For more than 50 years, success gurus in the business world have been urging employers and employees to work smarter not harder. In business, it often means to think big, delegate more, and let technology work for you. It’s often recommended for people who are overwhelmed with details, facing multiple deadlines, and feeling stressed out…
Each state that has adopted Common Core State Standards will select an assessment consortium to assess how children are progressing in school. The two options most widely chosen at this point are: Smarter Balanced and PARCC. Each assessment consortium has provided practice test questions and today we will review one of these questions and…
Every spring, kids in the U.S. take a bevy of standardized tests. Teachers and administrators fret over the results. A great deal of time and energy is invested in preparing students for the tests. Unfortunately, the only real official material of any direct use is often a set of released sample test questions and a…
Anyone who has been teaching for a few years knows that teachers face huge amounts of stress. It comes unremittingly from 20-120 students all demanding attention, and from administrative requests for meetings and paperwork, and parental requests about how Johnny’s doing. In the midst of this, a teacher has to prepare daily lessons, correct assignments,…
Usually in the Ask DataWORKS blog, we like to feature answers to questions that readers have asked. This time we are fortunate to have a special guest who has some definite opinions about education. Our guest is Yoda, the great 900-year-old Jedi Warrior, who played a starring role in the Star Wars movies. We…
Each state that has adopted Common Core State Standards will select an assessment consortium to assess how children are progressing in school. The two options most widely chosen at this point are: Smarter Balanced and PARCC. Each assessment consortium has provided practice test questions and today we will review one of these questions and discuss its potential impact on classroom instruction.…
Amidst all the hoopla about Common Core standards, and how to teach the lessons so students are ready for the new assessments, there is a quiet but very significant understanding that underlies all the standards. This key value, which all the standards are designed to achieve, is proficient practice.  The standards want the students to…
In November 2010, the U.S. Department of Education released the National Education Technology Plan. As we’ve mentioned in earlier Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 this plan is a broad vision for schools and districts to implement technology for learning. In this post, we will look more closely at the implications in the Plan for infrastructure…
Ever since I was in teacher training classes in college many decades ago, there has been a raging debate about whether education should be Teacher-Centered or Student-Centered. Â There is some research both ways. But I would like to suggest that the answer is NEITHER. The Teacher-Centered Approach To arrive at this conclusion, we have to…
TO GIVE OR NOT TO GIVE HOMEWORK…That is the question! The amount of homework students are given differs greatly across grade levels and states. Some students are given hours of work while other students are assigned little or no work to be done at home. So what’s appropriate? What is the purpose of homework? What…