Bill Ferriter

Read This: Merit Pay for Teachers a Poor Idea

Merit pay plans are less common in the private sector than people think, research shows. Only one in seven employees is covered by a merit pay plan and most of those workers are in real estate or sales.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

I've spent the past decade cringing in conversations about merit pay for teachers simply because:

I'm bugged by the fact that one test at the beginning of June becomes the indicator of my "performance" while almost 60 percent of the professionals in my building work in positions that are not judged by standardized tests. Call it jealousy if you want to.

I fully realize that the FIVE other teachers my middle school language arts students work with each day have an impact---whether it's positive or negative---on my students' reading scores. Why should I get full credit or blame for those numbers?

I know the damage that merit pay plans will have on collaborative efforts in schools. Why in WORLD would I ever share what I know about effective teaching and learning if I know that I'm competing over a small pot of money with my peers?



But every time that I lay out my case against merit pay in education, some spittle-flinging political rube starts shouting about how merit pay has "revolutionized American industry," leading to "more production" and "motivated workers."

"If our schools acted more like our businesses, we'd be competitive internationally!" the argument---usually introduced by some guy with no experience in education who happened to get elected by an under-informed pitchfork wielding mob---goes.

Consider THAT myth dispelled!

Not only do recognized experts on motivation like Daniel Pink believe that merit pay plans are ineffective in knowledge-driven businesses, FEW professionals in the business sector work under merit pay plans---unless they're selling houses or cars, professions where workers have always been independent operators.

NOW can we stop talking about merit pay plans that reward individual teachers based on test scores?

I'm all about restructuring the way that teachers are rewarded and I believe the single-salary schedule results in some teachers being unfairly rewarded and other teachers being unfairly under-rewarded, but restructuring salaries just ain't as easy as Mr. Pitchfork Man thinks it is!

Intervention Conversation: Day 3 Summary

It’s hard to believe, but our focused three-day conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour—authors of Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap—is quickly coming to an end! 

This conversation has been unique to me because it was driven by a small handful of really bright minds.  While there weren’t dozens of participants, those who came engaged deeply:  asking and answering questions, challenging thinking and allowing themselves to be challenged.

The end result is a conversation that will challenge your thinking, too!  Take a few minutes exploring the summaries from the first and second days of our conversation and then poke through our thread online. 

You might also be interested in the comments that I found most interesting today:

On Slide 2, David C asks a really interesting question about essential outcomes when he writes, "Paring down the curriculum can be a bit tricky, though.  When we talk about 8-10 outcomes, how specific do we want an outcome to be? 

For example, a math teacher can determine an outcome to be "students can identify and apply linear relationships between two variables," but this outcome can involve multiple skills.  We can also break things down to the specific skills, but then 8-10 outcomes may be too narrow of a focus."

For my learning team, focusing on the smallest measurable skill has become a driving force.  Our objectives---which are developed at the state level---are often incredibly broad and they require fluency with several independent skills in order to demonstrate mastery.

As a group, we've gone through the process of breaking these broader objectives down into discrete skill sets and have designed a series of lessons for each objective that incorporates practice with the skills that we've identified. 

By breaking everything into discrete skills, we've made reporting and tracking mastery far more targeted and specific---which makes intervening for students easier. 

Does this make any sense?  Our "essential outcomes" are broad objectives that we break down into independent skill sets that are targeted in our instructional planning and reporting.


On Slide 3, Matt Townsley asks a question that I'd love to see people answer---both here in the comment section of this blog and in our Voicethread conversation. 

He writes: "Does anyone have a great story they could share about addressing common content while teaching in a much different way than a colleague, but still producing parallel student learning?"

Wouldn't it be great if we could collect a bunch of tangible examples of the kinds of "parallel student learning" that Matt is asking about?  We'd finally be able to dispel the myth that PLCs are about standardizing practice!


On Slide 5, Bill Ivey---a great friend who teaches in a small boarding school in Massachusetts---spends time explaining how his faculty works diligently to tap into the knowledge of everyone when targeting the needs of individual students. 

He mentions how coaches, guidance counselors, academic teachers, school principals and house parents are involved in designing solutions for struggling students.

What I'm wondering is how common are these practices in traditional schools?  Are your buildings doing a good job eliciting information from all of the important adults in the lives of your struggling students? 

How have you created time for this kind of cross communication?  What are the barriers to seeing more faculty-wide collaboration around individual students.


