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SchoolSpring » Entries tagged with "teaching jobs"

How to recruit, grow, and keep teachers in a tough urban climate

January 11th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Boston thinks it has the answer…the Boston Teacher Residency Institute (btr). Although the tough economic times have made teaching jobs tough to get, inner city schools have a hard time recruiting and retaining quality teachers because their applicants are not prepared to teach in that type of environment. (…”no education theory class will help Clinton Lassiter engage a student who says that her top goal for eighth grade is to not get pregnant”) “Former Boston superintendent Thomas Payzant, who helped start btr, recalls that his biggest problem with new teachers was not subject knowledge or pedagogy, but under-preparation for the environment.” “’What we were getting when teachers arrived in Boston classrooms were people who were pretty well grounded in content and had some sense of how to teach. But they were not … Read entire article »

Filed under: Featured, Recruiting

Videotaping Classroom Instruction – New Evaluation Models

December 7th, 2010 | Add a Comment

Videotaping Classroom Instruction – New Evaluation Models

Going by the wayside are the days of a single administrator visit to the classroom with a check-list of classroom conditions and teacher behaviors used to evaluate teachers.  These type of evaluations make it very easy for teachers to receive high marks but provide no feedback. New (some controversial) models emerging are: A group of education reformers suggest evaluating teachers primarily on the basis of their students’ standardized test scores, since teaching is ultimately about helping students … Read entire article »

Filed under: Education Reform, high school, School Communication, teacher evaluation, Teacher motivation, Teacher skills, technology in education

STUDENT-LED CONFERENCES – A GROWING TREND

October 22nd, 2010 | Add a Comment

Mary Beth, SchoolSpring’s Program and Community Manager has personal experience as a mother with three children in school and input from teachers around the country as a part of her day-to-day work. For years the process of parent-teacher conferences has been the same; the teacher hurriedly telling a parent about their child’s progress (mostly meaning their grades and participation in class) and not much time, if any, for discussion.   A quote from Education World’s piece on Student-Led conferences,  “But now, many schools are trying something new — student-led conferences that communicate not only how a student’s doing but also why”.(link to article) After personally attending over 60 parent-teacher conferences to date (2 a year for 3 children) I have been in classrooms with teachers who give a 2 minute speech about what … Read entire article »

Filed under: Future of Education, parent teacher conferences, Student Health, teacher evaluation

MEDIA SPONGES

April 29th, 2010 | 1 Comment

Anya Kamenetz’s article in FastCompany titled, “A Is for App: How Smartphones, Handheld Computers Sparked an Educational Revolution,” she brings up a few reasons why media was bad, can be good, and why it was considered awful to the world’s future generations. Early in the article it states: “American children now spend 7.5 hours a day absorbing and creating media — as much time as they spend in school.” A decade ago, this was seen as a bad thing. Out of these technology-obsessed, media absorbing, inactive kids—experts and parents alike saw no value in the rise and use of technology among their children.  Less time spent on homework and minimal time outside was a cause for concern, but within the past few years, handheld, technological devices have re-established … Read entire article »

Filed under: Books, Future of Education, technology in education

No child left behind… in the United States of… Finland? What happened to America?

April 22nd, 2010 | 1 Comment

The American educational system is based on fair and equal educational gain among all students in the classroom. It is thought that by changing classrooms each year, a student will progress further.  It is also thought that this system will enhance a child’s way of learning by being surrounded among a variety of students each year with various skills and strengths. This however, is not the belief in Finland, where the curriculum is relaxed, children are honored among classmates for their academic strengths and helped with their weaknesses in the same classroom. Finnish children grow together, in the same classroom, with the same teacher for the first 5-7 years of their education while many American schools tend to separate students with weakness from the stronger students in specific subjects like reading, … Read entire article »

Filed under: curriculum, Future of Education, size of schools, Teacher motivation, Teacher skills

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