This article was originally posted on Getting Smart on December 19, 2012
In my previous post, I tackled the debate of student performance as a measure of teacher effectiveness in. Here’s why performance-based pay for teachers as an approach to teacher effectiveness runs counter to every meaningful definition of personalized education: Read more
This article was originally posted on Getting Smart on December 18, 2012
The irony is hardly lost on anyone when at education-related professional conferences educators sit in the audience as experts lecture them about how to teach as a guide-on-the-side rather than a sage-on-the stage. A “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do” moment that often has even the lecturer chuckling. The habits, traditions, and structural constraints of conferences make such absurdity inevitable, and we all tend to take it in stride with a dose of self-deprecating humor. Back in classrooms and buildings and districts, however, similar habits, traditions, and constraints have a much more serious, and less obviously absurd effect. Read more
This article was originally posted on Getting Smart on October 9, 2012
When I worked in the high-tech industry, our products sometimes included what we called “check-box features.” These were features that would never, in reality, be used by the end customer but which purchasing agents would look at when they compared our product against our competitors. In many ways I think of classroom management software as falling into this category – with the fears about technology use that absolutely do exist among parents and educators, having a checkbox that says, “Don’t worry – we can control student technology use,” feels like a must-have. Read more
