Thing 5a

After several days of searching for  and reading blogs, I am becoming more enthusiastic about the usefulness of blogs to my professional development.  Locating beneficial blogs is getting a little easier the more practiced I become.  I have found several interesting blog posts on the Blogboard feed.  Blogboard is a compilation of educator blogs from Teacher Magazine.  The blogs and the comments are generally thoughtful and, in my opinion, worthy of discussion.  In fact, I attempted to post my first comment to a blog not created by a classmate in response to a Blogboard blog but was unsuccessful.  I am still disappointed that my comment wasn’t successful because I did not save it and probably can’t generate such a persuasive commentary again.  I would like to two share two nuggets that I found in Blogboad posts.

The first nugget was found in a comment made by Nancy Flanagan to the blog Teacher Assignments? Call Scooby Do!  The blog itself addressed the idea of notifying parents about their child’s teacher assignment prior to the beginning of the school year and posed the question “Can anyone explain why systems don’t seem to have this down to a science? Are there implications in this issue that I am not seeing?”

Lively debate ensued on the pros and cons of sending letters to parents introducing teachers.  Nancy Flanagan shifted the conversation to the “highly qualified” language in NCLB:

Even staunch early proponents of NCLB have lately been admitting that the "highly qualified teacher" language therein was an elevation of credentialing over the substance of excellent teaching. We all want content experts in front of our classrooms, but many teachers who were highly qualified on paper were no such thing in front of children. A school leader who was "serious about building relationships with parents" would trust their own judgment about a teacher's competence, rather than paperwork hoops. It is for that reason that schools--knowing more about teacher's actual abilities and success-- wanted to be very cautious about labeling good teachers "unqualified." And--ironically--vice versa. A law that did nothing to clarify what effective teaching actually is...

It seems to me that far too often we measure what is easy to measure instead of what is important.

The second nugget that I found was also on Blogboard in a post entitled You Lie! In this post Anthony Rebora speaks to the idea of  “confidence-boosting lies” told by teachers to students in order to build the student’s confidence.  The implied question in the blog “is it okay for teachers to tell confidence-boosting lies to students?  I think this is an interesting question deserving dialogue.  I tried to comment on the post myself but so far my comments have not appeared on the blog.  In a nutshell, I posed the question why tell a confidence-boosting lie when a confidence-boosting truth works just as well.