Items, Events, and Other:

Websites:

1. Twiddla : Its like Elluminate, just without all the expense. (Thanks to Jenny for the heads up on this one!)

2. Forward Thinking Museum : A virtual museum worth checking out.

"Letters from our Listeners":

Shawn and Troy

I've spent some time in 5-8, 6-8 and K-8 school environments. Sometimes 5th graders were self-contained while older students moved from teacher to teacher. In other circumstances, 5th grade was used as a transition with single-teacher classrooms and locker access during passing time. I'm currently in a New Jersey K-8 school with no passing time, no lockers and 6-8th graders changing classes.

Knowing all too well the challenges of adolescent behavior and academic performance, I wonder what thoughts you had on the appropriate breakdown of grade levels for elementary vs. middle school. At what grade level should middle school begin (beside the legal requirements for teacher certifications)? Can a single administrator effectively manage a staff who work with students from kindergarten age to their teens, or should different principals handle different grade ranges? What impact does the proximity of 7th and 8th graders to elementary aged students have on academics and/or behavior? How about 5th and 6th graders? In my search for answers on this topic, I found a study done by Duke University in 2007 entitled "Should Sixth Grade be in Elementary or Middle School? An Analysis of Grade Configuration and Student Behavior."

Is there such a thing as either an elementary or middle school mentality? Can a teacher have both? Can a principal?

What are your thoughts on this topic?

News:

Public Schools Outperform Private Schools in Math Instruction

In another “Freakonomics”-style study that turns conventional wisdom about public- versus private-school education on its head, a team of University of Illinois education professors has found that public-school students outperform their private-school classmates on standardized math tests, thanks to two key factors: certified math teachers, and a modern, reform-oriented math curriculum.“According to our results, schools that hired more certified teachers and had a curriculum that de-emphasized learning by rote tended to do better on standardized math tests,” Lubienski said. “And public schools had more of both.”

Of the five factors, school size and parental involvement “didn’t seem to matter all that much,” Lubienski said, citing a weak correlation between the two factors as “mixed or marginally significant predictors” of student achievement.

They also discovered that smaller class sizes, which are more prevalent in private schools than in public schools, significantly correlate with achievement.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090226093423.htm

Bridging the Character Education Achievement Gap

Throughout his now-famous "Last Lecture," the late Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science Randy Pausch talked about what he called the "head fake." It is the idea that learning and education work best when they work on the personal and general levels simultaneously.

We miss one of the most important aspects of character education, the cognitive head fake, when our obsession with advanced coursework becomes myopic and overshadows the strength both areas could have if working to complement each other in high schools.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/02/26/23sutton-com.h28.html?tmp=804479676