Reading across curriculum

This also goes to answer the question about "deeper reading". Where does this fit in the curriculum? AP Lang and Comp? Social Studies?

I got this from Feldman 6/15/2010 -- it's filed there. Research the Shanahan connection.

1) Center on Instruction - Adolescent Literacy Series

see: http://centeroninstruction.org/pdevents.cfm#69

The Academic Literacy Community of Practice webinar series provided Regional Comprehensive Center staff an opportunity to engage in an interactive learning process with Center on Instruction staff centered on adolescent literacy best practices used in traditional content-area classrooms in grades 4-12, including differentiated instruction for students with language needs, struggling students, and students with disabilities, and methods for disseminating useful information and resources to SEAs to enhance state-level literacy professional development. A series of five webinars held from February 2010 to June 2010. Implementation of best practices were examined and discussed within an RTI context where applicable. Each webinar is described below, with a link to the archived WebEx file, and PowerPoint presentations are available for download below.

** These presentations are uniformly excellent - depending on your background knowledge and professional interests... I just read Cynthia Shanahan's on Discipline Based Literacy in History/SS - mind blowing it was so good... takes comprehension instruction to a whole deeper level within the specific context of understanding history, (e.g. role of context, corroboration, sourcing, etc. - sample questions students need to learn to ask as they read:

•Who is the author? Can I trust what he/she says? Why or why not?

•Who was the author writing to? Why?

•When did the author write it? Does that make a difference?

•Do others agree? If not, who is more credible?

•What does the author say that makes him/her believable?

*** Might be useful if we ALL learned to ask these when watching TV news, reading newspapers, etc!!

Colleges Work to Stop Cheating

NYT article (To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery) about colleges trying to stop high-tech cheating....

Here's the lead:

ORLANDO, Fla. — The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.

Cheat Sheet

Truth in Testing

Articles in this series examine cheating in education and efforts to stop it.

Related

• Cheat Sheet: Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Tests (June 11, 2010)

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (300) »

No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.

The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.

Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s third-largest campus by enrollment, said that cheating had dropped significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered during the spring semester.

“I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out about it,” Mr. Ellis said.

Free Phonics lessons/books online

Progressive Phonics are in the Bob-book vein. Just began looking at them. I'll try them with Charlotte.

http://www.progressivephonics.com/~suzettew/

NPR story on teacher pay/ evaluation

Here's the lead to a recent story on NPR titled "New Evaluation Laws Split Teachers Even More" about new teacher pay models taking hold across the states.

When summer ends, many teachers will face a new reality: A number of states have passed new laws and policies that tie teachers' job security to how well their students do in class. Some teacher groups dropped their longstanding opposition to this idea, and now say it will be good for the profession. Still, many teachers fear the new evaluation systems are part of an attack on their profession.

//

David Brooks waxes poetic about value of books

July 8, 2010 NYT. Jan Bujan hipped me to this article. David Brooks, in "The Medium is the Medium" shares data about how getting kids started on home libraries helps stop the "summer slide." The article goes on to weigh in on the debate about whether book reading is better than internet reading. Here's the core of that argument:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books
to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces
the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see
themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as
members of a different group.

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is
the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the
way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person
who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe.
There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the
bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great
writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and
hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit
that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes
hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had
been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary
America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than
the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant
activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph
Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being
cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about
current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also
helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in
those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering
significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have
to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse
yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the
teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The
Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture
still produces better students.

Common Core Standards

Ed Week: "As of July 9, 23 states had decided to replace their mathematics and English/langauge arts standards with the common set." Illinois did on June 24. 41 states are expected to take on the CCS by year's end.

Chicago's new layoff rules

July 14 Education Week reports that Chicago board of educaiton approved a policy last month that would dismiss tenured teachers rated "ineffective" before "dipping into the ranks of higher-rater novices." CTU head calls the new policy "illegal."

Teacher Performance Pay in Pittgsburgh

July 14 Ed Week reports that AFT teachers of Pittsburgh school district agreed to forego automatic raises for receiving masters's degrees in favor of a new schedule that "emphasizes teacher performance." [T]"eachers will earn big pay boosts by satisfying a periodic review based on a combination of their teacher-evaluation scores and demonstrating that they have advanced students' academic growth." On the plus side, teachers could pass the $100,000 mark in eight years.

Lightning Bug online resource for fiction writing for kids

Lightning Bug online writing website offers kids help with fiction writing. Links to "find a story idea," "develop a story idea," and "finish a story"

Be A Smart Citizen: Be Aware of Internet Fraud

See the government's new website, onguardonline.gov for tips, videos, and games about Social Networking safety, Phishing, Spyware, etc.

New Learning and New Literacies Masters Program

The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana has a new MA program for educators with the title above. This gives credence to the idea of teaching more visual literacy, more "new literacy". (or it's just a flash-in-the-pan that won't last). Read the description below copied from the website for rhetoric about how we need to train kids for the new world.

'New learning' is an approach to education that engages students as active designers and co-designers of their own knowledge. 'New literacies' aims to expand learners' meaning-making modes and capacities, and uses digital media to enhance student learning.

Designed for Teachers

This exciting, new online masters program anticipates a near future where education is even more central to society, the economy and personal opportunity than it is today. Education will be ubiquitous, available at any time and in any place, taking place not just at school, but at home, at work and in community settings. The emerging new digital media will occupy a central position in New Learning.

Participants in this program will be teachers of literacy and teachers in other discipline areas who wish to investigate language across the curriculum. Participants selected to join the program will have training and professional experience ranging from the early years of schooling to adult learning. The program supplements traditional, alphabetical notions of literacy (including the literacies required for learning across a wide range of discipline areas), with a broader conception of literacy in the context of new media, global communications and cultural and linguistic diversity.

Kristoff: The Boys Have Fallen Behind

Nicholas Kristoff opines in NYT article "The Boys Have Fallen Behind" that girls "have roughly achieved parity with boys in math. Meanwhile, girls are well ahead of boys in verbal skills, and they just seem to try harder." He references Richard Whitmire's book "Why Boys Fail." Key reading quote from Whitmire: "Poor reading skills snowball through the grades. By fifth grade, a child at the bottom of the class reads only about 60,000 words a year in and out of school, compared to a child in the middle of the class who reads about 800,000 words a year." Kristoff suggests that educators encourage boys to read "lowbrow, adventure of even gross-out books" and references guysread.com.

Writing Contest

Link to the JFK Essay Contest.

College Essay Videos

If you need another reason why visual literacy (both reading and writing non-print texts), here's one: colleges are moving towards video college essays. Here's a story on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124628580&ft=1&f=1003

Here's a website that offers advice about "writing" (probably no scare quotes needed) college video essays.

I've also put a copy of a similar story from the Education Week story in my "Department Sharing" folder.