Joyful Learning Network's Public Diigo Library

JLN is becoming a big fan of using Diigo as a way to bookmark and highlight online articles ... it's actually a lot more efficient than this news page, so we're going to start transitioning there ... check it out and let us know how it works for you!

"Do Middle Schools Make Sense?"
Mary Tamer, Ed. The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Fall 2012

"New research finds that keeping students in K–8 schools has benefits.
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"Not all students are so fortunate, as West discovered last spring when he released a study that explored the achievement and dropout rates of students enrolled in grades three through 10 in Florida’s public schools. The findings? In sum, students who left elementary schools for middle schools in grades six or seven “lose ground in both reading and math compared to their peers who attend K–8 schools,” he wrote in “The Middle School Plunge,” published in the spring 2012 issue of Education Next. Additionally, Florida students who entered middle school in sixth grade were 1.4 percentage points more likely than their K–8 peers to drop out of high school by 10th grade — a whopping increase of 18 percent.

"“Intuitively, I had not expected this to be an important policy lever, but there are a lot of indicators that things are not going well for students in the middle school grades in the United States,” says West, who serves as executive editor of Education Next. “If you look at international comparisons, kids in the United States perform better at elementary school than the later grades … so it made sense to look at whether grade configuration influenced this.”

"West decided to take a closer look after he read a 2010 study out of New York City by two Columbia University researchers that “produced compelling evidence that the transitions to middle schools were harmful for students in that setting.” That research found that students entering grades six through eight or seven to eight schools experience a “sharp drop” in achievement versus those attending K–8 schools. West wondered whether the same patterns would be evident elsewhere and, if so, whether the drop in achievement was temporary or persisted into high school.
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"Important, yes, but while West hopes that his research will open the door for districts to take a closer look at more K–8 models, the configuration alone is hardly a magic bullet or panacea for success.

"“I happen to agree with the idea that it’s good to have K–8 or seven through 12 schools, but this is not based on data,” Rogers says. “Small schools, with less than 400 kids, can make a difference, as can having children over a longer period of time. None of these things, alone, makes a difference. The question is, what are the practices that are occurring to make some schools successful?”
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"While some earlier studies questioned the role of grade configuration in school success and student achievement, including the 2008 National Forum “Policy Statement on Grade Configuration” and a 2010 study by EdSource, “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better” in California, “the evidence on academic benefits has become much stronger in the past two years,” West says.

"“I’m generally sympathetic with this argument, especially to the extent that it points to a set of practices that middle schools could adopt to address their performance problems given that wholesale changes to grade configuration are unlikely to occur overnight,” he says. “That said, our evidence indicates that effective school practices are more common in K–8 schools than in middle schools and that the transition to middle school itself is detrimental for students and should be eliminated wherever possible.”

"Perhaps most importantly, Rogers says the one consistency she has found among K–8 schools is that “kids tend to say they feel safer, so there is less of a Lord of the Flies environment” at a critical stage when they are “navigating through social currents. For many kids, it’s distracting.”

"So whether the reasoning is leadership, safety, or the lessening of transitions that may affect academic achievement, West hopes policymakers will continue to review grade configurations for the benefit of all students.

"“The flip side of the point I’m making is that there is not one grade configuration for everyone,” says West, “but I think for policymakers, it is too easy to say we know there is a problem with middle schools and we can mitigate those problems. I don’t think my research or anyone else’s gives us the steps to take to mitigate them.”"

"Effort to survey Indianapolis teachers meets resistance"
Scott Elliott, Indystar.com, October 8, 2012

"A national education nonprofit has chosen Indianapolis to pilot a survey of local teachers that aims to go beyond test scores and offer information about such things as whether a school is clean and safe, whether it encourages creativity and independent thinking and how well its staff communicates with parents.

"The point, says GreatSchools.org, is to give parents valuable information to help them navigate the fast-growing public, private and charter school options.

"Sound like good news? Not to Marion County school superintendents, who have become increasingly suspicious that such efforts are nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to erode public schools and steer parents and students to private and charter schools.

"In fact, almost no Marion County school districts are cooperating with GreatSchools.org’s survey effort, which is backed by the Indiana Department of Education, Mayor Greg Ballard and the United Way.
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"Jacob Pactor, a Speedway High School English teacher who filled out the survey, was glad to have the opportunity to say great things about his school.

"“I was excited as a teacher to have somebody ask for my opinion about the school that I’m working at,” he said. “We brag about it internally, and we should brag externally.”

"The state’s A to F grading system for schools, Pactor said, simply can’t capture important dimensions such as whether a school is safe and nurturing. The climate survey can supplement the grades.

"“It’s hard to judge anything,” he said, “if you judge based just on test scores.”"

"The Writing Revolution"
Peg Tyre, Atlantic Magazine, October 2012

"For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform."
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"...  And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing.
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"According to the Nation’s Report Card, in 2007, the latest year for which this data is available, only 1 percent of all 12th-graders nationwide could write a sophisticated, well-­organized essay. Other research has shown that 70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through 12 write poorly. Over the past 30 years, as knowledge-based work has come to dominate the economy, American high schools have raised achievement rates in mathematics by providing more­-extensive and higher-level instruction. But high schools are still graduating large numbers of students whose writing skills better equip them to work on farms or in factories than in offices; for decades, achievement rates in writing have remained low.
"Although New Dorp teachers had observed students failing for years, they never connected that failure to specific flaws in their own teaching. ...
"... Some teachers wanted to know how this could happen. “We spent a lot of time wondering how our students had been taught,” said English teacher Stevie D’Arbanville. “How could they get passed along and end up in high school without understanding how to use the word although?”
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"Back on Staten Island, more New Dorp teachers were growing uncomfortably aware of their students’ profound deficiencies—and their own. “At teachers college, you read a lot of theory, like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but don’t learn how to teach writing,” said Fran Simmons. ...
"... Teachers stopped giving fluffy assignments such as “Write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I” and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay describing three major causes of the conflict."

"Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You"
Cal Newport, New York Times, September 29, 2012

"IN the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard decision about my future career. I had a job offer from Microsoft and an acceptance letter from the computer science doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had also just handed in the manuscript for my first nonfiction book, which opened the option of becoming a full-time writer. These are three strikingly different career paths, and I had to choose which one was right for me.

"For many of my peers, this decision would have been fraught with anxiety. Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice books, the news media and others to “follow our passion.” This advice assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law school.

"To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers, musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.

"But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we’re still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.


"As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it. The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice summary of this literature.)"

"When Growth Outpaces Happiness"
Richard A. Easterlin, New York Times, September 27, 2012

"CHINA’s new leaders, who will be anointed next month at the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in Beijing, might want to rethink the Faustian bargain their predecessors embraced some 20 years ago: namely, that social stability could be bought by rapid economic growth.
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"Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.

"Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.
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"It is startling to find that Chinese people’s feelings of well-being have declined in a period of such momentous improvement in their economic lives. After all, most policy makers would confidently predict that a fourfold increase in a people’s material living standard would make them considerably happier.

"And yet, piecing the surveys together, we found a U-shaped pattern of happiness over time, with life satisfaction declining from 1990 to the first part of this decade, and then recovering by 2010 to a level somewhat below the 1990 value. What explains the “U” at a time of unprecedented economic growth?"

"A Painter at the Chalkboard: "Old School Tools" in the Classroom"
Lisa Michelle Dabbs, Edutopia, September 25, 2012

"How important are technology tools in the classroom? And what if I don't have access to them to use with my students? How can I possibly keep up with the rest of my colleagues around the country that do? I get asked those questions a lot when I’m consulting or in webinars. There really isn't an easy answer. What I like to say, however, is that it's not about the tool, it's about how you support your pedagogy with the tools you have, based on principles of good practice.
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"That said, whether you're a new teacher or an experienced teacher that doesn't have access to all the tech bells and whistles, let's look at three ways that you can still teach great content using some "old school tools."

"1) Use Paper to Teach Blogging
"2) Use Folders as Apps
"3) Use the Chalkboard as Social Media"

"Olympian Thoughts"
Paul Houston, Developmental Studies Center, September 19, 2012

"I watch the Olympics, not for the overblown pageantry, or the bloviating commentators, or the warped up nationalism; I watch them because in a concentrated form they give us insight about what is best about our species. And they offer lessons for any mindful educator. How can you watch and see the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” that is on display in every event and not see the struggles of mankind rolled up into a few minutes or seconds of competition?
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"The lessons for educators are as varied as the flags that fly during the Olympics. The power of social and emotional learning are central to education and the lessons from the games give us insight. Making your best effort, preparing well, going the distance, learning to overcome adversity, collaborating and cooperating and putting your ego aside for the good of the team are but just a few that come to mind. Perhaps the greatest lesson is that success only comes from failure. No one starts out a gold medal winner. We are all losers to some degree or another. What is clear is that simply relying on a learning system that uses the arbitrary measure of a test score but which doesn’t allow for broader life experiences that are critical to a child’s future is not one that will win gold or even a bronze."

"Young, Gifted and Neglected"
Chester E. Finn Jr., New York Times, September 18, 2012

"It’s time to end the bias against gifted and talented education and quit assuming that every school must be all things to all students, a simplistic formula that ends up neglecting all sorts of girls and boys, many of them poor and minority, who would benefit more from specialized public schools. America should have a thousand or more high schools for able students, not 165, and elementary and middle schools that spot and prepare their future pupils."