On the final slide of the conversation, Matt Townsley raises another interesting question when he asks:  "What is the role of non-core academic teachers in collaborative teams...specifically those without as much  "core content?" I'm thinking of the vocal music teacher or the industrial tech teacher."

Great question, huh?  And one that comes up often in conversations about professional learning communities.  Schools often have trouble figuring out how best to integrate non-core professionals into the collaborative work of their schools. 

I'd like to put an interesting twist on Matt's question:  What role can non-core teachers play in a school's system of interventions? 

I mean, so much of our attention is on whether or not students are mastering the core academic skills that are required---both for success in any subject and for success on standardized measures of student performance---that the work students do in elective classes is completely overlooked.

What's strange about that is many of our struggling students are more successful in their elective classes than they are at any time during their school day!
How can (are?) schools taking advantage of this reality? 

How are they taking advantage of the elective teachers in their building to reach students who aren't being successful in their core academic classrooms?

Interesting stuff, huh?  And questions that any school working to create a system of interventions are going to have to wrestle with at some point or another! 

Now, our conversation is officially over, but I’ll leave it open for commenting until the end of the day tomorrow.  That way, you can sneak in to leave any final thoughts that you want to share.  Rick and Becky will be stopping by once more as well, so if you’ve got specific questions for them, get ‘em up quick!

Also, Solution Tree will be leaving the link to a digital copy of Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap open until the end of the day tomorrow…so if you haven’t gotten your copy yet, be sure to click here.

Just remember that some readers have been having trouble getting their copy to download.  While the link is definitely live and working, you definitely have to register for a free account and you may have to click the link more than once to get the PDF file to load.

Hope this all makes sense to you---and thank you for being a part of my professional growth.  I love listening to and learning from y’all.

Intervention Conversation: Day 2 Summary

So we’ve made it through Day 2 of our conversation on interventions with school change experts Rick and Becky DuFour—authors of Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap—and I continue to be blown away by the depth of knowledge of the Radical Nation.

Every time that I stop by the conversation, I have my own thinking challenged, that’s for sure.  And that’s what I love the most about the Web 2.0 world:  I get to learn from people that I’ve never even met.

Too cool.

What’s also cool is that Solution Tree has made a digital copy of the entire text of Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap available to Radical readers for the next two days!  You can download your copy after creating a free account at this website.

If you haven’t had a chance to join us in Voicethread yet and you’re looking for a way to catch up on the conversation quickly, consider checking out this summary of yesterday’s interactions.  Also, here are some highlights from today’s discussion:

On Slide 3, Liz started a conversation that is bound to catch the eye of teachers that are new to professional learning communities and still value their instructional independence by asking:

"So, does anyone have any good strategies for aligning practices amongst teachers? If you get into even what seems like an "easy" topic such as late work you get a different philosophy on the concept from each teacher…How can we start to have alignment here? Is this a "tight" decision that comes from the top?"

For me, this topic is perhaps one of the trickiest for building support across faculties for professional learning communities simply because teachers feel so strongly about their practices.  Top-down decisions---especially in situations where professional choices need to be made---generally rub me the wrong way! 

What's more, I really believe that the process of developing common expectations---grading practices, late work policies, strategies for communicating with parents and students, remediation and enrichment plans---can lead to GREAT conversations between teachers about just what matters.

My biggest worry, though, is that "PLCs" are becoming synonymous with standardizing instructional practices across entire hallways. 

I hear principals often extol the virtues of PLCs because they know that when they walk into any classroom on any hallway, that they'll be seeing the same lessons delivered in the same way.  "It's perfect," they argue, "because we know that all of our students are learning the same content."

What these principals don't understand is that "learning the same content" doesn't have to mean "delivering the same lessons." 

While standardization of best practices will be a natural part of a PLC's journey together---I borrow lesson ideas from my peers all the time...especially when their students are outperforming mine on common assessments----there always has to be room for instructional experimentation on a learning team.

Otherwise, there's no real exploring or reflecting happening.  How can you identify "best practices" when your entire team is only using one practice?  Worse yet, how can you encourage innovation and creativity when your teachers are becoming nothing more than cogs in an instructional assembly line?

On Slide 4, Mary Anne started an interesting conversation when she wrote, "I find with the students in my class that they are in no position to learn or move forward if their social/emotional needs are not being met."

That's a great point, isn't it?  And it's one that I think we miss out on in conversations about interventions.  We're so focused on academic interventions that we rarely consider systematic attempts to tackle the social and emotional needs of students.

Doesn't that seem backwards? 

