Blog Archives

Presenting D.C.’s 2014 Teacher of the Year!

1/28/2014

Credit: Bill Day

It’s probably safe to say that most people know someone with a math phobia. In our increasingly math- and science-driven world, many students (and even teachers and parents!) still struggle to overcome anxieties around basic math skills. With the Common Core State Standards shifting instructional targets and practices, it will be interesting to see how a new approach will affect this all-too-common angst about math. William (Bill) Day, the 2014 D.C. Teacher of the Year, is not only a math teacher, but also a proponent for the Common Core State Standards and a more practical attitude about math education.

The Minnesota native started his teaching career in Maine before coming to D.C., where he has been at Two Rivers Public Charter School for the past three years. With wisdom from nine years of teaching, Bill shares his views on the Common Core and the future of math education and also gives us a sense of what’s to come during his Teacher of the Year tenure.

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Strategizing on Critical Thinking and the Common Core

1/21/2014

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Credit: Scott Goldstein

Albert Einstein said that the value of a liberal arts education was “not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think.” If that’s what we want for our students, a good place to start is training the mind to accept this crucial truth: There isn’t always one right answer.

And that lesson is more important than ever, as states roll out assessments tied to the Common Core State Standards that will ask students to choose not just the right answer — questions can have more than one correct response — but the best answer. Earlier this month, teachers from across D.C. gathered to strategize how their instruction can facilitate this change in thinking. (They were meeting for the final “Cutting to the Core” professional development session of the fall semester, an event sponsored by Teach Plus D.C.) How do we shift the mindset of our students from seeking the one easy, right answer to searching to unearth several right answers? To tackle this difficult task, I co-facilitated a session that explored best practices in four key areas: “teacher talk,” student feedback, assessment formation, and “student talk.”

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Inequality and the Education Reform Debate

1/14/2014

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Inequality is all the rage these days. From the president to the new mayor of New York City and even your local movie theater, we have heard about the challenges of income inequality. But it seems that what many people really mean when they talk about inequality is poverty. (And no doubt, as we look back at the launch of the War on Poverty and compare it to the relatively sparse concern for the poor today, such attention is sorely needed.) While inequality often implies a fair amount of poverty, the societal challenges of the two are not the same; and to confuse them can obscure some of the thornier difficulties of inequality.

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Can High Standards Hurt Students?

1/7/2014

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Courtesy of New Readers Press

The standards are rising, and so are the stakes.

As a teacher in a GED school, the new year brings a new exam, aligned to the Common Core State Standards, that will ask students to go far beyond what the previous test ever asked of them. There is no doubt the transition will be a rocky one as students learn to develop college-level, critical thinking skills. I’m up for the challenge of getting them there, but I’m also aware of the realities: In a school like mine, where we receive students at just about every grade level, we have to consider the effect of telling a 20-year-old student, with a third-grade reading level and a five-year gap in his education, that his next stop is a GED that demands 12th-grade proficiency. I’ve seen it too many times: The student comes in expecting that, just like his more advanced schoolmates, he will study for several months — maybe a year — pass the test, and be on his way to college. A year later, aware of how high a climb he faces, he packs it in and heads for a job market where he faces little chance of upward mobility in the years to come.

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Regulation, Litigation…Intimidation? One Lawyer Explains Why Educators Have No Need to Fear Education Law

1/2/2014

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As a social studies teacher, I taught my students how a bill becomes a law and why our government and laws exist to protect them as citizens. Yet conversations around compliance with special education laws, standardized testing policies, or union negotiations only served to heighten my blood pressure. Because I did not fully understand the laws by which I needed to abide, discussing them just added pressure to an already stressful job. However, I wasn’t the only one with these concerns. From my experience, it seems that this lack of understanding and subsequent uneasiness about education law is common throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institutions.

Michelle Tellock, a product of rural Wisconsin’s public schools as well as Yale Law School, brings her breadth of experiences to Recess to clear up our misconceptions. Now an attorney with the education practice group at Hogan Lovells, LLP in Washington, DC, she shares her insights about how attorneys and the law can help prevent conflicts in schools and institutions, and how lawyers and educators can learn a bit more about each other to improve relationships across the different sectors of education.

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about

YEP-DC is a nonpartisan group of education professionals who work in research, policy, and practice – and even outside of education. The views expressed here are only those of the attributed author, not YEP-DC. This blog aims to provide a forum for our group’s varied opinions. It also serves as an opportunity for many more professionals in DC and beyond to participate in the ongoing education conversation. We hope you chime in, but we ask that you do so in a considerate, respectful manner. We reserve the right to modify or delete any content or comments. For any more information or for an opportunity to blog, contact us via one of the methods below.

Bloggers

MONICA GRAY is co-founder & president of DreamWakers, an edtech nonprofit. She writes on education innovation and poverty.

LYDIA HALL is a legislative aide in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she works on education, civil rights, and other issues. Lydia is interested in helping to bridge the gap between Capitol Hill and the classroom.

MOSES PALACIOS is an advocate for student rights and works as a Research Manager for the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) - a coalition of urban school districts across the nation. He writes on issues regarding the children of immigrants and students learning English as a second language. His views are his own and not representative of CGCS.

PATRICIA RUANE is a
research associate at an education nonprofit. She is an editor of Recess.

LESLIE WELSH is a high school social studies teacher in DC. She is an editor of Recess.

Presenting D.C.’s 2014 Teacher of the Year!

Strategizing on Critical Thinking and the Common Core

Inequality and the Education Reform Debate

Can High Standards Hurt Students?

Regulation, Litigation…Intimidation? One Lawyer Explains Why Educators Have No Need to Fear Education Law

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