Six on Schools: A Crooked Seat at the Table: Black and Alone in an Honors Class; Frida Berrigan, Protecting the Children on a Trumpian Planet; any of this happened in YOUR back-to-school faculty meeting; Whatever Happened to Madeline Hunter?; Ways St
panaritisp
And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
Thanks John and Gary
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"Trump Is Attacking Their Education
He’s slashing public education budgets, opening space to even more for-profit schools, and modeling a bully swagger that’s a caricature of every bad kid.
My kids go to good public schools in New London. The little ones attend schools that offer theater, music, and visual arts every week. The older one is in a non-profit charter school that focuses on interdisciplinary work and community investment, while cultivating a strong, kind school culture. They are all thriving and happy; the schools themselves, less so. Each of them is struggling, while the message from the top is: make do with less.
A budget analysis from the Center for American Progress finds that the Trump administration’s 2020 education budget proposal would eliminate 29 public school programs, including after-school programming in poor communities and professional development for teachers, while cutting a total of $8.5 billion, a 12% decrease from the fiscal year 2019 budget. Over the last two years, the Department of Education has suggested even more massive cuts, though Congress has rejected them. We can only hope that its members will again “just say no” to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s grim proposals. Still, even the money that does get to cities and municipalities is so much less than what such schools and their teachers and kids really need.
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The public college scene is bleak, too. The way things are looking now, my kids may be going to plumbing school! College has never been more expensive and recent moves by the Department of Education have made accrediting for-profit colleges that bilk their students so much easier."
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Whatever Happened to Madeline Hunter?
“I used to think teachers were born, not made … but I know better now. I’ve seen bumblers turned into geniuses, while charismatic characters turned out happy illiterates.” Madeline Hunter, 1991
A former teacher and elementary school principal, and professor of educational administration and teacher education at University of California, Los Angeles, Madeline Hunter developed a model of teaching that combined instructional techniques applied to all academic subjects across elementary and secondary school classrooms. Called Instructional Theory into Practice (ITIP), the teacher-centered, direct instructional model was anchored in, according to Hunter, psychological learning theory and educational research. Academic content was important as were specific student objectives on what they were to learn and the sequence of techniques teachers were to use to reach those content and skill objectives (see here and here).
Hunter’s gift was to convert this model of “mastery teaching” into seven key features that every teacher had to cover within a lesson. A common template for a “Hunter Lesson” looked like this:"
"As often happens for educators, a group of students inspired me to come to terms with this question. I was teaching writing for high school English-learners, the majority of them Hmong students who were a few years in the country but newly arrived in our community and living at one apartment complex. Within just a few months of their arrival, tensions with nonimmigrant apartment residents over cultural and religious practices exploded, resulting in hurtful television and newspaper coverage.
My Hmong students were devastated. Their parents did not know enough English to communicate with neighbors or reporters, and although my students wanted to help, they didn't know how. I suggested they could write letters to the newspaper and television stations to help reporters understand the Hmong people and culture. Eagerly they took on the opportunity, discussing the messages they wanted to convey, reading examples of letters, and pairing up to select and address the most important points. We sent about 30 letters, and within a few days, a reporter called me. Eight letters would be published, but more important was the reporter wanted to visit the classroom to get to know the students. The newspaper had decided to publish a series on the Hmong in Sacramento.
At first glance, this writing experience fits the most common definition of writing for an authentic audience, for that real audience outside of school. But it was not that for everyone—only for my Hmong students. I had offered my other EL students the opportunity to write letters about issues they cared about, but for them, this was not a call to write. They were very clear that their job was to be an audience for their Hmong peers, helping them communicate, being supportive readers and responders."
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"A 2016 American Educational Research Association study of 90,000 students in New York City, for example, found that one’s status as a “top dog” has the most positive academic and social advantages in the sixth grade. And not only do kids at this age place a greater premium on popularity than their younger counterparts; they also benefit immensely from stability. A separate 2014 study of 6,000 K–8 students in small towns throughout Pennsylvania and Indiana found that starting a new school in the sixth or seventh grade can undermine kids’ motivation and confidence; those who didn’t have to transfer from their elementary school fared better.
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More recently, the psychologist Marisa Malone, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, found that sixth and seventh graders who started at separate middle schools were less likely to pass tests than those who were still grouped with their elementary-school peers. The transition to a new school, she concludes in her September 2019 paper, may be exacerbated by the disproportionately high rates of bullying and pervasively low self-esteem that occur in those intermediary years.
