Online Schools Test Students’ Social Skills

CAROL’S SUMMARY:
As online high schools increase in popularity nationwide, educators and psychologists are seeking to address a potential pitfall for students of digital learning: social isolation. The upside of these programs is that students can work at their own pace and delve more deeply into subject matter than a traditional classroom might allow. The downside is that some students feel lonely and see they’re missing out on proms, homecoming football games, and other social venues customary to high school life. According to the article below, approximately 100,000 of the 12 million high-school-age students in the U.S. attend 438 online schools full-time, up from 30,000 five years ago, based on research by the International Association for K-12 Learning Online, a Washington nonprofit representing online schools. The article reports:

“Online schools appeal to gifted students who want to work at their own pace, students who dropped out of traditional high schools or who are taught at home by their families, students who travel with globe-trotting parents and teens with competitive outside pursuits like ballet, tennis or gymnastics. Many more students take some classes online, while attending traditional schools.”

Of the home-schooled population, approximately 1.1 million students (2.2 percent of the school-age population) were being educated at home in 2003, compared to an estimated 850,000 students in 1999, says the Department of Education. The National Home Education Research Institute concludes that the homeschooling population is increasing each year. The institute estimates that the number of chil­dren being homeschooled grows 7 percent to 12 percent per year.

1) How can programs like LifeBound’s People Smarts for Teenagers be introduced to home school populations, as well as more fully integrated into conventional school curriculum so that all students develop the requisite social and emotional skills to thrive in our global world?

2) What can local high schools do to help connect online learners with their student populations?

3) How can online programs foster human connection so that students don’t become lonely or miss out on the socialization important to teen and young adult development?

ARTICLE
Wall Street Journal
By Paul Glader
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Tatyana Ray has more than 1,200 Facebook friends, sends 600 texts a month and participated in four student clubs during the year and a half she attended high school online, through a program affiliated with Stanford University.

Although top public and private high schools abound in her affluent area of Palo Alto, the 17-year-old originally applied to the online school because she and her parents thought it looked both interesting and challenging. She enjoyed the academics but eventually found she was lonely. She missed the human connection of proms, football games and in-person, rather than online, gossip. The digital clubs for fashion, books and cooking involved Web cams and blogs and felt more like work than fun.

To view the entire article visit
http://bit.ly/Ybt7J

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Skills Set Drafted For Students Nationwide

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a joint effort by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in partnership with Achieve, ACT and the College Board. Governors and state commissioners of education from across the country have created a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12.

According to their web site at www.corestandards.org, these standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills. The NGA Center and CCSSO are coordinating the process to develop these standards and have created an expert validation committee to provide an independent review of the common core state standards, as well as the grade-by-grade standards.

In math, the goal is to have students “solve systems of equations; find and interpret rates of change; and adapt probability models to solve real-world problems.” In English and language arts, the goal is to have students be able to “analyze how word choices shape the meaning and tone of a text; develop a style and tone of writing appropriate to a task and audience; and respond constructively to advance a discussion and build on the input of others.”

There is still much work and research to be done if a national consensus on education is to be adopted, but one thing is certain: Students from the United States need to be prepared to compete in the global marketplace among students from Asia and Europe. With education reform inevitable, here are some important questions to consider:

· Could standards be developed by type of student? College-bound, career-school bound?

· Could we identify skills that will make students successful no matter what path they choose and emphasize cross-curricular learning?

· How can we better work with the initiatives such as the 21century skills, which foster critical thinking, technological literacy, cross-curricular core-competencies and global knowledge needed to compete with counterparts world-wide?

Whatever standards are developed, the voice of Higher Education and employers will need to be heard. Learning needs to be linked to success in the working world. To fuel our economy of the future, students will need knowledge, skills and the initiative to tackle the toughest problems with confidence, competence and faith that the solutions—while difficult and elusive—can and will come with a quality mindset and follow-through.

ARTICLE:

Skills Set Drafted For Students Nationwide
By Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Experts convened by the nation’s governors and state schools chiefs on Monday proposed a set of math and English skills students should master before high school graduation, the first step toward what advocates hope will become common standards driving instruction in classrooms from coast to coast.

The proposal aims to lift expectations for students beyond current standards, which vary widely from state to state, and establish for the first time an effective national consensus on core academic goals to help the United States keep pace with global competitors. Such agreement has proven elusive in the past because of a long tradition of local control over standards, testing and curriculum.

