My Education Products

Here are highlights of the assignments I submitted for the teacher training program I attended, Teach Now, in the fall of 2015:

• How High-stakes Assessments Are Impacting Students, Teachers, and Schools (blog post)
• Survey of Teacher Effectiveness (Surveymonkey) Ten questions that get to the point.
• Grading, 21st Century-Style (infographic) What should be the purpose of a grading system? Why "student-centered"?
• Communicating Progress to Parents (Flipsnack PDF) How to conduct a parent teacher conference to explain three scenarios to parents of students in a 7th grade social studies class.
• Considering Teacher Evaluation (blog post)
• Specific Feedback and Praise (Powtoon animated video) 3 scenarios focusing on praising effort – it’s about growth. If you praise intelligence, you may set them up to want to avoid risking failure.
• On pre-assessment and innovative differentiation strategies (blog post)
• Rubric for Social Studies Unit (doc) focusing on student presentation skills (blog post)
• Planning Assessments (blog post)
• Applying Standards (blog post)
• Standards and Backward Mapping (blog post)
• Effectiveness of a Teaching Unit Strategy (YouTube): An examination of using simulations to help students understand lessons
• Teaching strategies to differentiate instruction for students with different learning profiles (mind map): for 8th grade social studies
• Social Studies Strategies (Live Binder)
• Scaffolding Teaching Strategies (Mind Map)
• 5 Objectives to Meet the Standard (infographic): 5 SMART lesson objectives to promote student learning related to a defined standard, per course History of Christianity II: Reformation to the Present
• Unpacking a Standard (Prezi): Goals to guide the curriculum, per course History of Christianity II: Reformation to the Present
• Applying Classroom Rules and Procedures (blog post)
• Teacher methods to support high student performance (blog post)
• Developing a Positive Relationship with Students (Prezi)
• Academic expectations of teachers, schools, and parent in the US (blog post)
• PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention and Support): What It Is and Why It Matters (infographic)
• On teaching strategies that improve the achievement of low-performing students (Flipsnack PDF): Understand the expectations one carries for different students; increase positive attention on low-performing students; have ways to get them to a positive response, despite resistance
• Classroom Rules and Procedures (Prezi)
• Establishing a Positive Classroom Climate (blog post)
• Our digital profiles and the lifelong task of curating them (blog post)
• Survey of Functional Geography: Applying 21st-Century Skills in a Student-Centered Mobile Activity (Voicethread)
• Slideshare on Proposed Podcast on Family Origins
• Education Future-cast (YouTube) Forecasting a bit of our future with technology affecting the field of education, particularly concerning our digital profiles and our new lifelong task of "curating" it.
• Students’ Use of Mobile Devices for Learning (blog post)
• Special Education Referrals in a Westchester School District (blog post)
• Beacon City School District Demographic and Achievement Performance (blog post)
• What is "Innovative Teaching and Learning"? (blog post)
• Brief History of US Education Law Pertaining to Student Testing (blog post)
• Why are the Common Core Standards So Closely Linked with High-Stakes Testing that Many Parents Find Onerous and Odious? (blog post)

My case for Bernie

I agree with Bernie about just about everything, and there has never been a presidential candidate I could say that about who has taken a campaign anywhere near as far as he has.

But if I were to reduce my case for Bernie to simplest terms, it is this: I believe there are only three big issues that really matter for America going forward. Better solutions to almost everything else flow from a sound response to these three. They are: global warming, economic inequality, and militarism. And to wrestle these interlocking horns, we need Bernie to ride on in.

1)    A person who does not in 2016 grasp that climate change is the biggest human issue of our lifetimes and our epoch has a shrunken heart for the future of life. We need inspiring, bold, sweeping dedication and action. Only Bernie takes it well beyond business as usual into the transformative territory we need to enter.

2)    Extreme and still-growing economic inequality is the bread-and-butter daily life issue of our era, far out ahead of any other. You don’t have to be anti-wealth or anti-rich to recognize that the radical concentration of top wealth, especially the 1% of the 1%, has dragged our proud nation into the configuration that only a generation ago classically defined a banana republic. It’s pathetic.

But more than that, extreme wealth concentration goes hand in glove with our civilization’s failure to date to adequately address climate change. The two phenomena are bound at the hip, and must be transformed together. That’s because the acquisitiveness, competitiveness, and selfishness of extreme wealth concentration makes all of us run faster and faster on the treadmill, taxing our planet’s resources beyond capacity, just to live – and feeds our insatiability, our will to excess consumption, and our distancing from others with whom we compete in scarcity. It doesn’t have to be this way.

3)    And this living on edge, this widespread forcing of insecurity, leads to irrational competition, feeding the vilification of the other (xenophobia), and militarism. The most obvious future if climate change and wealth concentration are not addressed transformatively is a future of increasingly violent competition between nations, communities, and ethnic and religious groups across the globe. Blinders and madness. Our large, permanent military budget is a major driver of own our domestic life-impoverishment and at the same time a glaring signal to all the world that your best shot is to arm yourself to the teeth. We need a change of orientation that will lead the world, to whatever extent possible, more towards calmness, civility, peace.

Friends, this here is what Bernie can do. It doesn’t matter if he should turn out to have a Congress that won’t pass anything he wants. We need this authentically progressive, meaningful, and effective agenda telegraphed at the highest level for an extended period of time in order to pull not only the Congress and the Washington and New York elite who control the instruments of governance, business, and messaging, but also everyone who is simply comfortable enough to feel isolated from these matters, into a greater acceptance of a general popular consensus that the interests of the people must be much better served at this time. Then look to the subsequent midterm election to build electoral and legislative strength, and a greater mandate.

Is the better alternative really to have Hillary pursue a path of continuing to soft-pedal these life-in-the-balance matters for years to come, in the face of an opposition that loathes her easily as much as Obama, and is guaranteed never to do anything she wants?

Better to have a president who effectively rallies undeniable support around a progressive agenda, and let the agenda’s strengths grow as more real leaders move into the fast lane. Four years for Bernie, then he hands it off for eight to America’s first woman president, Elizabeth Warren.