A few comments about what those bubbles on Standardized Tests don’t tell us about our students:

• creativity
• critical thinking
• resilience
• motivation
• persistence
• curiosity
• endurance
• reliability
• enthusiasm
• empathy
• self-awareness
• self-discipline
• leadership
• civic-mindedness
• courage
• compassion
• resourcefulness
• sense of beauty
• sense of wonder
• honesty
• integrity

(Thanks to Gerald W. Bracy’s Setting the Record Straight @Amazon)

Hey there! Three new technologies are now in place for teachers to use in the classroom and the good news is that they’re free! Here is our brief review of the best of the best:

A Cleaner YouTube: Works in your browser and allows you to display and search for YouTube videos without “related videos,” comments or display advertising. No distractions for your students! Whohoo!

TubeChop: A really cool YouTube editor that allows you to chop out a specific segment of YouTube video and show it to you students (without having to see the entire YouTube video. Awesome!

Drag On Tape: An amazing piece of software that allows you to mix segments of many YouTube videos into a mashup! Crazy!

Cheers for all you do!

There exists a multitude of entries in the academic literature that offer many a cogent reason why the current educational paradigm is in need of a strategic metamorphosis. These proposed academic reforms impact every conceivable level of schooling and are exhaustive. The recommendations are worth your attention because our continued tolerance of these inadequacies will result in the support of student achievement outcomes that are at best mediocre in their lasting consequences. Rather than reiterate that litany here, I’m going to simply recite my two best reasons why a 180 degree shift in the organizational structure of education needs to become a reality.

Our districts and the schools they oversee are controlled by gatekeepers. Our superintendents are the managers of district knowledge, administrative expertise and site planning while our principals control access to school’s resources in tandem with directing teacher efficacy in the expected school-wide learning results. Teachers support this archaic hierarchical structure with acts gate keeping as well by making obvious to the administration their adherence to a State mandated curriculum while minimizing those aspects of the subject deemed nonstandard. They are also gate keepers to the student’s academic progress in that they administer assessments designed to mark a student’s daily achievements in gaining a sanctified knowledge of the curriculum.

This industrial model of learning is antiquated in that it significantly compartmentalizes each person involved in a most worthy human endeavor, the education of our youth. This causes the stakeholders who work in this platform to make isolated decisions and daily contributions to the Whole without significant acknowledgment from a peer or the management team since the end game is primarily an analysis of the school’s high stakes testing regimen quarter by quarter. This leads teachers to feel significantly marginalized from other campus participants though they will be held accountable for their contribution to the annual Adequate Yearly Progress that summarizes their school’s academic achievement year after year. We are a strange set of bedfellows.

This hierarchical schema needs to be replaced by a relationship based matrix of co-responsibilities where the student (and not the standardized curriculum) is the subject of schooling; where all stakeholders share in the consequences of designing the pedagogy by which students are taught, including student families and the school’s community-at-large. In other words, we need to minimize gate keeping and maximize social relationships among stakeholders.

The second major flaw in the current paradigm for education is that it asks our instructors to primarily teach and assess sets of standardized knowledge without taking care to instruct our students in the cognitive methodologies necessary to serve their communities as lifelong learners. Rather than consistently teach our children models of thinking and doing that can be applied across the school’s curriculum and later into adult living, our gate keepers desire to see scores of proficiency or better on State assessments (by subject, by student, by school), which to my last inspection, has yet to spur any meaningful dialogue on the prowess of a young person’s manner of thinking and doing critically.

To this end, the new paradigm for education needs to cultivate integrated and sustainable relationships with the stakeholders in a manner that mutually shares the successes (and failures) of the paradigm they adopt while allowing teachers to offer instruction in paradigms of thinking and doing, rather than only teaching State mandated snipets of valued knowledge that in all likelihood will have limited applicability to much of their adult life.

Cheers for all you do!