Positively Persistent Teach

This is a guest post from Johnathan Abreu of the Library of Congress.

Do you use photographs in the classroom? Here are some great resources for you from the Library of Congress.

As a medium, the photograph is relatively young. Nonetheless, photographs have captured key moments and events in history. The Library of Congress has more than a million digitized photographs available through the Prints and Photographs catalog. Since it’s easy to get lost in such a vast collection, we’ve put together a few helpful resources on using photographs in the classroom and analyzing them with students. More than just capturing an event, a photograph has much to say about the artist’s point of view and the time in which it was captured.

In Taking a Closer Look at Prints and Photographs, Danna Bell-Russel begins a discussion on information literacy as it applies to photographs. This post provides useful ideas on how to analyze photographs with students and discern details such as false captions which can be misleading if unnoticed.

Library of Congress shares lots of ideas for using their resources in the classroom.   This is one thing I wish I had a chance to use.

Classroom Organizer is a free web-based program that allows users to maintain and inventory books in their classroom library. With this amazing tool you can:

- Import titles from your Booksource order
- Add your existing titles
- Import your student roster
- Enable students to check out and return books
- Run assessment reports on student and title activity

With both web20classroom.org and Free Technology for Teachers putting their heads together to write this FREE resource on ed tech, you know it is going to be good.  I’m adding this to the things I need to read over this summer, and deciding what to add to my repertoire. 

I think this is an interesting initiative.  Anyone know if there is anything like this in the U.S.?

Influential New York City educatorGary Rubinsteinhas long been critical of Teach for America, the organization that brought him into the classroom 21 years ago. In a blog post last fall, hearguedthat people should no longer sign up to join the organization. Now, he’s asking TFA teachers and alumni to take action against what he calls “the corporate reform movement for which TFA is the poster child.”

“Now you’ve experienced how difficult teaching is. You’ve seen, also, how complex the achievement gap is too,”Rubinstein writes. He goes on to ask some tough questions that challenge key tenets of the TFA philosophy: “So do you really believe that the issue is ‘bad teachers’ who need to be motivated through fear of being fired or through cash bonuses? Is that really what you determined after working in a school alongside people who elected to become career teachers? Those of you who worked in charter schools, do you really believe that they are providing an excellent education to all students?”

Rubinstein is inviting corps members and alumni to write openly about what they believe TFA must change, either on their own blogs or as guest posters on his blog. High on his own list is reworking TFA’s five-week long summer training institute, where new corps members learn the nuts and bolts of being a teacher.

Rubinstein is far from alone in his belief that TFA needs to change the way it trains corps members. Last February, after the organization’s 20th anniversary summit, an alum created a Change.org petition asking that corps member “receive at least a full year of high-quality, school-based preparation before they assume responsibility for their own classroom.”

(Click the link above to continue reading)

I am not a fan of TFA, and do not believe it is set up the way the program’s philosophy originally intended.  That doesn’t mean I think TFA-ers themselves are bad.  I just think a lot of them go into it very naively.  I feel like teachers who choose to go into the field, who choose to teach in hard to staff schools, and who stay for longer than two years should receive tuition or loan credits.  I don’t think that someone with less training, making the same amount of pay, and only making a 2 year commitment trumps that.

I think TFA makes teaching sound like summer camp to those outside the field.

I think it is a small band-aid to a much larger problem, and the lack of training and two year commitment create problems of their own. 

I wish the money, time, brain power, and creativity were being used to serve schools in a better way.

I also think it is super shady that they turn down applicants who have already worked towards a teaching degree.

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance.” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.

My district is very big on RtI, and while I don’t deal with it much in Prek, I’ve been trying to bookmark things for future use (in case I ever get to move up, which at this point doesn’t look like it will happen).  There are some very useful things here including example Tier forms, so if you are a new teacher (or someone not familiar RtI) you can get a good idea of how it works.

Now this is some #edtech I could really get into.  I love this idea.  Now if only I had an older class and ipads in the classroom!

Posting this so maybe some fellow teachers can put it in their bag of tricks for next year.

(Also, green initiative for the classroom!)