U-Va law professors explain the art of public speaking

Robert Sayler and Molly Shadel
"U-Va law professors explain the art of public speaking"
Washington Post
March 22, 2011

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/tongue_tied_college_students_u_va_law_professors_explain_the_art_of_public_speaking/2011/03/22/ABgUNKCB_blog.html?wprss=rss_educationTopic: Public Speaking

Here is an article about improving public speaking from law professors at U-Va.

Key Points: The article has a list of good techniques to consider when improving your presentation game. It does not mention it, but Toastmasters is a great program which allows you to actually practice all the things this article talks about in the safety of friends. http://www.toastmasters.org/
Relevance: The smoother and more articulate we can be while presenting subjects to students, the better we will be heard and our lessons remembered. .

The myth of the super teacher

Diana Senechal
"The myth of the super teacher"
Washington Post
March 15, 2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the_myth_of_the_superteacher/2011/03/14/ABfRM4V_blog.html?wprss=rss_education

Topic: “Super teachers”.

This is a discussion about a program where teachers were given greater incentives to be extraordinary teachers. In this case, a salary of $125,000.

Key Points: The results reported here were somewhat negative however, I wondered why better teachers would not be attracted by better pay. If we capped baseball player salaries at some arbitrary level, say, $40K per year, would the level of competition remain the same? If you want to consistently be in the hunt for the world series, you will have to be able to pay for the New York Yankees. Why would that not be true for a school trying to put together the best team of teachers?

Relevance: Improving education and how to do that is a topic that will continue to be debated.

Bring Back Textbooks

Jay Mathews
"Bring back textbooks"Washington Post
March 15, 2011

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/bring_back_textbooks/2011/03/15/ABr153Z_blog.html?wprss=rss_education

Topic: Textbooks and their use

We have heard a lot about how useless textbooks are and not much about their usefulness. Here is an article which makes the case for textbooks.

Key Points: Textbooks may be bland and written to support a certain point of view however, the point of this article is that students benefit from working through this unique type of text.

Relevance: Textbooks are one tool of the educational trade. How and when they should be used is something that is important to consider.

Teaching's Revolving Door

"Teaching's Revolving Door" by Barbara Miner

Rethinking Schools, Winter 2009/2010

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/door232.shtml

Summary: Miner discusses the high turnover rate of the profession and looks at efforts being made to address it, with special focus on Urban Teacher Residency programs, an innovation that (at the time of this article) were operating with some success.

Key Points:

• half of new teachers leave within five years in "regular districts," within three years in urban districts
• two main points to address: recruiting the best teachers possible, and then retaining those teachers
• "more teachers are expected to retire between 2010 to 2020 since any decade since World War II"
• "Urban Teacher Residencies" is one technique combining recruitment and retention, so far with some success

Intended Audience: general public, new and future teachers, those interested in issues of teacher retention and training

Relevance: As either new or future teachers, this article is immediately relevant to us! The prediction of so many teachers retiring in the next few years is heartening in a depressed jobs market, but tempered by the fact that many of those teachers are leaving because they couldn't hack it in underfunded, uncaring, hard schools. It will also be interesting to keep an eye or the UTR programs; they sound like a very valuable idea that will hopefully pan out. Sort of a combination of TFA and an MAT program.

Training Better Teachers (Jeff, Article Two)

Camille Esch
"Training better Teachers"
Los Angeles Times
November 16th, 2010

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-esch-teacher-training-20101116,0,4320785.story

Summary:

This op-ed piece points the finger at teacher preparation programs for the country's education issues. The author claims that most teacher preparation programs are "long on theory and short on practical training in such essentials as classroom management and how to actually teach specific subjects." She proposes that the successes and failures of the graduates of teacher prep programs should be monitored, thereby providing data on the institutions from which they graduated. She does not, however, provide a practical method for doing so. One method she proposes is measuring whether or not they obtain jobs and for how long they maintain them--two things that are affected more by politics and budget concerns than they are by teacher preparation. The second method she proposes for measuring teacher preparation is polling of an institution's graduates. However, I too find fault in this method as it is entirely subjective. But this opens up the proverbial can of worms: how exactly can we objectively measure teacher preparation?

Intended audience: General Public

Key Points: 1) America's problem with education is that we have bad teachers; 2) We have bad teachers because we have bad teacher preparation programs; 3) The way to fix this is to subjectively measure the preparation of new teachers, use this as a means to determine a program's effectiveness, "and if, year after year, the data show dismal results for particular teacher preparation programs, then it's fair for the state to shut them down, as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said should be done."

Relevance: Of the articles I have read there appears to be a developing theme: teachers are the bad guys, it's their fault that kids won't learn, etc. It feels as though the actual structure of our education system, the paradigm within which we force our kids, is beyond reproach. It will be interesting to deconstruct this point of view together as the course moves forward.