The Complexity of Daily Principal Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Complexity of Daily Principal Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Complexity of Daily Principal Decision-making

Just as the classroom teacher is in charge of the students but wholly dependent upon them to respond, interact, and learn, so too are principals dependent upon their teachers to adhere to district policies, create classrooms where students absorb lessons, and collaborate with peers and school staff. After all there is only one principal (maybe an assistant if enrollment is large enough) and there are, depending on school size anywhere from 10 to 30 teachers in elementary schools and up to 100 in larger secondary ones.The principal is a manager, the staff’s instructional leader, and politician in dealing with student rancor, parental disaffection, teacher squabbles, and district office directives.

An earlier post dealt with teacher decision-to make the simple–actually not so simple–point that teachers engage in daily decision-making before, during, and after a lesson. That engagement is a complex process that spans monitoring the classroom teaching of content and skills, managing behaviors of individual and group of students, and frequent improvising as the unexpected pops up–inevitably, I might add–during lessons.

Although the content of lessons in science or math, or English, or French or U.S. history differ, they have in common a massive CONTINUE READING: The Complexity of Daily Principal Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Grumpy Old Teacher – Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away

Grumpy Old Teacher – Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away

Decisions, Decisions–What’s a School District to Do?

Let’s survey the audience.

Even as we close out the Covid school year, districts are wrestling with deciding how to open schools in August. What mitigation measures should they keep in place? What should they drop? What does the community want? Parents? Students? Teachers and staff?

Grumpy Old Teacher’s (GOT) district has put a survey online to gather stakeholder input. (Stakeholder is a fancy word that means anyone whose life is affected by what takes place in the city’s schools. Employees, parents, students, obviously. But it also includes community organizations, local businesses who depend upon the school for customers, people who live around a school, etc.) You can find the survey here.

If you’re expecting a bash post, you will be disappointed. GOT is going to CONTINUE READING: Grumpy Old Teacher – Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away

The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making

In the previous two posts (see here and here), I have argued that parents as well as grandparents, uncles and aunts who became home-bound teachers during pandemic-driven closures of schools have come to both appreciate and understand teaching as never before.

Sitting with a 10 or 14 year-old at the kitchen table figuring out how to answer the math word problems or parsing teacher-assigned paragraphs in a U.S. history text were generally unfamiliar tasks that stay-at-home parents had to do regularly when schools shut down. Parents pleading with or ordering their children to complete their homework before the home-bound children sat down at the screen to begin the next session of remote instruction is not what many felt they had to do once their children were of age to traipse off to the schoolhouse. But now they do. And many, if not most, parents see teaching hardly like what they had recalled from their own years in school but far more difficult than they had anticipated.

At-home teaching with one or more kids for maybe two hours a day parents have discovered, is hard work involving many decisions. Yet parents do not face, for example,a third grade classroom filled with 30 eight year-olds for six hours a day for thirty-six weeks.

But most parents, grand-parents, uncles, and aunts are not teachers and their only memories of being a student were when they attended school decades CONTINUE READING: The Complexity of Teacher Decision-making | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Will Civics Education Help Students Make Better Decisions? [It’s complicated] | Ed In The Apple

Will Civics Education Help Students Make Better Decisions? [It’s complicated] | Ed In The Apple

Will Civics Education Help Students Make Better Decisions? [It’s complicated]

In my role as President of the Education Alumni Association at a local college I host a “Principal and Community Breakfast” every February. We invite a policy maker, a researcher, or a scholar to make a presentation to local principals and activists. This year we invited a speaker from the US Census; she made an excellent present – the Census and Schools.  In addition to the adults I invited the leadership class from a local high school. After the presentation I met with the kids and asked what they “learned.”  One student said if there was an undercount New York State could lose one or two members of the House of Representatives, another student was clearly “discomforted.”

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Today electors representing the winning candidate in the fifty states and the District of Columbia will cast their ballots, on January 6th, before a joint session of Congress the ballots will be counted: Biden 306, Trump 232.

The presidential election seemed to mark a revival in American civic engagement. A record two-thirds of the electorate voted. …

Yet large numbers of Americans appear to believe President Donald Trump’s baseless charges of election fraud. Civic life and discourse have been eroded by the normalization of lying by elected leaders, the dissemination of CONTINUE READING: Will Civics Education Help Students Make Better Decisions? [It’s complicated] | Ed In The Apple

ANATOMY OF A DECISION – Dad Gone Wild

ANATOMY OF A DECISION – Dad Gone Wild

ANATOMY OF A DECISION

“Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

 

Like most MNPS’s parents, the wife and I spent the week trying to decide what our choice for schooling would look like starting after the first of the year. Would we return to in-person instruction or remain virtual.

Nashville in-person instruction is scheduled to begin on January 7th for those opting in. Based on rising COVID-19 cases – the district’s recently revealed measurement tool shows the city currently at 9.3 out of 10 – it’s hard to imagine that deadline actually being honored. But, the measurement tool doesn’t factor in political winds, so there is no guarantee.

We are one of the fortunate families in that this year has been pretty similar to past years. The kids haven’t exactly embraced remote learning, but they are slowly mastering it. Along the way improving important life skills like time management, self-advocacy, and technical mastery while becoming more self-sufficient. I continually see CONTINUE READING: ANATOMY OF A DECISION – Dad Gone Wild