Cody explains his mission in his Living in Dialogue post as well as on the Facebook page which has, to this date, inspired over 400 educators to voice their concerns about the direction of this current administration.

Each week, Anthony Cody send the letters on, and the campaign is ever-growing.

I am particularly concerned about how few teachers are sitting at the federal education table, a table whose seats are currently occupied by textook and test-creating execs posing as educational policymakers. However, more often then not, teachers are being blamed for education’s faults without being invited to the higher conversations proposing or implementing solutions.

It’s hard to admit but despite what we know about the damage NCLB has done to education, it is still here, stronger than ever. ?The rest of the country is cheering for Change and Hope, yet it is getting increasingly hopeless in education. After all, prior administrations may have sent us down this road, but we were all looking towards Obama to change it’s direction. It has yet to be seen.

My letter was as follows:

Dear President Obama and Secretary Duncan,
My hope has been replaced by fear: fear that the textbook lobbies are still controlling the direction of education, fear that biased and antiquated assessments are still controlling the direction of our lessons, fear that in a global community, America is still trying to just swing on its own porch. The future in education is in teaching skills our schools are not funded or even encouraged to teach. We are the best bubbling country ever! You both claim that technology is our future, but fund our necessities as if it were our past.

In the equation of student success: student effort + family support + federal funding + school content delivery, the only and easiest element to claim accountability are the teachers. Yet every variable must be taken to task for the success of our children. Our windows are broken, there is police tape on our yards, our tools are 20th Century, and yet it falls to the school to solve the problems of its communities, cities, and country.

You have a war going on here at home, fought by talented troops of both new and veteran teachers who have always been dedicated to the future of this country. We are being abandoned by the media seeking for villains in this story, abandoned by the families believing the propaganda, and abandoned by our government looking to blame someone for the failings of a systems and its parts.

Please allow teachers to speak at your table. We are a knowing voice in content, in its delivery, and in our global goals.

Sincerely,
Heather Wolpert-Gawron
Middle School Teacher

Join the campaign.

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Anthony Cody, assessment, Educational Policy, facebook, Open Letter to Obama, teacher evaluations, Teacher Magazine

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But in the world of Facebook, you are infinitely defined by any thematic quiz you could imagine.  And the way I see it, it’s just the same old, same old personality type quiz…but more tailored to you.   In other words…differentiated.

For instance, according to the Facebook world of personality quizzes, I am the following (like in Jeopardy, try to think of the question that goes with the answer):

Water 

Viola 

A Hobbit

Jean Grey

Prof. Lupin

I have no real idea what all this information really means about me, but it’s a fun way to kill a couple of commercial break minutes during “So You Think You Can Dance,” does it not?

Anyway, all these quizzes got me thinking.  If you are a teacher using a multiple intelligences quiz in your classroom with your students, maybe it would be worthwhile, from a student choice/student ownership point of view, to have students develop their own quizzes of sorts.  Perhaps they can design their own topics of categorization and administer these quizzes to other students?  Would that not add additional ownership towards reflection?

I guess what I’m picturing is students gathering their own information about characters from books they’ve read during the year: traits, internal conflicts, flaws, life themes, skills, etc…and developing some kind of Facebook-esque flowchart that allows fellow students to follow a path towards a given answer.  Then the quiz author must provide a concise paragraph description of that character to distribute to students who qualify as that character.

If I understand it properly, to produce something like this offline, a student might only need index cards to create a flowchart to track answers towards the end.  Online, however, a student might use a program like this one.

I can see the value in this lesson and activity.  It serves as a review of a book or perhaps even covers the standard of Multiple Works By A Single Author.  The creation of the quiz itself is a differentiated assessment of the student who writes it.  It’s a cross-curricular assessment possibility:

Science: What Planet Are You?  (applying science, mythology, and character traits to the planets)

History: Which English Monarch Are You?  Caesar?  Inventor?

Language Arts: Which Book That We’re Read This Year?

Math: Which Algorithm Are You? (assigning traits to different equations as well as understanding the purposes behind their discoveries) 

As I’ve noted before, lessons can come from wacky places.  Keep your ears and eyes open, and you’ll have fresh lessons to start the new year off in an interesting way both for you and your students.

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: assessments, briggs-meyers, cross-curricular, differentiation, facebook, lesson planning, multiple-intelligences, quizzes, standards

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