Are academic interventions going to be successful with students who have social and emotional needs that haven't been addressed?  How many of your schools focus as much on the social/emotional needs of your children as you to the academic needs? 

On Slide 8, Matt Townsley starts an important strand of conversation when he asks, "My question for others that have been a part of the PLC process for a while - what is the fuel that *keeps your PLCs moving forward* on a year-to-year basis?"

As a longtime member of a professional learning team and a full-time classroom teacher, my gut reaction to Matt's comments is that flexibility and forgiveness---paired with a healthy dose of reality---is the key to moving learning teams forward! 

The pressure and urgency that surrounds schools multiplies the sense of failure that teams feel when things don't go right. 

Sadly, however, on innovative teams that are willing to experiment, failure is inevitable!  In order to keep moving forward, teams need to understand that progress is not always linear and that setbacks are not fatal. 

Otherwise, they'll perceive the work of interventions and professional learning communities as impossible tasks that aren't even worth trying.

If you haven't stopped by our conversation yet, you should!  Here's the direct link.  I guarantee that you'll learn something.

If you have stopped by already, here's your day three challenge:  Rather than posting something new to the conversation today, go in and find a comment made by another participant to respond to.  It could be something that made you think.  It could be something you completely disagree with.  It could be something that you want to know more about.

Make tomorrow a day of interaction by interacting with an existing participant.  After all, that's what good collaborative dialogue looks like in action, righat?

 

(Blogger’s Note:  Rick and Becky DuFour are good professional friends of mine and Solution Tree is paying me a bit o’ cash to moderate this here conversation with them even though I woulda done it for free.  You can learn more about my relationship with Solution Tree by reading my nifty new disclosure policy.)

Intervention Conversation: Day 1 Summary

Honestly, I couldn’t be more tickled with how Day 1 of our conversation with Rick and Becky DuFour on the challenges of setting up school-based systems for intervention has gone! 

In just a few short hours, we’ve had BRILLIANT questions asked and answered by professionals working in positions across the educational spectrum.  Classroom teachers are thinking alongside principals and professional developers.  Teachers in large schools are thinking alongside teachers in small, rural communities. 

That kind of diversity leads to a collectively intelligent group, y’all.  My thinking has already been challenged about a dozen times, and that’s cool. 

Here's a few interesting strands of conversation that you might want to jump in on:

On Slide 2, Dan Greenberg---who is a professional developer from Houston---asked an interesting question about our perspectives towards curricula when he asked: 

"In the realm of multicultural education, we hear a lot about some teachers having a deficit view of students and their potential and it seems that deficit view can be applied to curriculum as well.  Are we looking for what should be cut out or is the focus on what should be our essentials?"

That's got me thinking simply because I've never really considered the impact that my own view of the curriculum might have on my teaching and learning---and more importantly on the way that I choose to interact with students or to deliver instruction. 

Is it possible that a deficit view---what in our curriculum do we need to get rid of---might carry implications for our belief systems about what is possible and/or impossible to teach to our kids?

On Slide 3, Eric Townsley and Becky Goerend have introduced the challenges of regrouping for differentiation in high schools, where teachers can often be the only instructor of a particular subject, and in small schools, where there may only be one teacher at each grade level. 

That's really got me thinking, simply because I work in a large school where there are no fewer than 4 teachers in each content area at every grade level.  What I'm wondering is how regrouping to provide differentiated instruction looks different in small schools. 

How can faculties---regardless of their size---make opportunities for reteaching possible?

On Slide 5, Matt Townsley---a full time math teacher---wonders whether school wide systems of interventions are even possible in buildings where faculty members haven't bought into the idea that all teachers serve all students. 

He writes, "Rick talked about the need to think of students as "ours" instead of "mine."  I think having conversations leading to this mindset may be a pre-requisite to the interventions themselves.  A culture change of sorts.  How has it started in your schools?"

I think this is an important question to consider.  How do schools that have embraced the idea that every teacher serves every child---and that logical interventions require redistributing the intellectual capital of a building----make this philosophical shift. 

Are there specific steps that school and teacher leaders can take to develop this mentality in their faculties, or are such attitudes just the random result of a group of likeminded teachers coming together?

On Slide 7, Matt Townsley asks another key question when thinking about the common "yeah, buts" that prevent teachers and schools from creating effective systems of intervention. 

He writes, "Yeah, but as a classroom teacher, how do I get my principal on board if they're resistant to the idea of restructuring?"

