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For the first time, the Islamic School of Seattle has hired a non-Muslim leader. The small prekindergarten through sixth-grade school also will have two non-Muslims among its five teachers.
Seattle Times staff reporter
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Luis Tornillo, the new non-Muslim director of the Islamic School of Seattle, sits in one of the school's classrooms.
A year ago, during the holy month of Ramadan, a group of Muslims gathered for dinner at a home in Burien.
A single item dominated the night's agenda: the Islamic School of Seattle.
The private Montessori school in the Central Area that integrates Islamic teaching into every aspect of its curriculum was started 30 years earlier by five female Muslim converts.
Now, it was in trouble.
Enrollment at the prekindergarten through sixth-grade school had fallen to about 10 students, and with an earlier annual fundraising dinner yielding so little, there was a real possibility the school might close.
Conversations that night would continue for months
I’ve been doing some research on the controversial issue of error correction (primarily grammar-related) and English Language Learners. In my book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, I talk about some of the research. In it, I share my belief in using little overt correction with individual students and, instead, collect examples of student errors and use them in regular classwide inductive learning and game activities (without identifying who made the errors). In addition, I talk about the use of Dialogue Journals and “recasting” student errors.
In my upcoming ELL book, I talk a bit more about the topic, too.
I thought readers might find it useful to see links to some of the research on the topic that’s available online,
Students using an interactive whiteboard, part of an ambitious technology plan in the Kyrene School District in Arizona.
CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.
To hear from more experts, and to share your own predictions for the future of technology in the classroom, visit the Bits blog.
Molly Siegel and Christian Dedman, both 7, worked together with a laptop during a class in the Kyrene School District in Arizona.
In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a
Usually when business magazines like Forbes offer advice on education reform, I prepare to cringe. But this week we got a surprise. Management guru Steve Denning offers us "The Single Best Idea for Reforming Education," and it actually makes a great deal of sense.
Denning starts with a critique of the status quo.
...the biggest problem is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of "the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Chicago Labor Day Parade.
If you haven’t read my brother’s post on why Rahm’s longer school day proposal is full of holes, you should.
Some GOP members of the Michigan legislature want to out source teaching through private contractors. Mother Jones gives the scoop. H/T: Shutterbug.
By the way, if you haven’t stopped by the web site of the
If you read the news magazines or watch TV, you might get the impression that American education is deep in a crisis of historic proportions. The media tell you that other nations have higher test scores than ours and that they are shooting past us in the race for global competitiveness. The pundits say it’s because our public schools are overrun with incompetent, lazy teachers who can’t be fired and have a soft job for life.Don’t believe it. It’s not true.
So begins one of the most important pieces on education written recently. It appears in The Saturday Evening Post, which according to their circulation statement has 350,000 paid subscribers, and with a pass-along rate of
That is the final line of a remarkable column in the Sunday New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, with the title A Libyan Prisoner Lives to Tell His Story. It is about Salem al-Madhoun, a Naval officer who was a key source for Kristof, a man who was prepared to defect, to take his ship to Malta rather than obey orders.
There is too much richness to fairly represent the column with a few selections. It is a must read.
Al-Madhoun and his family represent some of the best among those who opposed the regime. He was captured by the regime's forces, and had his torture overseen by one of Qadaffi's sons. Kristof assumed he had been
I first met Doug Johnson in the mid-1990s when I was teaching a seminar on school reform for the Bush Fellows program in Minnesota. He had extensive teaching experience in many districts and, by then, was director of technology for the Mankato (MN) public schools. In that seminar and since, we have had many feisty exchanges over technology in school reform and teacher responses to high-tech devices in schools. He has written often about technology and other subjects. His Blue Skunk blog (http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/) attracts thousands of readers. One of his postings I had particularly liked because it captures so well how policymakers who decide to buy and deploy technology have little sense of the teacher’s perspective, including those teachers who are enthused about integrating high-tech into daily lessons. Few policymakers who push online instruction, blended schools, and other so-called “disruptive innovations” would applaud this manifesto.
Doug wrote this on December 11, 2005.
Dear Technology Director:
I will enthusiastically embrace technology only when the following conditions have been met:
this is a reposting of a diary from more than 4 years ago that I just encountered while looking for something else I wrote about the same time. I found value in rereading it and thought it might speak to some here, especially at a time when the level of internal conflict seems fairly intense. Make of it what you will
o, this is not a GBCW posting, let’s be clear about that. And the title is not directed specifically at dailykos, although this site is included in its intent. So if you reading this because you want to see how I am going to flame the site or the people here, or justify my taking my ball and going home, you can stop reading right now.
Similarly if what you expect is that I will now offer claims of moral or intellectual or spiritual superiority, and that
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OMG! (Whichever one you like.) That's my old 1955 classroom! I used to melt crayons on...(September 4, 2011, by 3Chord Monty) Read more
