For the second time this week, a ghastly-sounding story of a teacher verbally abusing a five-year-old child. And this time, it’s on tape. The parents of an Indiana kindergartener sent the child to school with a tape recorder in his pocket after suspecting problems:
I’ve been more than nice to you all year long and you’ve been ignorant, selfish, self-absorbed, the whole thing! I’m done!” Indiana teacher Kristen Woodward says to Gabriel on the tape. She continues: “Something needs to be done because you are pathetic! If me saying these words to you hurt, I hope it does because you’re hurting everyone else around you.”
Subject matter expertise or pedagogy? Which matters more for a teacher? Arizona says subject matter matters, at least enough to allow the experts to teach with a mere modicum of training, according to the Arizona Republic:
Beginning this fall, working engineers and scientists will sign on as adjunct teachers in a new pilot program. These professionals can teach one class of calculus or algebra daily after 36 hours of teacher training and a background check. Unlike adjunct instructors in universities, professionals teaching in high schools will not get paid. The state calls the new volunteer program the “Adjunct Teachers Initiative. Arizona’s teachers union calls it insulting.
“What I see coming from the adjunct teaching proposal is that teaching isn’t really more than some kind of community service that you do when you’re feeling generous,” Andrew Morrill, vice president of the Arizona Education Association tells the paper.
On the other hand, I’d rather have the expert than an “emergency teacher” with no subject expertise, apparently Arizona’s most common response to a shortage.
Student incentives seem to boost reading scores, according to a newly released piece of research. Critics have described plans to give cash, electronic gear or other rewards as bribery, but the study of charter school incentive programs from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes finds “reward systems are found to have stable and consistent positive impacts for student learning in reading. The effect holds across grades and across network and non-network charter schools.”
“It’s not a silver bullet, but for very little investment, you seem to get a pretty consistent bump,” Margaret E. Raymond, the study’s author, said in an interview with Education Week.
Read a summary of the findings here. The full report, “Paying for A’s” is here.
The success of incentives will get all the ink, but this finding caught my eye: “Schools in which there is continuous or near-continuous assessment of student conduct produce larger gains in reading than schools that have reward systems.”
Great post by teacher blogger Jose Vilson (hat tip: Joanne Jacobs) on giving kids what they need, instead of what they want. This is what enforcing classroom consequences looks like. Or should.
I care for you, and that’s why you’re not going on the trip tomorrow. Other teachers may protect you at their leisure. They may argue that you need the attention, and that you’ve deserved it academically, and to an extent they’re right. Yet, something makes my head itch at the thought that I’d let a repeat cutter attend a trip with students who truly deserve it. And of course, we know it’s not just you. The crew you hang out with influences your decisions to miss out on my afternoon announcements, my calls to you for better behavior and respect for all teachers, not just the ones you feel like respecting.
Read the whole thing here. First-rate stuff. I hope his administration backs him up.
Recent Comments