To view this entire article visit www.washingtonpost.com

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Schools Official in New Jersey Orders Plan to Combat Hazing

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

Bullying can take many forms (verbal, psychological and physical), and administrators for a district in New Jersey will participate in sensitivity training and devise a plan within the next two months to combat hazing at Millburn High School. These actions were ordered by the president of the Board of Education after a board meeting revealed that another school year started off with hazing of freshman girls by seniors that included being pushed into lockers, having whistles blown in their faces and the release of a “slut list.”

In the past, some seniors have been expelled, but Principal William Miron said that no student will be disciplined without proof. Board member Debra Fox remembers being hazed as a freshman and suggested punishing the entire female population of the senior class in order to get the names, saying “because no one is going to take the rap for someone else.” One parent was applauded when she said parents must also take responsibility when their children acted like bullies.

Tragically, every day thousands of students wake up afraid to go to school. As educators, we have an inherent responsibility to make our schools safe, bully-free cultures because every child and teenager has the civil right to learn unhindered. Because parents, teachers, and other adults don’t always see it, they may not understand how extreme bullying can get. According to the web site, www.kidshealth.org, two of the main reasons people are bullied are because of appearance and social status. Bullies pick on the people they think don’t fit in, maybe because of how they look, how they act (for example, kids who are shy and withdrawn), their race or religion, or because the bullies think their target may be gay or lesbian.

Hazing is a form of bullying and often the result of underdeveloped emotional intelligence, or people smarts, such as empathy and compassion. LifeBound’s book, People Smarts for Teenagers: Becoming Emotionally Intelligent, helps students develop these skills by boosting self-awareness and empathy. Every chapter includes a real-life story about another teenager who overcame their own obstacles to emotional well-being. This past spring, a progressive district in Colorado Springs used this book with all of their sixth graders and observed a spike in test scores, which they attribute to this program. Learning is linked to emotions and when we teach children and teens emotional and social skills we give them another advantage in the learning process. For more information about this and other student success and transition resources, visit www.lifebound.com

ARTICLE:

The New York Times
September 22, 2009
Schools Official in New Jersey Orders Plan to Combat Hazing
By TINA KELLEY

MILLBURN, N.J. — The president of the Millburn Board of Education said on Monday night that district administrators would have to undergo sensitivity training and ordered them to come up with a plan within the next two months to address the longstanding tradition of hazing at Millburn High School.

The action came at a board meeting that drew about 50 parents and lasted more than three hours.

“This is not acceptable behavior; it will not be tolerated,” the board president, Noreen Brunini, said of the most recent hazing, which included the distribution of an annual “slut list” of incoming freshman girls. “This is the end of this.”

To view this entire article visit www.nytimes.com

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Panel Urges Attention to Adolescent Literacy

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

In the article below, Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy experts gathered to discuss their final report in which they spent five years examining the need for better reading and writing skills among students in grades 4 through 12. The experts stressed the importance of action at each state level, suggesting reading and writing standards be set high and state tests be set to the levels of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Statewide data systems for all literacy, as well as, including adolescent-literacy training in state teacher-certification programs were considered of high importance.

Catherine Snow, a Harvard University education professor who chaired the Carnegie panel, said an important tenement of the report is to have the nation’s entire education system recognize that the traditional literacy approach (focusing on building skills at a young age) doesn’t help students with “complex vocabulary, composition, and concepts they encounter in high school.” Another panelist, Michael Kamil, a Stanford University education professor, said that the sole responsibility for teaching adolescent literacy cannot rest on the shoulders of English teachers. Literacy needs to be taught across the disciplines in each subject of middle and high school, because at these higher levels, literacy comprehension, and therefore instruction, is grounded within the content.

Students learn best when they can draw comparisons and connections between information they already know and the new knowledge presented to them. That is why in Critical and Creative Thinking for Teenagers, the basics of problem solving are presented to high schoolers within profiles about innovators in medicine, science, math, finance, art, music and English to relate their previous knowledge of the core subject to the new critical and creative thinking skills taught within the book. There is no reason why adolescent literacy cannot also be strengthened if it were taught within the core subjects.

How can literacy instruction be integrated into the curriculum of other subjects?

What can districts do to ban together and mastermind effective statewide standards and data systems to measure and track outcomes?

What role does emotional intelligence play in students’ ability to build a strong literacy foundation for cross-curriculum learning?

