A morning with Mike Schmoker

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a professional development session with hundreds of educators from across the state of Arizona. Our session leader was Mike Schmoker. 

Mike Schmoker is an Arizona native and has spent his educational career as a football coach, an English teacher and a school administrator. He has authored five books as well as published many articles in educational journals and magazines. Mr. Schmoker believes that we, as a state and a nation, must shift our efforts back to the "basics" of education before we will truly be successful with any other initiative or reform.

 Below is a shocking example of what he means by the "basics."
At the beginning of his session Mr. Schmoker asked one very simple question to our group, "when you walk into a Reading classroom on your campus what do you typically see?" This room full of educators came up with a variety of answers to his question ranging from students identifying the characters in a story, to students summarizing a passage to student creating a visual to support a presentation. One answer that was absent was...READING. Not one person in the room said they typically saw teachers or students engaged in any type of meaningful reading. It seems as though, at least in our experiences, that the focus was more on the elements of literature, writing a response or decorating a poster rather than actually reading.

If you would like to hear more from or about Mike Schmoker you can visit www.mikeschmoker.com

Are schools crushing students love of Reading?

Whether or not state standards and curriculum expectations are ruining the reading experience for students and crushing their innate love of literature has been a debate carried out in every teacher's lounge in every school that I have worked in. The Common Core Standards are currently at the center of this debate due to their heavy emphasis in the area of non-fiction text.

Over the last decade the national push has consistently been to incorporate more non-fiction text into our students daily lives. To use articles, speeches and biographies to teach reading comprehension skills instead of just novels, short stories or poems. Many teachers of reading have voiced that this practice is crushing student's love of reading and making it difficult for them to teach important concepts such as elements of literature and main idea.  

Over the past decade, teachers of every subject have also been trained to teach content through reading instead of simply teaching content. This has raised concern primarily with teachers of math, science and the arts. They fear that the content will be lost to students because the focus is on reading instead of equations or formulas. 

As the Common Core Standards gain more momentum in schools across the country this debate will likely continue to dominate conversations amongst educators.

Below is an interesting article published by Education Week outlining the reform taking place as a result of the Common Core Standards.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/11/14/12cc-overview.h32.html?tkn=NTQFCykjMQZg87ScG1flt1hxpygWfMZA4B0b&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1&intc=EW-CC1112-ENL

Performance Pay for AZ Educators

It seems important to acknowledge that nearly 4 million dollars will be awarded to Arizona educators in the next month as additional compensation for performance. Currently over 1,680 teachers and 60 administrators are participating in the Teacher Incentive Fund awarded to Arizona State University under the Obama administration as part of his educational reform initiative. While pay for performance is still surrounded by controversy and often debated between teacher's unions and policymakers it is exciting that AZ educators are earning an average bonus of $2,340. This is a first for educators in the state of Arizona and a step in the right direction of rewarding educators for their performance.

Below is a link to an article outlining the details of this monumental moment in AZ.

https://asunews.asu.edu/20121115_tifgrant