JEREMY Y WANG

Richfield School District is opening a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) focused elementary school, and it's drawing loads of interest among parents.

While the focus of the article is about its popularity, this shows another trend in elementary education - teacher specialization at lower grade levels. I'm totally for this movement, especially when it comes to science education. Teachers should know how to design instructional experiences for young children that can serve later learning of more complex science concepts. I would hypothesize that kids that have more experiences with "strange" or "magical" science demonstrations (and appropriate instruction) will have an easier time overcoming their intuitive conceptions that often block scientific understanding.

St. Cate's is apparently responsible for the professional development (on-going over the year). I am interested to see how they are doing a year or two down the road. Anyone know the people there working on this?

Here's a great resource that I can see science teachers using as warm-up activities or "hooks" for introducing new material.

Also, be sure to check out other Science Reference Services. For example, Science Tracer Bullet series provide summaries and lists of references for getting acquainted with science topics.

“We’re at a huge frontier when it comes to understanding learning,” she said. “Divorcing teacher preparation from this research would suggest to me that you would prepare doctors with hands-on tools without their benefiting from medical research.”

La Toya C. K. Caton, 26, of Baldwin, N.Y., decided to become a teacher after she was laid off as a systems analyst. Last spring, she applied to Teach for America but withdrew at the last minute, enrolling at Teachers College instead. “During that time I was a substitute teacher in middle school and high school, and I felt that more training was necessary,” said Ms. Caton, who will complete her master’s in May.

“Teachers College really provides you with an amazing opportunity to learn from supportive teachers,” said Ms. Caton, now a student-teacher at Public School 180, the Hugo Newman School, in Harlem. “They really act as mentors. They’ve given me the space to become the teacher I want to be.”

Dr. Steiner said that the alternative groups would have to shape their own certification programs subject to Regents approval. While those programs would involve some theoretical classroom learning, he said, they would be “given some relief from the traditional constraints of course credits and hours.”

“We believe there are a few institutions that have earned their right to the table,” he said, although he declined to identify them. “They would be held to exactly the same performance assessment that the traditional schools of education would be held to.”

A spokeswoman for Teach for America, which has 800 new teachers enlisted in its two-year program in 300 schools in New York City, said the group would consider submitting a plan for a certification program.

Some education schools have already seen a drop in their application numbers as a result of the allure of alternative programs, though the effect has been blunted by the recession, which has helped fill up graduate schools in general. In a weak economy, alternative programs are especially attractive because participants can earn a regular starting salary from the outset while also receiving a discount on tuition for a master’s degree.

In contrast, annual tuition for a master’s degree program at a public university like City College of New York costs $7,360, while tuition at a prestigious private institution like Teachers College runs $26,040 for a full course load. (For a student living in a dormitory, Teachers College puts the total cost for nine months of study, including tuition, books, fees, room, board and other expenses, at $63,196.)

In Brooklyn, Dan Cosgrove, 24, is now in his second year with Teach for America, teaching fourth grade at Leadership Prep Bedford-Stuyvesant Charter School. He joined Teach for America after graduating from Trinity College, unsure which career path to follow but eager to right the social inequalities he had studied as a sociology major.

Despite a grueling schedule (teaching all week and pursuing a master’s degree on weekends and in the summer), Mr. Cosgrove is sold on teaching. At Leadership Prep, classrooms have co-teachers, which has helped him develop classroom-management skills.

“It’s incredibly challenging and difficult, but it’s also extremely rewarding,” he said. “I think the best way to learn is by watching people here and being in all kinds of situations.”

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[via Mark Lewis]

Alternative certification isn't just an issue in Minnesota...

The tension between alternative certification programs and traditional schools of education is tenable, but they boil down to philosophical differences. It's interesting that schools of education are appealing to philosophy rather than research.

Illustrations by Chis Gash

If you’ve written a few five-figure tuition checks or taken on 10 years’ of debt, you probably think you’re paying to be taught by full-time professors. But it’s entirely possible that most of your teachers are freelancers.

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.

“When a tenure-track position is empty,” says Gwendolyn Bradley, director of communications at the American Association of University Professors, “institutions are choosing to hire three part-timers to save money.”

THE PROBLEM

While many adjuncts are talented teachers with the same degrees as tenured professors, they’re treated as second-class citizens on most campuses, and that affects students.

It’s sometimes harder to track down adjuncts outside of class, because they rarely have offices or even their own departmental mailboxes.

Many patch together jobs at different colleges to make ends meet, and with commuting, there’s less time to confer with students or prepare for class. It’s not unusual for adjuncts to be hired at the last minute to teach courses they’ve never taught. And with no job security, they may consider it advantageous to tailor classes for student approval.

