Teaching

I have added five new terms to the teaching glossary for the month of April. I will continue to add new terms each month. This is primarily to aide readers who may not have a background in education.

• Ad Valorem
• Bloom's Taxonomy
• Depth of Knowledge
• Rubric
• Title I

There are essentially five choices that parents have today when it comes to their child's education. Those include public school, private school, charter school, homeschooling, and virtual/online school. Each of these have their own pros and cons, but which one has the best learning environment? A reader inspired me to answer this question.

I believe that each of these choices can be an effective learning environment and that a child's academic success depends more upon the parents that are raising them than on the environment in which they learn. If a parent values and pushes education, then typically their child will be successful. Likewise, if a parent doesn't value and push education, then the child's chances at academic success are less likely. The parents choice in what type of schooling is secondary to the overall value placed on education.

Becoming a school board member is a terrific way for parents and community members to get involved with their local school. It is a lot of work to even become a board member since it is an elected position which means you will have to campaign. Once elected the real work begins as you have to learn more about the internal daily operations of your local school. Good school board members are invaluable and have no hidden agenda other than to help make decisions that will improve the overall quality of the district's education. School board members who are in it for reasons other than that, shouldn't be and will create more problems than they will good.

For the past two years, I have challenged the students at my school to read and take Accelerated Reading (AR) quizzes twice a year. Each challenge last for a month. I have conduct the first challenge in October and the second challenge in March. One of the challenges pits class against class. The class who earns the most AR points receives a pizza party. I also always reward the top readers in each class with a prize of some sort.

The other challenge that I conduct is the more interesting one and the more productive one. I set a school wide goal that I want all students combined to earn. Then I set the stakes very high. Last year I spent 24 solid hours on the roof of the school in the middle of November. Kids read like crazy to put me up there. It was a cold and miserable night, but it was well worth it.

This year I decided that I would involve a couple of my teachers in this torture. I set the goal very high and my students surpassed it by over 700 AR points. So this Friday, myself and two teachers will be skydiving with the entire student body watching. This is not something I have ever done and I am both excited & nervous. Whatever happens, as long our chutes open, it will be well worth it.

UPDATE: I survived and had an absolute blast. I posted a picture above of the three of us in our goofy sky diving suits. Our students absolutely loved it! It was absolutely worth the stress and anxiety that each of us felt going into it.

I have added five new terms to the teaching glossary for the month of March. Hopefully this will be advantageous to my readers who do not have an in depth background in education.

• Adequate Yearly Progress
• Block Scheduling
• Educational Leadership
• Reduction in Force
• School Legislation

Reading is absolutely the most important aspect of education. Struggling readers are typically struggling students. It is essential that parents and teachers help children develop a genuine love for reading. In the digital age what better way to foster such love while building skills than through interactive websites. There are thousands of terrific websites for students of all ages dealing with reading and phonics. In this article, I highlight five interactive reading and phonics websites that I consider to be among the best. Each of them covers a different topic or adds a unique element that will keep a student's interest and teach them at the same time.

No matter what you think about standardized testing, the reality is that it likely isn't going away soon. Personally, I believe there is a benefit to standardized testing, but I don't like how the data generated from such tests are being used. There are several pros and cons of standardized testing. In researching for this article, I can tell that the cons far outweigh the pros.

I believe that standardized testing could be utilized better. Why not give a standardized pretest at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the year? This would allow teachers to see where their students are and where they need to take them. The real benefit would be that you could accurately measure improvement over the course of the year. This in my opinion is much more important than the current practice of simply looking at proficient vs. not proficient.