Promoting Active Learning

All too often, students simply want to “get the work done” without recognizing that active learning is essential to building a lasting foundation for excellent work in school.  For example, in our work with students in mathematics, one of the simple, yet critical things we do is emphasize the “logic” of an answer to a problem.  We label that process with names like “the logic test” or “the smell test,” i.e. “Does that ‘smell’ like a reasonable answer?” The goal is singular: engage students beyond the simple read problem/provide answer dynamic in order to help them develop a sense of reasonableness and involve them in a way which makes them pause and reflect.  By doing this, we help students to strengthen their confidence in relying on their “gut,” and we also help them to take pause, thus better cementing the bigger lesson concepts of the problem(s) into memory.

This kind of thing can be done at home as well.  While not every parent is going to be able to help their child with the specifics of a math problem, a scientific process, or a historical movement, parents can promote student reflection on subject matter by requiring them to spend a minimum amount of time working on a topic, rather than simply requiring them to “finish his/her homework.”  A reasonable time requirement, rather than a completeness requirement, can reduce the temptation for the student to go as fast as he/she can when completing assignments and creates an atmosphere that is conducive to active learning.

Article Located at: http://www.qwertyed.com/blog/promoting-active-learning

Sneak peek at one simulation on Dyslexia for a Day

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=107900060&gid=66995&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_nd-pst_ttle-cn&ut=2WwjYmUEJQzBc1

An interesting experiment to show some individuals how students with dyslexia may appear in the classroom.

Scientists Probe Role of Brain in ADHD Cases .

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

A brain area that helps orchestrate mental activity works overtime in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, reflecting the internal struggle to hold more than one thing in mind at a time, neuroscientists reported Sunday.

The scientists used a functional magnetic imaging scanner to track signs of neural activity among 19 affected children and 23 other children who were asked to remember a simple sequence of letters. The scientists discovered that a critical mental control area, called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, worked much harder and, perhaps, less efficiently among children with attention problems.

This fundamental difference in brain function might be an underlying cause of the inattentiveness, impulsivity and focus problems that make it hard for ADHD children to concentrate in the classroom, the scientists said during an annual gathering of 31,000 brain researchers in Washington, D.C.

"Our findings suggest that the function as well as the structure of this brain area is different in children with ADHD," said Wayne State University biologist Tudor Puiu, who reported the team's findings Sunday at a conference held by the Society for Neuroscience. "It might explain the cognitive problems we see in the classroom."

All told, about two million U.S. children have been diagnosed with attention problems. No one yet understands the basic neurobiology responsible for the mental ailment, which has grown more common since 2003, according to a survey by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.

The portion of those with the most severe symptoms who are treated with prescription stimulants, such as methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamine (Adderall), also has continued to rise, the National Institutes of Health reported in September.

The finding reported Sunday adds to growing biomedical evidence that those diagnosed with the attention disorder—arguably the most common childhood behavioral issue—have unusual patterns of brain function that can persist well into adulthood.

Overall, the brain of an ADHD child matures normally, but it may take up to three years longer to fully develop, especially in areas at the front of the brain's cortex, an outer layer of tissue important in controlling attention, reasoning and planning.

Researchers have also reported a range of specific anatomical differences among ADHD children that may be linked to behavioral problems. Earlier this month, researchers at New York University's Langone School of Medicine reported that ADHD children appeared to have a significantly thinner cortex and less gray matter than other children in some areas involved in regulating attention and emotion.

In a separate study, other scientists said they had determined that ADHD children have differences in the caudate nucleus, which is involved in learning and memory, compared to other children.

"These networks are disrupted," said Mr. Puiu. "The ADHD brain has to work harder than the normal brain."

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

Time is the enemy of graduation

BY Stan Jones

President Obama's plan to make college more

affordable is noble in intent but misses the

mark in design. If the president and Congress

were to focus on the real culprit of high college

costs — poor college completion numbers — they

could find rare common ground and make substantial

headway on a problem that threatens to

sink U.S. economic competitiveness.

The president was right when he noted that

college is rapidly becoming unaffordable for many.

Yet his threats to reduce federal funding to schools

that don’t cut tuition may open the door for

opponents to push back against reforms by

invoking accusations of “price controls” and

another “big-government takeover.”

College presidents point to what seem like

reasonable arguments for rising tuition: shrinking

state budgets, for one, and the increasing costs of

energy, pensions and health care. But if these

circular arguments simply go round and round, an

important opportunity will be missed.

Data show that time, not tuition, is the enemy of

college completion. Today’s college students are

dramatically different from the archetype of the

U.S. undergraduate: A 2009 Public Agenda study

drawing on Education Department data found that

less than a quarter of U.S. college students attend

full time at residential schools. Most students now

commute to campus, balancing jobs, school and

often family.

Higher education has done little to adjust to the

changing needs of this new majority, with the

result that students are spending longer than ever

in college. The longer it takes to graduate, themore

life gets in the way and the less likely that one will

ever graduate. More time on campus also means

that more is spent on college, adding high costs as

another driver of dropouts. In this instance, time is

money.

