorporating the report's ideas into their lessons. He said the Catalina Foothills district in Tucson has "completely revamped their education system around 21st-century skills." Progress has also been made at schools in Lawrence Township, Ind., Manassas, Virginia Beach, Milwaukee and Darlington, Wis.

I welcome e-mails from anyone involved in those schools on what specific changes have been made. I will be keeping an eye on the introduction of 21st-century skills in Manassas, not far from where I sit. My Post colleague Jennifer Buske wrote in August of initial moves in this direction by Manassas Superintendent Gail Pope. The organizations involved in the 21st-century effort are staffed by good people. I am going to assume that we agree that we need to look closely at the details of teaching these skills, and in that spirit I want to make two suggestions.

First, please try to avoid the lethal disease that infects so many of these studies. I call it All-at-once-itis. That refers to the irresistible urge to insist that the changes have to be accomplished ALL AT ONCE, or we will fall short of our important objectives. In past columns, I noted the appearance of this ailment in otherwise admirable reports such as "Tough Choices or Tough Times" (2006) or " 'Restoring Value' to the High School Diploma" (2007). In this democracy we never make good changes all at once. The presidential campaign and economic crisis are proof of that. So please don't tell us we have to.

Second -- and this will wreak havoc with report deadlines -- why not wait to release your recommendations until you have tried them out on at least two or three schools with a few hundred students? I won't insist on proof of success. I just want to get a sense of how young human beings, and their teachers, react to all these new hoops they must jump through. (This will also help stifle my suspicion that you don't actually know how to do any of the things you are suggesting.)

No one is going to pay attention to what I want, of course. The report writers know I will keep reading their stuff, full of hope that I will eventually find some classroom reality among all the pie charts.

I am not saying the people who issue these pronouncements are wrong. Many of their ideas are excellent. But if we are going to make them happen, they have to show us what it is going to take, besides just more concerned citizens spending more money to produce more reports like this one.

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WASHINGTON POST

A Surprisingly Sensible 21st-Century Report

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 21, 2008; 6:17 AM

Only six weeks have passed since my last cranky diatribe about teaching what are called "21st-century skills" in our schools. I think the 21st-century skills movement is mostly a pipe dream, promoted by well-meaning people who embrace the idea of modernity but fail to consider how these allegedly new and important lessons can be taught by the usual victims of such schemes, classroom teachers.

Now I am forced to calm down, take a breath and consider the possibility that I was wrong about this, because a scholar whose work I admire has produced the first sensible report on 21st-century skills I have read. "Measuring Skills for the 21st Century" was written by Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at the Education Sector think tank in Washington. It is available at http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=716323. It suggests that this idea is vital, important and ought to be pursued, no matter what I say.

I telephoned Silva to express my concern that we differ on this issue, since she always knows what she is talking about and I sometimes don't. Our conversation reassured me. She has the same doubts I do about the loose and overheated way the 21st-century skills concept has been marketed, and the failure to give teachers useful guidance on what to do with it. She agrees with me that much of what is labeled 21st-century learning is not new, but represents what our best educators have been teaching for several centuries.

For those of you unfamiliar with this topic, here is what alleged 21st-century skills are: the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information. Does that sound futuristic to you?

Silva and I are also of one mind on the need to make sure this emphasis on analytical and critical thinking does not derail the national effort to make sure all students learn the basic content of the important disciplines, such as literature, math and science. Learning how to learn, one of the goals of the 21st-century skills movement, is fine, but it is not a substitute for being able to recall without resort to Google vital facts and concepts, like the causes of World War I, the usefulness of active verbs and how to calculate growth in percents.

The most important conclusion of Silva's well-sourced 11-page study is that the best learning happens "when students learn basic content and processes, such as the rules and procedures of arithmetic, at the same time that they learn how to think and solve problems."

Okay, I said. That sounds good. But what of my complaint in that peevish column last month, "Why I Don't Like 21st-Century Reports"? Before our various 21st-century think tanks show me their shining vision of a revolutionized education system churning out a new generation full of Warren Buffetts, Antonin Scalias and Rachel Maddows, how about letting me see one or two schools that are already showing this is possible?

Silva has done that. Her prime example is the New Technology High School Model, created by teachers, business executives and community leaders in Napa, Calif., in 1996. They got money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and now have 40 schools in nine states.

"Student learning at New Technology is designed to simulate real life and real work," Silva writes. "Instead of completing traditional worksheets and daily assignments, students are assigned periodic projects, often as teams, and must complete a combination of products, including written essays and practical demonstrations. Each project assigned to students is accompanied by a set of rubrics that measure a student's performance on fundamental skills, like writing, as well as criteria such as critical thinking, application and originality. Students receive multiple grades, one for each criterion, for each project."

