I have been reading the "Success In the Middle Act" since class on Wednesday and really pondering how it is going to help us implement some middle level strategies and get wide spread support for middle level certification, teacher education programs, and funds. As well as why all the house and senate sponsors except one (Representative Platt from PA) are democrats. I will continue to explore this and figure out how I feel about it.
Meanwhile
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19video-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
This article was recently posted in the blog I follow "This Week in Education" sponsored by Scholastic. The "Quest to Learn" program that is highlighted in this article focuses on the idea that we should be anticipating the way our students our going to learn in the future and the tools that will be available to them. Then we should use that knowledge to teach and assess our students in that anticipated way. In this excerpt they were writing a video game. They were also learning the skills of revision, problem solving, and how to analyze data. Other skills they have learned through the program are how to navigate a social networking site like Facebook, but it is only open to parents, staff, and students. They are learning what is acceptable for the Internet and how to find blogs of interest to them and respond responsibly and articulately. From what the article provided, the students were overwhelming engaged and there was a waiting list to get into the program even though it's a lot of work. There is very little mention in the article of students’ success in other academic areas. They were working other disciplines into this design program but I do not know if it was enough to meet current standards for other academic areas.
"Had they learned anything? It depended, really, on how you wanted to think about teaching and learning." - Al Doyle NY Public School Teacher
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