All this adds up to a startling fact: Less than half

of U.S. college students graduate, the National

Center for Education Statistics reported last year.

There is a way the federal government can take

on this issue. Because cutting time cuts costs, the

president can achieve the savings he seeks for

students and taxpayers by linking federal investments

to college results and targeting the greatest

obstacles to graduation: failed remediation programs

that waste time and money; broken policies

that make it hard for students to transfer credits;

students roaming the curriculum excessively instead

of following structured, career-focused programs;

creeping credit requirements; and schedules

designed more to please faculty than to help

working students.

Colleges should, of course, become more efficient.

But raising professors’ health-care premiums

or adjusting thermostats won’t boost completion

rates. And appeals to reduce tuition through

higher appropriations are unlikely to fly in

cash-strapped state capitols. The result is that

America will fall further behind: The United States

once led the world in higher-education attainment;

now we trail at least a dozen countries,

according to Organization for Economic Cooperation

and Development data published last year.

Rather than engage in simplistic fights about

runaway tuition, let’s pinpoint the best methods to

reduce time on campus. College completion can be

common ground on which the president and

Congress focus on costs that are directly related to

student learning and success. They should replace

blame shifting with irrefutable facts and seek

data-driven solutions that can be achieved now to

help students afford their dreams while increasing

graduation rates.

Washington should also keep this in mind:

States are not waiting to boost college completion.

Since March 2010, 30 governors have publicly

committed their states to setting graduation goals;

designing comprehensive completion plans; and

moving significant policies to speed student

success, including paying colleges for the students

they graduate, not simply for those they enroll.

Working across party lines, governors, legislators

and education leaders are building a movement.

Their success will strengthen state economies

while taxpayers get a greater return on their

investments and millions more students make it to

graduation day. Washington should follow this

example.

Stan Jones is president of Complete College America, a

Washington-based nonprofit. 

Complete College America Report

Follow the link in the title to take a look at an interesting report about the status of our colleges in America.

My View: How mentors changed my life

by Ashkon Jafari, Special to CNN

Editor’s note:  Ashkon Jafari is the co-founder and executive director of StudentMentor.org. He has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Santa   Clara University. Ashkon was recently invited to the White House to meet President Barack Obama and talk to officials about mentoring and preparing students for tomorrow’s work force.

My transition to college wasn’t easy. I graduated from high school at 16 and felt thrown into a different world in college. Unlike high school where administrators proactively called my parents if I missed classes, I found out that college professors didn’t hold students to the same level of accountability. Most college professors didn’t stay after class to help me when I was struggling in their classes. I was on my own.

During the beginning of my sophomore year, my situation began to improve. I started visiting the tutoring center to receive help on calculus and physics courses. There I met Dinh, who had already received a master’s degree in my major.  Over the course of the next two years, he not only spent countless hours guiding me through difficult subjects, but he did much more. Dinh and I discussed life decisions, job prospects and career paths, and how I could succeed in my junior and senior years.

Dinh was an amazing tutor, but what I looked forward to most during our weekly Sunday morning sessions was chatting freely and openly about these topics. I may not have labeled Dinh a mentor then, but in retrospect he was an outstanding one. Without his help, I know I wouldn’t have succeeded in college.

During the summer of my junior year, I started an internship at a large tech company and found another key mentor. Although a busy senior manager,  Jack scheduled an hourlong meeting with me for extra training that would be useful in my future career. That meeting turned into weekly sessions in which I learned a lot from Jack about what employers valued and where the industry was headed.

Soon, Jack was asking me to bring in my upper division course list so that he could offer a professional’s opinion on which electives would be advantageous in the industry and which were outdated. We kept in touch as I progressed through my final two years of college and occasionally met for lunch. Jack became an even greater resource to me as I prepared to embark on my career. He was a reference for job openings and graduate school applications. Five years later, we remain good friends, and he is on the board of directors for my nonprofit organization, StudentMentor.org.

Mentors such as Dinh, Jack and many others are the most important reason for my success in college. Despite my rocky start, I graduated in the top 1% of my college class.

There are countless professionals, teachers and peers  who are eager to become mentors.  Whether it’s through informal discussions or structured programs, mentoring is powerful and vastly undervalued.
January is National Mentoring Month. Each year the president encourages Americans to serve as mentors and help young people. As you think back on your life, how have mentors affected you? By adding “becoming a mentor” to your new year’s resolutions, perhaps you can positively change the course of someone else’s life, just as my mentors did for me.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ashkon Jafari.

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

By Valerie Strauss
Update 12/12:

QUIZ: Take part of the test that the local school board member took in the story below: Reading Quiz | Math Quiz. Questions come from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) for 10th grade.

Update 12/6:
Revealed: The school board member who took standardized test

Original post:
This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.
By Marion Brady

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.


He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:
“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.

But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.

Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”

One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.

“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.

Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”

A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.

How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?