HOW TO

Colleges tend to play down the increasingly central role of adjuncts. This fall, the American Federation of Teachers complained that some top-ranked universities exaggerated the percentage of full-time faculty to U.S. News & World Report for its rankings. U.S. News declined to investigate.

Another source is the “Compare Higher Education Institutions” search tool at A.F.T.’s Higher Education Data Center (highereddata.aft.org). These are the stats that colleges report to the federal government.

Ask admissions officers point-blank: what percentage of classes and discussion sections are taught by part-timers and graduate assistants, and are they required to hold office hours?

For entry-level classes — the ones tenured faculty famously don’t want to teach — the squeaky wheel often gets a full-time professor, says Harlan Cohen, author of “The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College.” “If you’re not thrilled with your adjunct professor,” he says, “go to the head of the department and see what options are available. They may put you in a different section.”

CAVEATS

If you take a strict anti-adjunct stance, you may miss out on some star instructors — Barack Obama taught a seminar on racism and the law at the University of Chicago Law School as an adjunct. Professoring part-time is a hobby for overachieving architects, graphic designers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, all of whom can share insights from real-world experiences that full-time academics haven’t had.

“Before making assumptions that an adjunct is bad, Google them,” Mr. Cohen says. “You may find that real estate teacher is one step removed from Donald Trump’s V.P. on LinkedIn, and these are the types of people you want to meet.”

via nytimes.com

Two views on this:

(1) My girlfriend is one of those adjunct faculty that take teaching seriously, probably more so than most full-time faculty, and students benefit from that. However, this is a blessing and a curse for her - she can do freelance, but doesn't get benefits.

(2) If this is the direction we're heading, we might end up with two types of faculty - those that research and those that teach. Again, a blessing and a curse - teaching requires a lot of effort that some researchers aren't willing to put in, but researchers are at the forefront of human knowledge that students should have access to...

Do you think many young people have a similar "erroneous" outlook?

Yes. [Obj 774] They have accepted the philosophical beliefs of their elders. [Obj 774] They are the distilled essence of the Establishment's culture. [Obj 916] The average graduate has no concept of knowledge. He has the cynicism of a decadent adult and the credulity of a child. His mind is in a state of whirling confusion. [Obj 917] He finds himself in the midst of the brilliant complexity of an industrial, technological civilization which he cannot begin to understand.

You refer to "graduates" in particular - you think it's education's fault?

[Donahue #1 41:56] Today, those who didn't go to college are better informed and less easily fooled than those who did. [ARL 52] Of all government undertakings, none has failed so disastrously as public education. [Obj 933] The grade-and-high-school teachers blame it on parental influences. The college professors blame it on the teachers. Few, if any, question the content of the courses.

So, what's wrong with the courses?

[Obj 956] The purpose of education is to teach a student how to live, by developing his mind. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e. conceptual. He has to be taught how to think, to integrate, to prove by his own effort. This is what the colleges renounced long ago. What they are teaching today has no relevance to anything.

Is this necessarily the fault of public education? Wouldn't private schools under no regulation run the risk of being even more limited and trend-driven?

[Margin 35] Oh, no! The exact opposite is true. [ARL 78] A private school has the right to teach any ideas of its owners' choice, and to exclude all opposing ideas; but it has no power to force such exclusion on the rest of the country. The opponents have the right to teach a wider spectrum of viewpoints, if they so choose. The competition of the free marketplace of ideas does the rest, determining every school's success or failure - which, historically, was the course of the development of the great private universities. [Faith 8] If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas, the intellectual history of the Nineteenth Century would be a good example to study.

So you would support a voucher system?

[ARL 81] It would work not as a motor of freedom, but as a brake on total regimentation, [ARL 77] a temporary measure in a grave national emergency. [ARL 53] We are living in a disastrously mixed economy, which cannot be freed overnight. In today's context, the proposal would be a step in the right direction.

What about government scholarships?

[Obj 92] The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

Excerpt from a Wired "Interview" that was constructed from the writing and interviews of Ayn Rand. Some interesting stuff here...

Considering my current status as a government-funded graduate student, this was particularly interesting:

"The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism."

Yay Minnesota! Home of 3M & Medtronic (among many others), we certainly have plenty of reason to emphasize STEM.

It's noted in the article that the Minnesota science assessments (MCA-II) are completely computer-based (something that the testing industry has long avoided). The test uses innovative item types to get at students' scientific reasoning and inquiry skills.

The draft test specs for the next version of the science assessment, MCA-III, have been recently released for public review, and I'm looking forward to looking at them.

Full Disclosure: My dad is a psychometrician at Pearson, who analyzes the results of the MN science assessment. He may have juked the scores to make me feel better...