ARTICLE:

EducationWeek

Published Online: September 15, 2009
Panel Urges Attention to Adolescent Literacy
By Catherine Gewertz

Washington

Leading figures in education policy, academia, and philanthropy called today for a “re-engineering” of the nation’s approach to adolescent literacy, saying nothing short of a “literacy revolution” is needed to keep students in school and ensure that they are able to learn the complex material that college and careers will demand of them.

The experts gathered to discuss and draw attention to the release of the final report of the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, which has spent five years examining the need for better reading and writing skills among students in grades 4 through 12. Vartan Gregorian, the president of the foundation, urged audience members to “be good ancestors” to future generations by pushing for sound adolescent-literacy policy and practice, given the pivotal role such skills play in young people’s lives, and the low level of skill students have shown on national tests.

To view this entire article visit www.edweek.org

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

What Traditional Academics Can Learn From a Futurist’s University

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

Singularity University, founded by futurists Ray Kurzweil and Peter H. Diamandis, forward-looking thinkers who share ideas about where technology is headed in the near future and in the long term, is designed to study technologies that are manifesting exponential change. The first ever nine-week session was held last summer and cost $25,000 per student. The course was divided into three parts: In the first three weeks, students attended lectures by experts from business and academe. Over the next three weeks, students each chose one of four areas to research. And the final three weeks, students worked in groups on global challenges that aimed to help at least a billion people around the world.

The article below cites that more than 1,200 students applied to fill the 40 slots, making the program more selective than Harvard University. James A. Dator, director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, at the University of Hawaii-Manoa says Singularity University is an example of the rise in interest in futurology with courses offered at Anne Arundel Community College (Arnold, Maryland), the University of Notre Dame and San Diego City College.

The article also mentions that higher education has experienced relatively small changes: “Compared to most other markets, higher education in particular really hasn’t felt the earthquake,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster who is a consulting professor at Stanford University, and chair of the futures-studies track of Singularity University. More “futures studies” at the university level would require better preparation of high schools students. LifeBound’s new book, Critical and Creative Thinking for Teenagers sparks innovative thinking, is cross-disciplinary by examining critical and creative thinking through various lenses and promotes media and technology skills. Such a curriculum would equip today’s high school students with the skills necessary to brainstorm and tackle the world’s greatest problems. For more information about this resource visit www.lifebound.com.

What steps can higher education take to embrace the technological strides over the last 50 years?

How can we promote critical and creative thinking in the classroom via technologies?

How can “futures studies” enhance 21st century skills among today’s students?

ARTICLE:

The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 14, 2009
What Traditional Academics Can Learn From a Futurist’s University
By Jeffrey R. Young
Moffett Field, Calif.

“We’re going to be unapologetically interdisciplinary,” said Neil Jacobstein, chairman of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, during one of the first lectures at Singularity University. “That’s not because it’s fashionable, or because the faculty took a vote, but because nature has no departments.”

The students burst into applause.

That dig against traditional institutions was par for the course at the unusual new high-tech university, which wrapped up its first nine-week session at NASA’s Ames Research Center here last month. Students were asked to come up with technological projects that would help at least a billion people around the world, reflecting the techno-utopian vision of the institution’s founders.

To view this entire article visit www.chronicle.com

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Duncan Urges Colleges to Help Underperforming Schools More

CAROL’S SUMMARY: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former chief executive of Chicago Public Schools before joining President Obama’s administration, delivered a keynote speech at an education forum to encourage other colleges and universities to follow the University of Chicago’s example by taking districts under their wings. Specifically, he charged universities to “establish their own charter schools, develop better research methods to track the results of efforts to improve schools’ performance and provide more hands-on training and support for teachers.” By working together school districts improve their graduation rates and universities promote higher education and career training. While Timothy Knowles, Director the Urban Education Institute admits, “Not every university in the country should own and operate a public school,” every university can involve themselves in education reform by coming alongside struggling schools.

Academic coaching, with its emphasis on asking powerful questions, can help equip teachers with the tools for creating dynamic classrooms and becoming leaders in their districts. Many student success programs operate at both the high school and college level and collaboration could serve as an iron sharpens iron proposition. If teachers and professors attended academic coaches training together it’s possible that bonds would form in the spirit of cooperation and common good that might withstand the high turnover of school district administrations.
Could your district benefit from academic coaching?

What specific steps can school districts and universities to band together to improve our nation’s educational system?

Who is ultimately responsible for education reform and how might student success and transition programs be at the center of this reform?

