Archive for the ‘School Advisory’ Category
Who is making you uncomfortable?
May 12th, 2011
Seth Godin is one of the most popular business writers in the world. Recently he blogged:
Who looks you in the eye and says, given your skills, you could do better
You have enough leverage to really make a difference.
Could you set aside the fear and go faster?
I know youre holding back
It takes love and kindness and confidence to bring the truth to a friend you care about. If youre insulating yourself from these conversations, who benefits?
You see, thats what I was trying to say, as we role-played a teacher coaching conversation last week. I just didnt have the right words. I meant to tell this imaginary teacher what Seth said.
Instead, evidently I said this, which the MTR team immediately turned into a coffee mug for posterity:
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Jim Menchinger, retired Portage Northern teacher, to be first Michigan coach inducted into National Forensics League Hall of Fame
May 8th, 2011
PORTAGE — James Menchinger, a retired Portage Northern High School teacher and current forensics team assistant coach, has been named to the National Forensic League Hall of Fame and will be inducted on June 14 in Dallas.
He will be the first Michigan coach to receive the honor.
Menchinger will receive his Hall of Fame award from the NFL president and be introduced by past NFL director, James Copeland, a former championship coach at Battle Creek Central High School.
During his 50 years of teaching and coaching, Menchinger led three teams to Class A or Class B state forensic championships and won two novice state championships.
He has also guided more than 70 students to the NFL National Tournament, four Veteran of Foreign War’s State Champions, two national champions in the optimist oratorical and a national champion in the roundtable oratory competition.
Menchinger also has earned five Diamond awards, the most of any coach in Michigan. Each award represents more than 2,000 speech performances or debates during five or more years.
Menchinger began his relationship with the National Forensics League at Portage Northern, earning charter status in 1973. He has also served as a final round judge at the nationals multiple times.
Tags: Fame, League Hall, Portage Northern, Retired Portage Northern
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What We Can Learn From The Celtics Failed Trade
May 7th, 2011
The Boston Celtics lost tonight. Until mid-season they were the top team in the East. What happened?
The Celtics made a trade. At the time of the trade, my favorite NBA commentator, David Berri, imagined the following conversation:
Celtics General Manager Danny Ainge: Sam, what can I do for you?
Thunder General Manager Sam Presti: Danny, how about you take the two worst players on my team? And in return give me a big man that can help me contend for a title?
Thats in fact what happened. The Celtics traded a slightly above average center, Kendrick Perkins. In return, the main attraction was supposed to be Jeff Green, pictured above.
Berri has always had a very simple but profound notion about the NBA. People overvalue scorers. People undervalue many other things. And not just fans. Even famous general managers like Danny Ainge, who has spent his life playing, coaching, and now evaluating the game.
Berri is an economist and a fan. He has zero special knowledge of the game of basketball. Instead, he has complicated mathematical regressions. The formulae tell him things which experts may overlook. In this case, he knew that Jeff Green, the guy the Celtics got, was a terrible rebounder for a man of his size (69). He is also a very inefficient scorer. As a result, he harms his team every minute he plays.
Ive written previously about the MET project, funded by Gates Foundation. The early finding is that the popular teacher evaluation rubrics the forms filled out by many principals and other evaluators seem to be overlooking something. We just dont know what.
These tools, when used by trained observers, fail to predict student learning very well, as measured by student test score gains. These evaluation tools are like Danny Ainges eye.
The problem is we dont have a David Berri yet. We do not have a much better way of evaluating teachers such that we can do a decent job of predicting the future (how much each teachers kids will learn, as measured by VAM).
In fact, the early MET data, released to the public a few months ago, seemed to show that Harvard political scientist Ron Ferguson was closer to being David Berri than any of the teaching experts. His approach is to never observe the teacher at all. Instead, survey kids.
That is, if instead of giving an expert on of these teacher evaluation forms, you give the kids a survey called Tripod, you are more likely to be able to predict the learning gains of that teachers students.
My belief is we need to open up the teacher evaluation challenge to the hive mind tens of thousands of curious people around the world who have zero expertise in teaching, and therefore may be able to see things that experts cannot.
I will explain my idea in a future post. It involves putting lots of teacher video on the web. But only with explicit permission of teacher and kids for each clip.
Essentially, wed create a game that allows anyone to try to predict student learning by watching teachers in action.
My belief is some new insights would emerge that move our field forward. Whether those insights will come from a retired calc teacher in Omaha, an off-Broadway actor who knows something about performance, a psych grad student in India, or a security guard at a pork and beans cannery, I have no idea.
But Id bet a lot that someone would move us forward if we made the raw video easy to play with and think about.
Tags: Trade
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This is our 3-year-old’s favorite video
May 3rd, 2011
I like it, too. Watch.
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Cash-strapped districts considering switch to four-day school week
May 3rd, 2011
Is the 180-day school year going the way of slate chalkboards?
As California lawmakers are considering cutting back the school year about 150 days, two Pennsylvania school districts are looking at changing to four-day weeks to save money.
The Associated Press reports that Coatesville Area School District in Chester County and the Warren County School District are considering becoming the first in the state adopt shorter weeks to deal with shrinking budgets.
A four-day week would save Coatesville about $1.7 million a year because of lower operations and transportation costs, as the district faces a $12 million budget gap, superintendent Richard Como told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
He’d rather trim the days than cut 53 jobs, and could consider offering daycare if there was a demand for it.
Last month, Matthew Jones, coordinator of grants and foundation development for the Warren County School District, told a budget team the short week has worked well for districts elsewhere, which reported better attendance and student morale while lengthening the time spent in class each day, The AP reported.
Administrators there don’t think student achievement would suffer. It doesn’t seem like something that is going to impact it negatively,” Jones told the panel, according to the Warren Times Observer.
Districts are considering taking Mondays off, and Coatesville would extend the length of the school days.
Last week CaliforniaWatch.com reported that the state’s districts are facing a cut of $800 to $825 per student in addition to a $1,000-per-student reduction already in place.
Keep in mind that Michigan, like Oklahoma and some other states, shifted its attendance mandates to hours instead of days to give districts more scheduling flexibility. The 1,098-hour target works out to 165 days, though districts plan more.
And, consider that And Gov. Snyder announced his Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace approach on Wednesday that opens the door for changing the way we think of school in terms of attendance and the way students are taught.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan called blended learning, where students take part of their classes online and away from school, the future at the recent Governor’s Education Summit, so student might still be learning on those days when school isn’t scheduled.
And, when you make the switch from slate to wipe boards, remember to use dry-erase makers. I speak from experience.
Tags: Fourday School, School
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