Share how you're occupying education - It's easy!

I'm doing it! Lots of members of my personal learning network are doing it! Students are doing it! Homeschooling kids are doing it! Teachers are doing it! Parents are doing it! And you should too!  


We are all sharing our stories about how we are transforming education and challenging the status quo in public education by creating a sign and taking a picture with it that includes our faces.  What is powerful about this is it shares the real voices of teachers, parents, and our youth, not just those of the disconnected politicians and corporate reformers.


Participation is easy!

Here's how.
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Have Your Voice Heard! Are Schools Making Us Stupid in America?

Want to share your thoughts about education with the nation?  Now's your chance! John Stossel recently followed up his 2006 program, Stupid in America with a show featuring new insights and observations and he wants to hear from you!  He will be taping a show live in response to the new segment where he'll be sharing reactions to the show. Below is the show broken down into six segments each with some questions to consider.  Watch, think, and respond (using labels A, B, C...) to any questions that elicit a reaction. If you do, you can get your comments on air by responding to this post.

Stossel is especially interested in any comments you have that are provocative, insightful, or hostile.  John will take a look at your comments and consider including quotes from readers of The Innovative Educator during his taping tomorrow.  You will be able to watch the show on Thursday at 10 pm Eastern time and Saturday and Sunday at 9 pm and midnight.

Additionally, if you want to attend the taping which takes place on Tuesday, October 18th at 7 pm at Fox Studios, I will be able to offer tickets to a select number of readers who respond to this post with their name, email, and why it is they want to attend.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead. Watch! Think! Comment! Be heard!

A - Public schools are making us “Stupid in America.” What some are doing to change that.

• School spending has tripled. School improvement - Ziltch 
• Since there is no improvement correlated to spending, should we reduce taxpayer burden? Why or why not?
• Are test scores the best way to measure improvement? 
• Are our industrial-age model schools really failing or are they doing just what they are designed to do? i.e. babysit, reward compliance, punish those who question authority
• Charter schools are doing the same job as public schools with less money. 
• Why is that? 
•  How can public school learn from this? 
• Charter school operator Ben Chavis says he can take the worst school and turn it around at his American Indian Public Schools. Keys to his success: 1) Hire students to teach students 2) Use embarrassment to keep people in line 3) Teachers know they can be fired in a moment’s notice 
• Do you believe he can turn around any school? 
• Do you believe this model is best for children?

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Personalized Learning Can Be Focused on Talents, Interests & Career Ideas!

Guest post from Mariaemma Willis, M.S., LearningSuccess™ Institute


Home and school educators often wonder how a child's learning can be customized to meet their style needs, talents, and interests, when there are state standards and school district requirements to follow.  Fortunately there are indeed ways to customize learning even when working with standards and requirements. 

Focus on Modality

Suppose the course is U.S. History. At minimum you can provide the information that you are required to cover in different modalities. Non-print learners have a difficult time processing and retaining information from a text book. Many books have recorded versions available or if you are getting the information online, you can use any number of free text to speech programs. Audio books are also an option, as are videos of the books for picture learners. With the technology we have nowadays and so much being available through the internet, these options could be made available to all students.

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Children can educate themselves without the control of adults

From Psychology Today article

The Sudbury Valley School has, for the past forty years, been the best-kept secret in American education. Most students of education have never heard of it. Professors of education ignore it, not out of malice but because they cannot absorb it into their framework of educational thought. The Sudbury Valley model of education is not a variation of standard education. It is not a progressive version of traditional schooling. It is not a Montessori school or a Dewey school or a Piagetian constructivist school. It is something entirely different. To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the thought: Adults do not control children's education; children educate themselves.

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Seth Godin Discusses Failure of Educational Model

Best selling author Seth Godin discusses the failure of our educational model that's built around producing factory workers.

Godin explains that it wouldn't take very many passionate parents to start schools down the right path. Parents just need to realize that they and their children own the learning and they are not the property of the government. For ideas on how to do this read my free guide downloadable from the right column on this blog: Fix The Schools, Not the Child.


Source: http://www.LeeStranahan.com
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Why I Don't Like Standardized Tests

Guest post by Cathy Earle

As an educator, I am sometimes called upon to teach children test preparation skills. I do so because these particular children are going to have to take a particular test – it's a reality. However, the first step of my test prep lesson is to tell the children that I don't like standardized tests, especially high-stakes tests. I don't believe they should have to take them, and, I tell them, I didn't subject my own kids to them.