ARTICLE:
The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 10, 2009
Duncan Urges Colleges to Help Underperforming Schools More
By Libby Nelson
Washington

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urged universities on Thursday to get more involved in helping to improve underperforming schools, by forming partnerships with local school districts, establishing charter schools, and improving teacher education.

In a keynote address at an education forum presented here by the University of Chicago, Mr. Duncan pointed to that institution’s charter schools as an example and praised the university for not being an “ivory tower in the middle of the city.”

To view this entire article visit www.chronicle.com

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Colleges Are Failing in Graduation Rates

CAROL’S SUMMARY: In the United States only half of students who enroll in college end up with a bachelor’s degree. Italy is the only rich country with a worse college graduation rate. In a new book titled, “Crossing the Finish Line,” authors William Bowen (an economist and former Princeton president) and Michael McPherson (an economist and former Macalester College president) analyze the data of about 200,000 students at 68 colleges.

Although the book’s statistics are alarming, there is hope. Instead of requiring a total overhaul of today’s educational system, McPherson and Bowen suggest large strides can be made if institutions shift their focus from enrollment to completion and become accountable for their failures. The first problem “Crossing the Finish Line” identifies is under-matching. According to the article below, under-matching refers to “students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive.” To combat this, the Obama Education Department now informs students of the graduation rate at any college in which they express interest when they fill out an online form for federal financial aid.
College graduation is important to career success. According to the Labor Department, last year workers with bachelor’s degrees made 54 percent more on average than those who attended college but didn’t finish. When people, especially students fresh out of college, enter the workforce and contribute to society, everyone benefits.

What can high schools do to prevent students from under-matching themselves with colleges?

How can colleges and universities shift their focus from enrollment to completion and balance these efforts on both fronts?

In addition to implementing student success and transition programs at the high school level, what else can we do to improve our nation’s college graduation rates at public institutions?

ARTICLE:
September 9, 2009
Economic Scene
The New York Times
Colleges Are Failing in Graduation Rates
By DAVID LEONHARDT

If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you’d probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. From there, you might move on to Wall Street’s fellow bailout recipients in Detroit, the once-Big Three.

But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities.

At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.

To view this entire article visit www.nytimes.com

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Virtual 3-D lab aims to stimulate learning

CAROL’S SUMMARY: A three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environment developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) with the university’s Center for Technology Education will allow Baltimore County’s Chesapeake High School students to explore the area surrounding Mount St. Helens this fall without leaving their classroom. The area around Mount St. Helens was chosen because the ecosystem has changed dramatically over the past 30 years and begins to integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts into the virtual environment. The classroom and lab will be incorporated into the school’s environmental science and geometry curricula this school year, with plans to extend to social studies and English next year.

Today’s students are tech-savvy and most are avid video-gamers. Programs like this will help engage students within a medium they already show interest in and create cross-disciplinary courses and curricula. A giant step in the direction toward improving national graduate rates as recent surveys list boredom as the number one reason for high schoolers to drop out. That’s why my new book, Critical and Creative Thinking for Teenagers, co-authored by Maureen Breeze, includes innovators from the past and present to reinforces the skills discussed, as well as, incorporate academic subjects such as statistics and science.

Do you think the Virtual Learning program will succeed at raising student achievement?

Do you think these skills will make American students more competitive with global students?

It’s important for teachers to be interested in what they teach as well. Do you think programs like this would develop more effective and invested teachers?

The advantages to such a classroom seem obvious. What are the drawbacks and how could you solve them?

ARTICLE:
by Maya T. Prabhu
August 24, 2009
eSchoolNews

Students at a Baltimore County high school this fall will explore the area surrounding Mount St. Helens in a vehicle that can morph from an aircraft to a car to a boat to learn about how the environment has changed since the volcano’s 1980 eruption.

But they’ll do it all without ever leaving their Chesapeake High School classroom–they will be using a three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environment developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) with the university’s Center for Technology Education.

To view the entire article visit www.eschoolnews.com

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Empathy in the Virtual World

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

Within a philosophical context, the writer below explores the hazards of cyberspace on empathy, and the illustration that accompanies the text reveals the crux of Dr. Gorry’s essay:  Is digital technology taking the heart right out of us?  

