Thomas Newkirk's Superlative Look at CCSS
Thomas Newkirk's Holding Onto Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones was already a book worth reading. In 2009, it was a very thoughtful response to some of the twisting of instruction that was happening in English classrooms. Not a practical strategies book, but a book for thinking about the philosophical foundations of what we do.Turns out that in 2013 Newkirk added a Postscript to the book entitled &
A Little Help, Please!
Next week, I'm off to Seattle for a 2.5 day session on PLCs. Our school district is trying to pilot PLCs, and my principal has asked me to attend. He's working his posterior off to get our school on track, so I would probably walk across coals if he asked, but the fact that my daughter and son-in-law just moved to Seattle is definitely a bonus.Anyway, we have a variety of breakout sessions to atte
The Mystery of Excellence
Diane Ravitch's recent columns about Ms. McLaughlin, one of the undeservingly employed terrible teachers of the Vergara trial, underlines one of the central problems of the whole teacher evaluation portion of the reformster dream.Ms. McLaughlin won awards for teaching excellence not once, but twice in her career. And yet one of the plaintiffs found her to be grossly ineffective. Now, it's possible
6-29-14 Curmudgucation Week
CURMUDGUCATION: Being White GuysI'm going to write this companion piece to last night's post about race and gender and then I'm going to set this topic aside (until I don't).Preamble and Disclaimer Let me make two points before I start this exercise in gross generalization. These apply to the previous post as well.1) I cannot possibly speak for everybody in any category and to every person's exper