Post a comment about the budget cuts at your school on our interactive comment map. more »
GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools
Posts tagged "Uncommon Schools"
the teacherati
August 12, 2010
A place for educators to steal their colleagues’ best ideas
The BetterLesson profile for sixth-grade Roxbury Prep Charter School teacher and BetterLesson celebrity Jason Armstrong
The most popular member of a new social network is neither Lady Gaga nor Ashton Kutcher, though Kutcher is a fan of the website.
The distinction goes to Jason Armstrong, a sixth-grade teacher in Roxbury, Mass., who has more than 6,500 total views and more than 1,100 downloads on a new website for teachers called BetterLesson.
BetterLesson’s circle of about 7,000 teachers are downloading Armstrong’s math lessons, grouped into six units: whole numbers, decimals, fractions, percents, geometry, and a year-ender called extensions and review. They can also download his quizzes and tests and become his “colleague” (the equivalent of a Facebook friend).
Armstrong’s former colleague and roommate, Alex Grodd, created the site — which Kutcher recently promoted in a Tweet, a stroke of generosity devised by a BetterLesson staffer. Grodd first came up with the idea for the site when he joined Teach for America in 2004.
Assigned to teach third grade science during his summer institute training at a Houston elementary school, Grodd went online to hunt for ideas. Surely one of the other hundreds of third grade science teachers in the world had come up with a smart way to explain his assigned topic, the solar system. Why should he have to reinvent the pedagogical wheel? The last remotely relevant class he’d taken was Harvard’s notoriously science-light “Natural Disasters.”
Hours of Googling later, Grodd came up with nothing. “This was 2004, it wasn’t, like, 1994,” Grodd told me today. “The Internet had been around for a while.”
BetterLesson is not the first attempt to solve the problem of teacher isolation, but it’s already catching on more quickly than many efforts. Those 7,000 users are up from just 200 in June 2009, when the site launched to a small group, and Grodd won backing from NewSchools Venture Fund, the philanthropically financed new-idea incubator. (more…)
When capturing your students’ attention isn’t enough
I’ve gotten a lot of great teacher e-mails in response to my New York Times Magazine story about teaching. One of my favorites, from a retired teacher named Ralph Maltese, responds to Doug Lemov’s taxonomy of effective teaching practices. Lemov’s taxonomy, I wrote, centers on “a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions.”
Maltese taught for 36 years in the Abington, Penn., public schools just outside of Philadelphia (also the town where I was born!). He argues that the importance of attention works in reverse, too: Just because you have students’ eyes and ears doesn’t mean they’re learning.
Maltese describes a teacher he had in college:
Dr. Green was a medieval history prof at my undergraduate university. We said that Dr. Green had a sport jacket pocket which knew everything about medieval history because he always spoke into it. He mumbled. “The most important point to remember about the shift of power in the 9th century was (and his head would tilt toward the pocket of his jacket) mmmm hhhmmm hhhmmmm.”
“Dr. Green, would you please repeat that?” Dr. Green was a nice person. “Certainly, Mr. Maltese. The most important point to remember about the shift of power in the 9th century was (and the head dropped again), mmmm hhhmmmm hhhmmmmm.”
We would get to class early and fight to be in the first row to hear Dr. Green because all his tests were on his notes. He had our rapt attention…was he a good teacher? I don’t think so.
scaling up
April 9, 2009
Eli Broad invests $2.5 million in two city charter school networks
Two New York City-based charter school networks, Uncommon Schools and Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network, are splitting $2.5 million in grants meant to help them expand in size speedily. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation doled out the money and made its announcement today.
The full press release is below. The most interesting part that I see is the disclosure that the Uncommon Schools network plans to expand to operate 33 schools by 2014, 20 of them in New York City. The network now has nine charter schools in the city, by my count.
The Success network’s plan, which has been reported before, is to expand its current crop of four schools to 40 in the next 10 years.
Only Uncommon Schools is said to be planning to use the money to invest in facilities.
The full press release: (more…)
Mapping the Budget Cuts
Copyright Notice
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.