Great question, isn't it?  In the end, classroom teachers have little organizational authority.  We can't require the kinds of changes necessary beyond the classroom to make school-wide intervention systems possible. 

So if we're working in a building where there is little momentum from the top to work differently, what kind of actions should we take to move responsible practice forward?

On Slide 10, Russ Goerend argues that in order for school leaders to get faculty members on board, they've got to present the "whys" behind both professional learning communities and systematic interventions designed to meet the needs of every learner. 

By presenting the "whys," school leaders get skeptics on board and provide supporters with knowledge that can be used to bolster their gut instincts. 

I'm wondering, though, just how many school leaders do an effective job of outlining the "whys" of professional learning communities to their faculty members. 

I've worked with far too many skeptical teachers to believe that a clear case for professional learning communities and interventions for students is being made in most districts.  There's still a lot of doubt---especially in the face of new and challenging work. 

So my question is a simple one:  How important is it for school leaders to clearly, convincingly and constantly outline the "whys" to their faculty members?

A pointer for participants:  Many users have asked whether it is possible for one person to leave more than one comment on each slide.  The answer is yes---and I hope you will!  Ongoing dialogue between participants around one concept is what makes a conversation healthy.

When you do, though, you won't see a new icon added around our focusing quote.  In order to keep a slide from getting cluttered with icons, whenever a participant adds a second comment to a slide, Voicethread adds the comment to the conversation without adding a new icon. 

Other participants will know that you've added a second comment by looking at the timeline found beneath each slide, where they will see a new yellow comment tab.  They will also see a yellow box---and a groovy yellow speech bubble---surrounding your icon.

Here's to hoping that you'll take the time to stop by our conversation before it ends on Friday!  Not only will you learn a ton....we'll learn a ton from you!

Conversation on Interventions Starts Today!

Here
it is, Radical Nation: The first day in our three-day conversation on
the nuts-and-bolts of setting up school-wide systems of intervention with school change experts Rick
and Becky DuFour, whose newest book, Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap, was recently published by Solution Tree.

Interested in joining the conversation?

Then click this link:  Enter Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap

You might also be interested in this set of directions on how to make digital conversations work for you and this set of directions about how to sign up for a Voicethread account. 

Something to know about navigating Voicethread conversations:

While working in a Voicethread conversation, participants can choose to hit the "Play"
button at the bottom of any particular slide and watch the conversation
around that slide from beginning to end.  That's probably the best
strategy the first time you stop by our conversation with Rick and
Becky because you'll get to hear my opening questions, Rick and Becky’s
initial responses, and the thinking of other participants.

As you revisit pages, however----something you should do once or
twice over the course of the week to see how conversations are
developing----you can click on new icons surrounding the quotes that you are interested in to hear new comments that have been added.  You can also click on individual comments in the "Timeline" bar that appears at the bottom of each slide.

By doing so, you won't have to listen to every comment every time
that you stop by our conversation!  Instead, you can focus your
attention on the thoughts of new participants or participants you’re
most interested in learning from.

Let's knock this out of the park, huh?

Take some time in the next three days to add what you know, to allow
your thinking to be challenged and to challenge the thinking of
others.  Be committed to walking away from this conversation with new
information that you can use to push your building forward.

School-wide systems for intervention can be powerful tools for driving
change in our buildings, but only when the pieces are laid in place
properly---and the first step towards assembling the puzzle is building
shared knowledge about what school-wide systems for intervention look like in action. 

Voicethread can help us to do that together.

(Blogger’s Note:  Even though I would have done
it for free, Solution Tree—the DuFour’s publishing company—is paying me
a bit o’ cash to moderate this conversation.  To learn more about my
relationship with Solution Tree, read my nifty new disclosure policy.)

Read This: YouTube hits 2 bn daily downloads

"We are a stage and we give everyone in the world an opportunity to participate and that is being a video platform for creating a solution for people to not only upload and distribute their videos on a global basis but to find and share videos."

via news.bbc.co.uk

This article, which describes YouTube's role in the developing media ecology, carries real implications for learners, doesn't it?

After all, people are increasingly creating their own content and consuming content created by others. The filter for publishing---which was always the cost involved in owning the tools of publication---have been completely removed. Today, no one needs to ask for permission to have a voice.

And while I love that freedom---heck, 10 years ago, I would never have had 1,200 people listening to my thoughts about teaching and learning---it also means that the quality controls that once provided a measure of assurance that the content we were consuming were semi-reliable are now completely gone.

