Class Dismissed

Tara Bordeaux was named 2018 Teacher of the Year by the state of Texas. She built a nationally recognized media arts program at Lanier High School in Austin, and her students' work has been featured in national advertising campaigns.

However, Bordeaux's path to Teacher of the Year is unique. Bordeaux says she went through some very hard times during her junior year and dropped out of school.

"I couldn't, as a teenager, really deal with it. And I wasn't really getting along with my parents, we were fighting," says Bordeaux. We didn't see eye-to-eye, so nothing felt right, so I dropped out of school. I felt invisible to most of the world."

But Bordeaux's 11th-grade chemistry teacher, Mary Kay Canon, wasn't going to let her disappear that quickly.

"I was working at a McDonald's at the time and she [Ms. Canon] came to my job and she sat there for two hours until I got to work that night, to try and convince me to come back to school," says Bordeaux

Bordeaux didn't return to school the next day because she didn't want to face her mistakes. But she says what Ms. Canon said and stuck with her for her whole life.

"The fact that someone, especially a teacher, took the time to come to my job and to wait for me just to tell me how important I was and that I should come back to school. She's the reason that I'm here today. She saved my life."

To hear more about how Bordeaux and Canon's life-changing conversation listen to the Episode 25.

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What are we not teaching in K-12 schools that we should be teaching?

If you ask a group of educators, personal finance often bubbles to the top of the list.

Schools are excellent at teaching math, science, history, and English, but students are often handed a high school diploma without knowing the pitfalls of having a credit card.  Or they can't balance a checkbook or fill out a W-4.

Ami Amero saw the need for teaching high schoolers these life skills, but she didn't just complain about it.  Over a decade ago she created an elective to teach high schoolers personal finance.  Now that course is a requirement at the school she teaches at in Maine and is being considered as a requirement statewide.

In Episode 24 we ask Amero about what it took to get the course started.

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Many teachers are turning to DonorsChoose.Org to fund classroom projects. Several times during the production of the Class Dismissed Podcast, the organization's name has bubbled up as a vital tool in a successful classroom.

DonorsChoose helps teachers raise money for things ranging from 3D printers to robot kits to supplies for a makerspace.

In our Bright Idea segment of Episode 23, we speak with Alex Fagundez. Fagundez is a former 2nd and 3rd-grade teacher that now works on the DonorsChoose.Org teacher success team.

Fugundez offers tips for setting up a successful campaign and provides some historical background on the organization's roots.

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Each year public schools are spending millions on copyright protected textbooks. But now that we live in a digitally dominated world there may be a better way. School districts around the world are currently exploring Open Education Resources (OER), and the results can be drastic.

When states use open education resources correctly, they can experience better educational tools at a lower cost.

Our guest is the Director of Open Education with Creative Commons.

Cable Green has over 20 years of experience in academic technology and online learning, and he’s a leading advocate for open licensing policies.

In this episode, Green explains that the many states are spending millions of dollars on textbooks that are sometimes six to ten years out of date.

"The United States, just in K-12 spends somewhere between $6 and $9 billion a year on textbooks and other curriculum," says Green.

It doesn't have to be this way. With educational resources from the past decade originating in a digital format all that information can be stored, copied, and distributed for minimal cost.

Green believes by informing school districts about open educational resources; districts can spend a lot less money and get a lot better results.

Hear Green explain how Open Educational Resources (OER) can change your school district by listening to Episode 22.

This interview with Cable Green is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

 

 

Teachers Lounge

A new report says that more and more schools are phasing out the tradition of naming a valedictorian and salutatorian because it leads to unhealthy competition.

Chicago public schools have drastically cut back on librarians, is this a growing trend?

And one university is now allowing payment for college with Bitcoins. We'll tell you what school, and we'll explain what a bitcoin is.

Bright Idea

This episode's Bright Idea segment is a rebroadcast from Episode 04- We speak with we speak with BioEYES founder, Dr. Steven Farber.

Farber’s Zebrafish research lab was the catalyst for ‘BioEYES,' a K-12 program that provides learning in classrooms with live zebrafish.

In Episode 04, Farber explains how zebrafish can help teach grade school students about the challenging subjects of sex education and race.

When it comes to sex-ed, Farber explains…

“Because it’s fish and because they swim next to each other and you don’t have any mechanical issues to discuss, literally, no one gets upset about that curriculum topic!”

As for critical thinking about race, Farber says, “The kids have to mate a fish that does not have pigment to a fish that does have pigment.” In the high school unit, students learn about the genetics of pigmentation.