I need to see data on this approach, but at least as a guide to teachers it is clearer and more comprehensible than I have seen in other 21st-century skills reports. Assessment turns out to be a very important part of Silva's paper. She recognizes that we need some way to determine whether 21st-century schools are producing anything more valuable than cool-looking brochures and Web sites.

Here are some existing assessments of advanced skills -- the College Work and Readiness Assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment, PowerSource, the Key Stage 3 Information Communications Technology Literacy Assessment and a new National Assessment of Educational Progress Science Assessment. I threw all those into one sentence to emphasize the fact that a lot of these measures are very technical and may induce slumber if read late at night. Some seem rudimentary. It is unclear, at least to me, whether what they are measuring are teachable skills or character traits, like persistence and affability, that most schools have barely an inkling how to foster.

But Silva cites enough research to convince me, almost, that if 21st-century skills, as she says, "can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way," we will have the tools to do that before long. I would be happy with a yardstick that did no more than separate schools that I grudgingly admit may be adding value, such as New Technology High, from those that slap a 21st-century label on the same old courses in hopes of fooling the PTA.

The report reminded me of something I knew but had not put in this context. We already have in several hundred American high schools a program that teaches critical thinking and measures the results with depth and clarity. That would be the International Baccalaureate program. Its three- to five-hour final exams at the end of college-level courses in all the major disciplines -- no multiple choice questions allowed -- provide a more sophisticated assessment of student learning than anything else in American public schools.

Silva says IB "is built on the principle that students can and should master both basic subject matter and higher-order skills." I think Advanced Placement, which also offers college-level learning and assessment in many more U.S. high schools, does the same thing, even if its final exams are not quite as good. To their credit, neither IB nor AP advertise themselves as the key to 21st-century skills. Once we get straight that the 21st-century label is a marketing trick, and refers to the kind of learning that has produced scientific and cultural advances in every era, we might be able to do something with some of the programs Silva describes.

I will remain skeptical. I have seen too many glittery labels come to a bad end when applied to classes organized with very little thought. But I will look for more from Silva. I will also welcome any firsthand observations of 21st-century skills classes readers might have. E-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com. Good or bad, we can learn something from what you have seen.

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Education Sector Reports

Measuring Skills for the 21st Century

Author:

Elena Silva

Publication Date:

November 10, 2008

When ninth-graders at St. Andrew's School, a private boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, sat down last year to take the school's College Work and Readiness Assessment (CWRA), they faced the sort of problems that often stump city officials and administrators, but rarely show up on standardized tests, such as how to manage traffic congestion caused by population growth. "I proposed a new transportation system for the city," said one student describing his answer. "It's expensive, but it will cut pollution."

Students were given research reports, budgets, and other documents to help draft their answers, and they were expected to demonstrate proficiency in subjects like reading and math as well as mastery of broader and more sophisticated skills like evaluating and analyzing information and thinking creatively about how to apply information to real-world problems.

Not many public school students take assessments like the CWRA. Instead, most students take tests that are primarily multiple-choice measures of lower-level skills in reading and math, such as the ability to recall or restate facts from reading passages and to handle arithmetic-based questions in math. These types of tests are useful for meeting the proficiency goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and state accountability systems. But leaders in business, government, and higher education are increasingly emphatic in saying that such tests don’t do enough. The intellectual demands of 21st century work, today's leaders say, require assessments that measure more advanced skills, 21st century skills. Today, they say, college students, workers, and citizens must be able to solve multifaceted problems by thinking creatively and generating original ideas from multiple sources of information—and tests must measure students' capacity to do such work.

While many policymakers, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, have emphasized the need for schools to, first and foremost, teach the basics, learning science—an interdisciplinary field that includes cognitive science, educational psychology, information science, and neuroscience—suggests that the best learning occurs when basic skills are taught in combination with complex thinking skills. Decades of research reveals that there is, in fact, no reason to separate the acquisition of learning core content and basic skills like reading and computation from more advanced analytical and thinking skills, even in the earliest grades.

But standing in the way of incorporating 21st century skills into teaching and learning are widespread concerns about measurement. The cost, time demands, and difficulty in scoring tests of these less easily quantified skills have slowed the adoption of such tests, as have concerns among civil rights advocates that these tests would erode progress toward ensuring common standards of learning for all students. Collectively, these concerns derailed efforts in the late 1990s to move toward the use of performance-based assessments such as portfolios, exhibitions, and projects.

New assessments like the CWRA, however, illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century—the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information—can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way. These emergent models also demonstrate the potential to measure these complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student's mastery of core content or basic skills and knowledge. There is, then, no need for more tests to measure advanced skills. Rather, there is a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students' need to succeed today. … Read the full report: Measuring Skills for the 21st Century

This report was funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Education Sector thanks the foundation for their support. The views expressed in the paper are those of the author alone.