That means we're going to stumble across an increasingly large quantity of biased and inaccurate information in our online travels. Because anyone can have a voice, anyone can push their own positions and pass them off as fact. The "nonfiction" content that we're consuming is far more persuasive and slanted today than it has ever been.

Now, as long as we're preparing students for this new reality---as long as we're teaching them how to identify reliable sources and how to spot the bias in the content that they're consuming---we'll be fine in this new media world.

I'm just worried that those lessons are not being delivered in most American classrooms. Our kids see the Internet as an efficient way to gather facts instead of as a trap for opinions.

Does any of this make sense to you?

Voicethread Tips for Upcoming DuFour Conversation

As regular Radical readers know, we're in the middle of planning
for an asynchronous Voicethread conversation with school
change experts Rick and Becky DuFour (see here and here) who will be helping us to think through the
nuts and bolts of creating school-wide systems of intervention. 

For those new to Voicethread, here are a few tips:

Voicethread is one of the easiest---and most engaging---digital
forums for discussions available to educators today.  It's a tool that
my students have embraced completely (check out
this conversation that they had about Darfur) and that I've used
with teachers for conversations on Web 2.0,
Grading,
Reading
Instruction and Professional Learning Communities. 

Our conversation with the DuFours will start on May 19th and run until May 21st. 

During that time, Rick and Becky will be stopping by our Voicethread a
few times a day to lend their advice and to answer your questions about
the challenges of effective intervention in the public schoolhouse----but the real value in our
conversation comes from the collective wisdom of all of our
participants!  My hope is that we'll wrestle with challenging topics together
for four days----answering and asking questions, pushing back against
controversial ideas, letting our own preconceived notions be
challenged. 

The cool part about Voicethread is that there are no set times for
participating in our conversation.  Far from a full four days of
constant interaction, Voicethread conversations allow users to choose
when they'd like to stop by and learn.  

That means you can stop by as your schedule allows---before school,
after feeding the dogs, just before bed----to read comments from other
participants and to share your wisdom with the digital peers that join
together to reflect on professional learning communities.  

It should be a great example of what collaborative dialogue between
accomplished teachers can look like---and it should elicit ideas that we
can all use to drive change in our own schools and communities.

To be best prepared to use Voicethread during our
conversation with Rick and Becky, consider:

  1. Creating a free educator account by visiting http://voicethread.com
  2. Viewing
    this Voicethread tutorial    , which will show you how to add comments
    to a conversation.
  3. Viewing this Voicethread tutorial, which will
    introduce you to the idea of Voicethread identities.

You can also practice by adding a comment
to one of the following professional development Voicethreads that I've
created for my teachers:

You might also be interested in these
"digital conversation suggestions" that I introduce to teachers and
students whenever we tackle new tools:

While commenting, try to respond directly to other readers. Begin
by quoting some part of the comment that you are responding to help
other listeners know what it is that has caught your attention. Then,
explain your own thinking in a few short sentences. Elaboration is
important when you’re trying to make a point. Finally, finish your
comment with a question that other listeners can reply to.

Questions help to keep digital conversations going!

When responding to another participant, don’t be afraid to
disagree with something that they have said. Challenging the thinking of
someone else will help them to reconsider their own thinking—and will
force you to explain yours! Just be sure to disagree agreeably—impolite
people are rarely influential.

If your thinking gets challenged by another participant in
a conversation, don’t be offended. Listen to your peers, consider their
positions and decide whether or not you agree with them. You might
discover that they’ve got good ideas you hadn’t thought about. Either
way, be sure to respond—let your challengers know how their ideas have
influenced you.

Finally, know that you can always leave questions
for me in the comment section of this entry.  I'm really excited about
our upcoming conversation and want to make sure that everyone feels
comfortable with the tool that we'll be using to interact with one
another.

Read This: Text Messaging Explodes

Cell-phone texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and their friends, and cell calling is a close second. Some 75% of 12-17 year-olds now own cell phones, up from 45% in 2004. Those phones have become indispensable tools in teen communication patterns. Fully 72% of all teens2 – or 88% of teen cell phone users — are text-messagers. That is a sharp rise from the 51% of teens who were texters in 2006. More than half of teens (54%) are daily texters.

via www.pewinternet.org

I'm not sure that the results of the Pew Internet Survey on student cell phone use and communication patterns reflects an obsession with texting----something suggested by many critics of today's kid.

