Posts Tagged ‘administrators. EDAD’

taking attendance

Modern way to skip class from r/gifs

Present or absent? With schools closed, some districts stop tracking attendance, while others redefine it

The latest available data show that three in four high school students had logged in to the district’s online portal on an average day the following week, a district spokesperson told Chalkbeat.

New York City schools began its attendance tracking effort last week. Teachers are counting “daily meaningful interactions,” which can include participation in an online discussion, a completed assignment, any response to a teacher’s email, or even communication with a family member that indicates a student is engaged.

Mayor Bill de Blasio indicated the initial picture would be worrisome. Teachers are “reaching a lot of kids,” he said, but “there’s clearly an issue with attendance.”

The district isn’t using this “for the purposes of any kind of punitive measures,” Denver Public Schools superintendent Susana Cordova said. It’s “really to make sure we’re engaged with our students.

“Merely logging in does not tell us anything more than the student turned on their computer,” Los Angeles superintendent Austin Beutner said in a speech last week. “The absence of a log-in, when a student is reading a book or working on a writing assignment, can leave a misleading digital footprint.”

 

academia and pandemic

Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks

APRIL 09, 2020

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Members-Fear-Pandemic/248476

Covid-19 is being described as both a crisis and an opportunity for higher education. But how “opportunity” is defined depends on where one stands in the academic hierarchy. While some hope the pandemic provides a chance to reverse troubling trends toward the adjunctification and casualization of academic labor, administrators may see it as a different sort of opportunity, to realign institutional priorities or exert greater authority over their faculties.

statement by the Tenure for the Common Good group offers 20 recommendations for administrators, including that they “resist using the current crisis as an opportunity to exploit contingency further by hiring more contingent faculty into precarious positions.”

As faculty members are asked to take on greater teaching, advising, and administrative responsibilities, faculty development and retention “will be more important to institutional resilience — survival — than ever before,” Kiernan Mathews, executive director and principal investigator of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, wrote on Twitter.

To DePaola, the pandemic doesn’t pose new problems to academe as much as it magnifies existing ones. “Everything was held together with gum and paper clips, and coronavirus came and just sort of knocked it all down at once,” DePaola said. “I think none of the crises that this virus is causing are new. They’re just accelerated greatly. And the contradictions of the system are heightened all at once for people to see.”

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The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus

https://osf.io/6kuet/

2020-04-11

Beginning in March 2020, many universities shifted to on-line instruction to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, and many now face the difficult decision of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses complete transcript data from a medium-sized residential American university to map the two-node network that connects students and classes through course enrollments. We show that the enrollment networks of the university and its liberal arts college are “small-world” networks, characterized by high clustering and short average path lengths. In both networks, at least 98% of students are in the main component, and most students can reach each other in two steps. Removing very large courses slightly elongates path lengths, but does not disconnect these networks or eliminate all alternative paths between students. Although students from different majors tend to be clustered together, gateway courses and distributional requirements create cross-major integration. We close by discussing the implications of course networks for understanding potential epidemic spread of infection on university campuses.

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lockdown drills

About 95% of American public schools conduct some form of regular active shooter safety drill — sometimes called a lockdown or active threat drill — according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But concerns are growing that these drills have not been proven effective in preventing violence and that they may even traumatize some students.

In a 2019 research paper, James H. Price and Jagdish Khubchandani found a lack of empirical evidence in favor of active shooter drills and other “hardening” measures used in schools. Partly this is because gun violence in school remains very rare.

And yet, the school security industry is worth a reported $3 billion. Guy Grace with the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools, an educator and industry partnership, insists that twice a year active shooter drills for students are an important piece of violence prevention.

leadership weekly duties

What should people in leadership roles actually be doing all week?

Sep 8, 2019 Ted Bauer

https://medium.com/swlh/what-should-people-in-leadership-roles-actually-be-doing-all-week-67de8c24fd2

People spend most of their week sitting in meetings or on calls — or checking email. Since nary a soul has prepared for any call/meeting, and since e-mail is the biggest joke society has wrought on us all, these are not necessarily “productive” uses of time. That doesn’t matter, of course — the goal isn’t productivity, it’s to be seen as useful or essential. In no place is that truer than the front-line managerial ranks, who often create fires on their own team just to swoop in and “save the day” in order to get lauded by a boss.

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more on leadership in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=leadership

video 360 faculty assessment

Jones, C., Watkins, F., Williams, J., Lambros, A., Callahan, K., Lawlor, J., … Atkinson, H. (2019). A 360-degree assessment of teaching effectiveness using a structured-videorecorded observed teaching exercise for faculty development. Medical Education Online24(1), 1596708. https://doi.org/10.1080/10872981.2019.1596708

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/hb33bq/informaworld_s10_1080_10872981_2019_1596708

enable faculty to receive a detailed 360-degree assessment of their teaching

The faculty in Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine (WFSM) saw an opportunity to incorporate a focused teaching practicum for faculty within a multiple-specialty faculty development program. 360-degree assessments involve a combination of feedback from subordinates, colleagues and superiors. 360-degree feedback has been considered an essential tool in transformational leadership because the evaluation process avoids bias through diversity of viewpoints represented, and it is rarely applied to teaching assessments. Specifically, we designed a teaching practicum using a Videorecorded Observed Teaching Exercise (VOTE) to provide self-, peer- and learner assessments of teaching

Our design of videorecorded microteaching sessions embedded into a faculty development program presents a feasible, well-received model to provide faculty development in teaching and a robust 360-degree assessment of teaching skills.

Two strengths of our program are that it is feasible and reproducible.

In addition, costs for these sessions were low. VOTE video capture costs ranged from $45 – $90 per session depending on the audiovisual capacity of the room used for recording. Costs for this activity included an audiovisual technician who performed the room setup and videorecording. However, a handheld videorecorder or mobile device could be used for these sessions as well.

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more on video 360 in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=360

Principals value coaching

Principals value coaching, but the model still isn’t widespread

https://www.educationdive.com/news/principals-value-coaching-but-the-model-still-isnt-widespread/564442/

Not only does the coaching model benefit principals and teachers, it retains veteran educators who have spent most of their professional lives honing their teaching craft. Not all educators want to climb the administrative hierarchy, and the coaching model gives this group the opportunity to become teacher leaders who pass on their insight to the next generation.

recent evaluation also found when effective teachers act as coaches to multiple teachers, students gain in areas like math skills.

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more on principalship in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=principal

microcredentials in education

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-07-12-microcredentials-could-be-a-game-changer-for-educators-but-hard-questions-remain

According to the authors of a newly published reportat least 10 state education agencies—Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington—have launched official microcredential pilots. And another five states—Illinois, Maryland, Montana, New York, and Wyoming—are experimenting with microcredentials in some way.

sponsored by the non-profit Digital Promise, the report argues that we’ve reached a kind of tipping point in the evolution of the “emerging micro-credentialing ecosystem,”

Reports from early adopters (among them, the NEA, the country’s largest teachers’ union) have been promising, and the potential market for such programs is potentially huge. According to Digital Promise, nearly three out of four U.S. teachers are currently engaged in some type of informal professional development or learning.

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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredent

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