Thinking and Linking Pt.3

You can read previous linksets here and here (or here for all posts with the tag "articles").


The Washington Post has a great summary of Linda Darling-Hammond’s proposal for a framework for effective and professional teacher evaluation.

The NY Times offers what it calls “essential questions” for failure across various disciplines and professions. These could easily become age-appropriate lessons that integrate with our approach to developing critical thinking and meta-cognition about learning habits.

The Herald News reports on a school using the technique of learning walks to encourage collaboration among teachers. I've reported on my experience with learning walks seven or eight times on this blog (such as here and here).

This piece on GovTech presents arguments on both sides of bringing technology into lower elementary classrooms. This is a topic of that the elementary faculty discussed briefly during our year-end division meeting – what is developmentally appropriate technology for children of this age? What are our responsibilities to integrate digital technology into the classroom in ways that support the school's Technology learning outcome? Should we broaden the concept of technology to include brooms and mops, pencils and pens, rulers and protractors, and other hands-on practical life tools that we believe are also important for kids to use successfully?

The Huffington Post reports on a study that shows that yes, Virginia, the amount (and quality) of sleep impacts a student's performance in the classroom. Didn't we learn that from John Medina already?

Brad Kunz hits the nail on the head with his post on ASCD: good teaching should be focused on student learning and understanding, not on the evaluation or grade that a child earns. Good assessment is just a tool to help teachers gauge a child's progress in the arc of learning, not a means to evaluate and judge a child's worth. Besides, we all know that grades are completely subjective and actually damage children's intrinsic motivation.

Algebraic thinking should be part of the upper elementary math curriculum, but as this article from the Harvard Education Letter points out, there's a huge difference between pushing 8th grade math to 3rd grade, and building off of what younger students already know and do in a developmentally-appropriate way. That's why we love the NCTM standards: the five strands of mathematical thinking - operations, geometry, algebra, measurement, and data analysis - should be taught at ALL grade levels.

Here's a short and sweet call for sanity from Renee Moore that resonates nicely with our approach to standardized testing.

In some ways, not understanding the importance of critical thinking skills is indicative of a lack of those same skills. This has to be some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.


I'll put up another installment next week (I've got a good collection still waiting for annotation and attention).