Here are my major reasons for my antipathy toward standardized tests:

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School redesign as a community project-based learning challenge

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

-Albert Einstein 

If you’ve ever complained about the way things are in schools today, now’s your chance to stop talking and start acting by participating in the Reinventing School Challenge.  The challenge is a program that begins with a simple mission: Encourage life-long learning, promote alternative learning environments and equip learners with 21st Century skills. It takes a fresh and different approach to school reform in the following ways.

1. Inviting the whole community to get involved.
2. Giving the community a framework to collaborate and fashion solutions for their own school communities.
3. Providing a platform to present, share and celebrate what's possible and what really works.

The program uses design, collaboration, technology, play and social media to engage and empower young people to effect positive change in their school community. It starts by encouraging participants to reframe problems as opportunities. Ask beautiful questions, spark imagination, provide a framework to research, generate ideas and rapidly prototype and test design solutions. Doing anything less, results in remaining passive observers, making slow progress, losing interest and leaving all the work policy makers and Government. If they fail to deliver, we will simply blame them and much will stay the same.

This new Design Thinking Challenge runs for 8 weeks from now until November 7th and again in March. It uses design, collaboration, technology, play and social media to engage and empower young people effect positive change in their school community. It encourages life-long learning, promotes alternative learning environments and equips participants with 21st Century skills.

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Disorganized Sports + Unstructured Play

When asking children: 

What is your favorite part of school?

It is not uncommon to get this answer:  

Recess!!!

I still like to play :)

Sadly, in schools today, recess is on it's way toward extinction.  On a parenting group I belong to, student's back to school schedules were shared.  Sadly, very few included time for recess. Yet at a recent conference I listened to brain researcher John Medena  who shared that activity, movement, and exercise is crucial for boosting brain power.  Not only does play make you smarter, this article points to play being a great way to alleviate ADD / ADHD symptoms. Unfortunately, educators are in a state of panic in our test prep obsessed education system, no longer able to think clearly about what is truly best for our children. 

If today's teachers and administrators had the opportunity to pull themselves away from the worksheets and bubblesheets they would find that play is an essential component of student success as pointed to in the article Can We Play by Psychologist David Elkin.  In the article Elkin shares that recess is already extinct in more than 30,000 U.S. schools that have eliminated recess to make more time for academics and that children’s time spent outdoors has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s.
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If School Was Causing Your Child’s ADD / ADHD Would You Remove Him?

During a recent conversation with friends and family, the topic of ADHD / ADD came up and I shared my belief that this is not a disease that should result in people being drugged, but instead a personality type (like mine!) that should be honored.  My friends and family looked at me stunned.  They wondered how an educator like me didn’t know better as this new epidemic was clearly documented as a disease.  I then found out that a few of those among us had been drugged or had been responsible for drugging their children.  They were offended by my words! Fortunately, I'm used to this.  

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Stupid in America

Editor's note:  Some teachers may recall John Stossel's Stupid in America broadcast bashing NYC schools and unions back in 2006.  This time around he has a different story to tell which you can watch this weekend.   

Guest post from John Stossel

Exciting things are suddenly happening in education.  Inner-city kids do well on benchmark tests and are excited about learning. I tell fourth graders that school is boring, they yell at me, “No, it’s not!”  One boy said: “Reading is rockin’ awesome!”

I’ll report on innovations at the Success Charter Network and Harlem Village Academy in New York, and at the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, California.  “Let’s destroy the system… create a system that serves kids,” says charter school director Deborah Kenny.   

Hurricane Katrina made that experiment possible by destroying much of New Orleans.  Now 70% of New Orleans students attend charters, and they learn more.

Aside from such bright spots, most of education in America is still a mess.  The cost has skyrocketed, but performance is flat.

Why?  One big reason is that the government monopoly—the “BLOB”— makes it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Former Washington DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee talks about her attempt to change that, including firing her own daughters’ principal, and the backlash that led to her losing her job.  

I’ll confront union leaders, like DC union boss Nathan Saunders, who opposes judging teachers by student test results.   “I know my kids are learning when I look in their eyes,” says Saunders. New Jersey union leader Joseph Del Grosso opposes charter schools:  “Over my dead body, they’re gonna come here.” 

  

Virtual education innovator Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, is on the right track.   He’s a great teacher who now reaches millions of kids via the internet.   Some fifth graders who watch his videos do high school level math.   Before radio and TV, every big town had a best teacher and a best singer.  Mass media changed that, so now Lady Gaga sings to the whole world.   But education has stayed local and stagnant-- until now, when the web allows the world’s best teachers to reach into every classroom. 

Why don’t we have more innovation? Why don’t we have a vibrant market in education? Are we still Stupid in America? 

To find out, watch Stupid in America this weekend on Fox News. Tune in on Saturday at 10PM EDT / PDT, repeats on Sunday.