AUSSIE

Blog entry posted February 8th, 2010 by Bernadette McKinlay

AUSSIE consultants are currently active in several of the Districts of Long Island and there is a great deal of enthusiasm amongst this team of AUSSIE professionals about what is happening in their schools.  A recurring theme is the wonderful openness of the teachers, with whom they are working, to embracing new ideas and a keenness to learn new ways of working.  The other great advantage is the...

Blog entry posted February 1st, 2010 by Dale Worsley

Two blog posts ago I laid out a short-term plan. I said I would contend with the dragon of standardized testing, brandishing a story and three items of research in my attack. I lied. I am going to wield three items of research and two stories, one just off the press. First, the third item of research. (See the first two in previous blogs.) Don’t yawn. It’s research I’ve used to take down the monster dozens of times. It often comes in the form of...

Blog entry posted January 27th, 2010 by Jeff Vohden

How important are passion, innovation, and creativity to being an effective teacher? To hear Ron Clark speak, as I did last week at the National Title I Conference in Washington, D.C., they are critical—and he has the results to prove it.

Ron’s story is fascinating. After graduating from college, he became a teacher in a rural disadvantaged North Carolina school where he used his own nontraditional innovative approach to teaching to make a tremendous impact on his students. Test scores soared. His real-world applications caught the eye of...

Blog entry posted January 19th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

I was able to get back to Tom McMurrer’s second grade classroom this week, at last, and catch up on progress there. They did it! The little folks wrote letters to each other and took a walk to the post office. Because it was the chaotic holiday season, the workers couldn’t show them around, but the young correspondents did post their letters, and not a single hand lost to those alligator-jawed post boxes. Even better, as foretold, the letters arrived at their homes, full of...

Blog entry posted January 11th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” exclaims Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In my last blog, I suggested we let the question, “What is school?” guide us through the next decade. Following my own suggestion, ready to define the nature of education at every pass, I sallied forth to encounter for the umpteenth time the...

Blog entry posted January 6th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

I ran out of space in my last post (last of the decade!) as I was turning to Neil Postman for perspective on the problem of questions that can’t be answered. His book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School actually offers perspective on both questions that can and should be answered and those that can’t and shouldn’t. In the first category, he told the story of Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. After a speech, a member of her audience asked how she...

Blog entry posted December 22nd, 2009 by Dale Worsley

Update on “The Question that Fed My Writing Unit.” You noticed the title change, didn’t you? From “The Question that Ate My Writing Unit” to “The Question that Fed My Writing Unit?” I may be jumping the gun, but my hope is only growing that teacher Tom McMurrer’s second grade writing unit on letter writing is becoming more meaningful in response to the students’ unexpected questions: (“Where do you get a stamp?” “What happens...

Blog entry posted December 17th, 2009 by Dale Worsley

Promised update on The Question that Ate My Writing Unit: Tom McMurrer, the second grade teacher at PS 124 whose unit was in peril, has decided to contact the United States Postal Service to see if he can organize a class trip to answer the students’ questions. We have trepidation. What if the recession has caused the USPS to cut back its...