“So most kids in the urban setting, their only concept of race is a social construction”, explains Farber. “What they learn in our unit is that there’s actually one gene that was discovered in fish that explains the biggest chunk of why somebody’s skin is darker or lighter.”

Farber says that there’s one little change that happened in that gene to make skin lighter and that learning with zebrafish allow students to come away with an entirely different perspective then they had before.

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Having a makerspace in a classroom is a fast growing trend in education.

The spaces offer materials and room for students to have hands-on opportunities with design, experimentation, and construction.

Cheryl Nelson is a long time teacher out of Northern Virginia and is a believer in a curriculum that involves hands-on activity.

Nelson says she had one child that struggled academically but when he had an opportunity to work in the makerspace he flourished.

He and some classmates built a car that was "amazing" says Nelson. When they presented the car, his teammates acknowledged that the struggling child had been the force behind the design and creation of the project.

"The kids were in awe. And his teammates even said that this child was a genius," said Nelson. "I will tell you that this child operated at least two or three grade levels below his classmates. And I'm sure it was probably the first time in his life that he had been acknowledged by his peers as somebody who was a genius."

Nelson says she remembered calling his mom after school to tell her. "And she just burst into tears, because his education was just a real struggle."

Nelson and her colleague Wendy Goldfein, created a blog called Get Caught Engineering. It's resource site to help teachers and parents connect “classroom learning” with real-life applications in STEM.

Hear our full discussion with Nelson on Episode 20 of Class Dismissed.

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The idea of a student digital portfolio is for the pupil to collect their achievements as digital artifacts and then display those online -- often that's a website. The practice is growing in popularity across the country, so Class Dismissed tracked down a district that's seeing results.

"It's the idea of having a showcase place or place where students can curate their work. Their successes, their failures, the things they care about, some of their classwork, things like that," says Daniel Whitt, the instructional technology coordinator for Madison City Schools in Madison, Alabama.

"The basic concept for all students is practicing constant 'show then reflect,'"

Whitt is a champion of Digital Portfolios at his district, and he and his colleagues have compiled tools to implement the curriculum.

In Episode 19 we chat with Whitt about the need and challenges for school districts to roll out a digital portfolios curriculum.

"The idea here is to showcase things that are not easily quantified," says Daniel Whitt with Madison City schools in Madison Alabama.

During the episode, Whitt refers to a Google Drive with tools for success. That Google drive can be found by following this link.

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Flipped learning is a pedagogy that's becoming more common in classrooms around the country.

Classes are traditional structured where class time is reserved for the introduction of material, and then educators cut the students loose to wrestle with the higher level stuff at home.

With flipped learning, teachers reverse that model. Students are given a structured activity before they come to class. Sometimes it's a recorded lecture from the teacher touching on the basics of the subject.

The students then bring what they learned back to the class and the teachers work with the students in a social setting on the more complex material.

Our guest in Episode 18 is Dr. Robert Talbert. He's been working with the flipped learning model for nearly eight years, and he recently published "Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty."

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Valerie Lovato teaches elementary school at Eagleton Elementary in Denver Colorado.  In her school district, it's encouraged to conduct home visits with all students families right around the start of the school year.

The goal is to build relationships with parents and determine what opportunities and challenges may develop with students.

Most would agree that home visits make sense, but how does a teacher actually accomplish the ambitious task.

In Episode 17, we talk to Lovato to get the answer.

Schools in the Houston area scrambled to get the doors open with minimal delay earlier this week. On Monday, twelve independents school districts navigated through the complicated logistics caused by the flooding of Hurricane Harvey and approximately 80 percent of the schools in the area were able to restore some sense of normalcy to students.

James Jubran is a teacher in the Alief Independent School District in Houston. He was originally a guest on the Class Dismissed Podcast back in Episode 10. Jubran built an incredible 1,100-gallon aquarium that mimics the Amazon river.

After Harvey, we first followed-up with Jubran via email on August 29, just a few days after Harvey's impact.

"School has been closed since Friday and will continue being closed through at least the rest of the week," Jubran wrote.

"I have no idea what the shape of the tank is, let alone the school. All I know is that a lot of people have water in their homes. I've been out helping evacuate people on my boat the past couple days."

Two weeks later, we spoke with Jubran again to find out how his colleagues and students are managing after the Hurricane Harvey. We also asked him about the status of his school and that incredible aquarium.

You can listen to his full interview in Episode 16.

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