Author of Born to Learn, Rita Smilkerstein, found in her research that all learning is linked to emotion, and among the digital generation we need to find ways to impart not only academic but social and emotional skills so that we engage both the mind and the heart of students.  This is the precise aim of LifeBound’s books, particularly our text, People Smarts for Teenagers:  Becoming Emotionally Intelligent, which has data-proven results to increase scholastic achievement while promoting qualities like empathy and motivation.

Dr. Gorry postulates that the virtual world has so permeated our conscious and unconscious selves that it might be making us numb to the “real suffering of others.”  The bombardment of so many problems worldwide can diffuse a sense of responsibility to actually do something about the plight of what we see and hear. 

The concept of friendship, for example, has enjoyed a renewed prominence via social networks that have emerged in the last few years, namely Facebook and MySpace.  This is born out of a universal human desire to connect to other people and is perhaps one of the noblest achievements of human culture.  It is in and through our friendships that we grow and develop as human beings.  We should be careful, therefore, never to trivialize the concept or the experience of genuine friendship. It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop on-line friendships were to be at the cost of our availability to engage with our families, our neighbors and those we meet in the daily reality of our places of work, education and recreation.  Almost any parent of a teenager can give an account of the difficulty students have tuning out their iPods and cell phones and tuning in to their parents or siblings.  If the desire for virtual connectedness becomes obsessive, it may function to isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development. Even more troubling, social sites have become a breeding ground for cyberbullying and have made it easier for pedophiles to access vulnerable adolescents. 

The digital world demands our attention in part by speeding up the pace of life, and the addictive nature of media multitasking takes away time and energy from something of far more value:  human interaction.  It’s the trap of emergency living, paying attention to the immediate rather than thinking more deeply about things like goals and the quality of our relationships and acting on those impulses to do something bigger than busyness.

Researchers at Stanford University released a report this summer regarding multitaskers of media activities like watching YouTube, writing e-mail and talking on the phone.  What they found is that they are not very good at any of their tasks.  After testing about 100 Stanford students, the scientists concluded that chronic media multitaskers have difficulty focusing and are not able to ignore irrelevant information.

At their best, teaching and learning aren’t purely academic pursuits; they are methods that promote a better planet.  New technologies have tremendous power for good in the world and can be put at the service of humanity to promote tolerance and understanding among communities, especially for those who are exploited.  Here then are serious questions to ponder:

How can we harness the power of technology to foster human interaction rather than compete with it?

What potential of the new technologies can be used to promote human understanding and solidarity, especially for those who are most disadvantaged and vulnerable in our world?

What can educators do to transfer technology in such a way that it fosters empathy rather than detracts from it?

ARTICLE

Chronicle of Higher Education

By G. Anthony Gorry

We live increasingly “on the screen,” deeply engaged with the patterns of light and energy upon which so much of modern life depends. At work we turn our backs to our coworkers, immersing ourselves in the flood of information engendered by countless computers. At the end of the workday, computers tag along with us in cellphones and music players. Still others, embedded in video displays, wait at home. They are all parts of an enormous electronic web woven on wires or only air.

To view the entire article visit

http://bit.ly/J6UrU

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like

As the article below iterates, some schools nationwide are forming reading workshops which allow students the freedom to select their own books rather than the traditional approach of assigning a classic that the entire class reads together. Critics of this approach are concerned that children won’t be exposed to classic literature because they’ll gravitate toward books that are trendy or popular.

This debate begs the question: What is the goal of reading in school and for that matter what is the goal of educating our children? Educational reformer John Dewey said, “The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to learn and go learning.” As most educators agree, a passion for learning isn’t something you have to inspire kids to have; most children are innately curious. Author Alfie Kohn writes, “Anyone who cares about this passion will want to be sure that all decisions about what and how children are taught, every school-related activity and policy is informed by the question: “How will this affect children’s interest in learning, and promote their desire to keep reading, and thinking and exploring?”

Several months into the experiment, the English teacher at Jonesboro Middle School in a south Atlanta suburb says, “I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with. Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”

Perhaps a middle-road approach could be implemented where children are allowed to choose books, and so is the teacher. It’s best to teach reading in a way that mixes free choices with great literature. We want to trust students enough to give them some leeway in making decisions at school, which might help promote a lifelong love of reading while also exposing them to some of the reading “greats” from throughout time.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

ARTICLE:
A New Assignement: Pick Books You Like
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: August 29, 2009
The New York Times

JONESBORO, Ga. — For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.

But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

To view this entire article visit www.nytimes.com

Share this Article with Your Friends:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
Email Newsletters with Constant Contact