Instead, I think it shows an obsession with social interaction. Most of the students in our classrooms have grown up in a participatory culture. They look for opportunities to connect everywhere, whether that be joining together virtually for conversations in Facebook, partnering with one another to beat the newest version of the hottest video game, or becoming active members of their favorite band's fan sites.

Texting is just an extension of that desire to connect and participate.

For teachers, the lesson learned is actually a simple one: To capture the attention of today's tweens and teens, we've got to embrace this commitment to participation in our daily lessons. The presentation culture that has defined our schools just doesn't resonate with kids.

Until we incorporate more collaborative experiences into our instruction, our students will continue to feel disconnected from their own learning.



Does any of this make sense?

Basically, I see the growing commitment to texting as evidence of a much larger desire to connect that has become a basic expectation of today's kids, but that continues to play an infrequent role in the lessons designed by the American teacher.

Celebrating the Day of the Teacher. . .

In celebration of The Day of the Teacher, Kelly Kovacic over at the InterACT blog has come up with a unique way to recognize her former teachers:  She’s writing short thank you notes recognizing the role that they’ve played in her life.

As Kelly explains:

“I was fortunate to have many dedicated and capable teachers as I went through the K-12 public school system in my hometown of Arcadia, California. 

In recognition of some of the excellent teachers who played important roles in my life and in my career as an educator, and in recognition of The Day of the Teacher, May 12, I want to send out a few of my own thank you notes.”

Like Kelly, I had a ton of great teachers during the course of my school career, but none stands out more than my fifth grade teacher at Northwoods Elementary School, Mrs. Morosini.  I figured she deserved a thank you today, so here goes:

Thank You, Mrs. Morosini, for being one of the most challenging teachers that I ever had the chance to learn from.  I've got to say that when I walked into your fifth grade classroom as an active 10 year old boy, I was scared to death! 

I'd heard rumors about how strict you were from everyone in my neighborhood, and those rumors were confirmed on the first day of school when you yelled at me for whispering to Karen Swiderski!

"Billy," you said, "Is that REALLY the impression you want to make on the first day of school!" 

I wilted under your glare, but that was a pattern that repeated itself about a thousand times from August to June too, wasn't it? 

There was something about being in a class with all of my buddies that made an already distractible kid even more distracted!  Whether I was talking out of turn to Brian Bushcowski, letting Karen cheat off of my math papers, or whipping up fart juice with Paul Pfluger, I had to be more than an handful, huh?

And you were definitely the hammer of justice! 

If we could go back and dig up my discipline records from your classroom, they'd make a great read today.  It's kind of surprising that we both survived, actually----especially after Battlestar Galactica left Paul and I inspired enough to shout regularly about the chocolate covered Cylons coming out of our butts while coming in from recess each day.

Somewhere in the thousand "warm conversations" that you and I shared, you said something that has defined who I am as a person, though.  You said, "Bill, it takes a long time to earn someone's trust and respect and only one stupid mistake to lose it all." 

That made sense to my tweenage brain----and it has served as a constant reminder to me in every relationship since. 

I can even hear your voice when I'm standing on the edge of a tricky decision that could change what others think of me and MOST of the time, I choose to avoid the stupid mistakes that defined me as a child.

Kind of wild, isn't it? 

You were the teacher that was the hardest on me as a child.  I can honestly say that I'm not sure I enjoyed a moment of your class while I was living it.  But you're also one of the teachers who has shaped who I am as a man.

For that, I owe you one! 

Read This: Guilt Trip Into the Woods

My son is not a glassy-eyed blob tethered to a screen. He’s an enthusiastic dynamo, and his love of manga and anime and digital cameras and computer games and PowerPoint to create his own stories has made me question if nature has become his generation’s version of castor oil. Is it really true that Nick and all other children are in a state of natural crisis? Or is this just another round of Oldsters versus Youngsters, with boomer oldsters re-claiming a familiar refrain? These kids today are going to hell in a hand basket.

via www.brainchildmag.com

After writing my recent piece titled Doubting Mother Nature, Dina Strasser stopped by and pointed me to this article questioning just how important experiences in the natural world are for today's students.

Built as a riff off of (against?) the popular title Last Child in the Woods, it argues that a lack of connection to nature is not a problem for today's students and that our fears of lost connections are just another example of the never-ending "oldsters versus youngsters" debate that defines generations.

While I think the author is oversimplifying the consequences attached to the digital divide (read: kids who never experience nature because they're always plugged in), this is a counterpoint worth exploring.

« first‹ previous…343536373839404142…next ›last »
Syndicate content