March 18, 2012

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Policy Recommendations for Improving Teaching This post is actually a response to John Merrow's Huffington Post column on value-added. Recommended - it's quite good! First, I appreciate Mr. Merrow going to the source. I've known and worked with Bill for years and his work inspired my passion for education, leading ultimately to serving on the school board here in Nashville. His work is solid but the policy recommendations drawn from it are often wrong. Part of that is Tennessee's fault - we've had almost 20 years to learn how to help teachers add more value, and we've failed because we spent most of those 20 years fighting the data rather than working with it. Based on years of working with that data from a policy perspective and my work in positive psychology, here are my policy recommendations: 1. Recruit great teacher candidates. TFA has found that high grades and test scores from top colleges are not enough. We need better data on the qualities of character and outlook that make for great teachers, and how to select for them (I suspect there will be multiple patterns), but, in the meantime, look to resilience - especially optimism and a growth mindset - plus a passion for teaching. 2. Help teachers develop personally to become more resilient, more growth-minded, better at relationships, more focused on strengths - and show them proven ways to help develop these same qualities in students while teaching academic content. The Army is doing this for sergeants to help soldiers; why can't we...
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What's meaningful in your life? For many, meaning is a critical component of a good life. We want to feel that we matter and that we are connected in some way to something greater or bigger than we are. I've run across two pieces recently that speak to this, one in the course of commenting on how the social structure and role of government in the developed world is and must change, the second in a piece on global warming. Here they are, with links. The pieces are well worth your time, but the quotes can stand on their own: "Many Americans became (and remain) stuff-rich and meaning-poor. Many people classified as “poor” in American society have an historically unprecedented abundance of consumer goods—anything, essentially, that a Fordist factory here or abroad can turn out. But far too many Americans still have lives that are poor in meaning, in part because the blue social model separates production and consumption in ways that are ultimately dehumanizing and demeaning. A rich and rewarding human life neither comes from nor depends on consumption, even lots of consumption; it comes from producing goods and services of value through the integration of technique with a vision of social and personal meaning. Being fully human is about doing good work that means something." Walter Russell Mead, "The Once and Future Liberalism" http://the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1183 Powerful. The second piece is an account of a lecture by Lord Christopher Monckton on the issue of global warming at Union College, Schenectady, NY. After the lecture, in...

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