Tuesday
April 28, 2009
This month’s free professional development resource from Golden Apple is a step-by-step guide to getting your words—and your students’—into print. It was provided by 1997 Golden Apple Fellow and published children’s book author Cheryl Chapman. Please visit the Golden Apple website to download your copy!
A note from Cheryl:
When I was working as a Head Start teacher in the early 1980’s, I was frustrated with the lack of diverse characters in the picture books in my classroom. I’d been a writer all of my life, heading up The Scribblers Club as a Roosevelt High School student in Des Moines, Iowa, and writing poetry for friends and magazines, editorials for newspapers, liturgies for church, and plays for various organizations. I admit it: I always knew I could write for kids, but took that talent for granted. I was the geek who was so thrilled whenever we were assigned 500-word essays in grade school. I entertained my little brothers and sisters and their friends with my Dr. Seuss take-offs. When Kennedy died, I wrote a poem that made my whole school start to cry again. I knew the power of playing with words. So, along with my hippie-era penchant for righting wrongs, as well as my civil rights work, my little 3 and 4 year- old Head Start students finally gave me the motivation for getting some stories out of my heart and into publication. Around that time, our local NAACP president befriended me. I think it no coincidence that Cynthia Davis Brown was also a retired 3rd grade Chicago Public School teacher. She took me, like a student, like a daughter, under her wings and saw that I developed the faith and know-how to do more than simply self-publish my manuscripts. She has been the angel at my shoulder ever since, and I hope she’s proud.
So, that’s how I got here! No matter how you’ve come to the writing life, and no matter how your students get there, if you’ve never tried to get something published before, these pages should help you! You will learn the basics:
Labels:
Thursday
April 09, 2009
Please enjoy posts from Golden Apple’s own Penny Lundquist for the next few weeks. Penny is a 1986 Golden Apple Fellow. She has been on the staff of Golden Apple for 17 years, and currently serves as Golden Apple’s Director of Professional Development. Prior to working at Golden Apple, she was an English teacher with 23 years of classroom experience in grades five through twelve. Her interests include literacy and teacher professionalism.
What follows is a highly personal list of what I perceive to be 5 key education trends . . . expressed as injunctions. I would love to have readers comment on my choices and list picks of their own. These are in no particular order, just things I’m picking up surfing the internet, reading Educational Leadership, Edutopia and other education publications, and following Obama’s/Duncan’s education priorities.
Today is the 5th and final trend in this series.
5. Start young and focus on reading.
President Obama and Secretary Duncan have placed a high priority on early childhood education as the key to improving student achievement. High quality, universal early childhood education can generate a generation of children entering elementary school ready to read and to learn. The early years are critical in laying the groundwork for developing literacy, which leads to success in school, graduation from high school, entry into higher education and success in securing jobs demanding intellectual capital. Reading is Everybody’s Business!! This is something we’ve seen illustrated recently as Secretary Duncan and the Obamas have gone public reading to children. Whatever else is or isn’t done educationally, reading is the basis for learning how to learn, the bedrock of education. Deep in our national DNA is the image of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, largely self-taught, trudging miles to get library books and reading by candlelight.
Expect a renewed emphasis on this most important of skills, the bedrock of all other learning, and the call for more and better early childhood education and for more teachers to become highly skilled teachers of reading. Arne Duncan’s work in Chicago focused on early childhood education and reading. Golden Apple Award-winning teachers developed a Children’s Reading Bill of Rights to help schools and communities define a reading agenda for children, and we are sharing it as one of this month’s Free Resources.
The International Reading Association is a repository of excellent research and policy recommendations, including recommendations to President Obama. For more, check out their website.
What trends in education have you noticed?
Labels:
Monday
April 06, 2009
Please enjoy posts from Golden Apple’s own Penny Lundquist for the next few weeks. Penny is a 1986 Golden Apple Fellow. She has been on the staff of Golden Apple for 17 years, and currently serves as Golden Apple’s Director of Professional Development. Prior to working at Golden Apple, she was an English teacher with 23 years of classroom experience in grades five through twelve. Her interests include literacy and teacher professionalism.
What follows is a highly personal list of what I perceive to be 5 key education trends . . . expressed as injunctions. I would love to have readers comment on my choices and list picks of their own. These are in no particular order, just things I’m picking up surfing the internet, reading Educational Leadership, Edutopia and other education publications, and following Obama’s/Duncan’s education priorities.
Last week, I looked at three trends in education. This week, I’ll be sharing two more. Today, #4:
4. The digital divides need closing.
Definitely one of the most urgent priorities is to guarantee that students acquire the 21st century technological skills they will need to compete successfully with students in other countries for the high quality lifestyles and living wages that are in everyone’s best interest. For that to happen, two digital divides need closing. We all know about the first – ensuring that poor kids have the same access to technology that more advantaged kids have. That’s the original digital divide and by all accounts it is widening rather than shrinking. And that brings us to the second: in many high poverty schools, computers and other high tech equipment sit gathering dust, in some cases still in their original boxes, because teachers are either technology averse, haven’t received adequate professional development to use the technology or our current priorities under NCLB seem to preclude more innovative instructional approaches – those involving technology. There is a digital divide between kids and their teachers across socio-economic groups. It’s just less problematic in more advantaged communities where kids have access to technology after school, when much of their real learning is taking place, driven by their own interests. All teachers need to become more sophisticated users of technology for instruction. That means they need to understand how to harness web 2.0 features for classrooms across the nation.
For more, check out Edutopia.
Check back in a few days for the 5th and final trend in this series!
Labels:
Thursday
April 02, 2009
Please enjoy posts from Golden Apple’s own Penny Lundquist for the next few weeks. Penny is a 1986 Golden Apple Fellow. She has been on the staff of Golden Apple for 17 years, and currently serves as Golden Apple’s Director of Professional Development. Prior to working at Golden Apple, she was an English teacher with 23 years of classroom experience in grades five through twelve. Her interests include literacy and teacher professionalism.
What follows is a highly personal list of what I perceive to be 5 key education trends . . . expressed as injunctions. I would love to have readers comment on my choices and list picks of their own. These are in no particular order, just things I’m picking up surfing the internet, reading Educational Leadership, Edutopia and other education publications, and following Obama’s/Duncan’s education priorities.
A few days ago, I published the first two trends: It’s the Teachers, Stupid! and It’s the Students, Stupid! Here’s #3:
3. Children need 21st Century Skills.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a collaboration including business and technology leaders such Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Verizon, and educational organizations such as Discovery Education, Scholastic, and the NEA, advocates for the full implementation of a new framework for conceptualizing education in the 21st Century, arguing that,
There is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces...U.S. schools must align classroom environments with real world environments by infusing 21st century skills.
The framework, which has already been adopted by state partners in ten states, emphasizes a wide variety of themes, including critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, technology skills, self-directed learning, leadership, and cross-cultural understanding.
In an examination of West Virginia’s implementation of the 21st Century Skills Framework, EdWeek noted that successful integration of the framework would require a “fundamental change in teachers’ roles.”.
In his recent education speech (3/10/09), outlining his administration’s focus for the future, President Obama expanded on this idea:
In a 21st-century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there’s an Internet connection, where a child born in Dallas is now competing with a child in New Delhi, where your best job qualification is not what you do, but what you know—education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it’s a prerequisite for success. I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.
It will take all of us working together, not just state education chiefs and state governors, to gear up our education system so that students learn what they need to know for successful participation in the new age. We have to educate students for the future, not the past.
For more, check out: http://www.21stcenturyskills.org
In the next week, I’ll discuss two more trends in education.
Labels:
