Thoughts on Teacher Compensation plus Websites and Articles For Teachers

Sites of the Week

Open Library- Teachers  and  school librarians might be interested in this book website featuring 23,747,948 books (including 1,111,774 with full-text).  Once you have located a book you can browse for purchase or find it at a library.  Some are catalogued and some can be read online.

Watch Know - The Internet is full of useful information, but it's disorganized and often unreliable.  This site is collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website.  Many of the videos feature children sharing their knowledge.

Highlights Magazine - A great magazine has moved to the web and has many interesting games, puzzles, and activities for young children.

Pestworld for Kids - Here is a great site for youngsters interested in bugs.  Checkout the video contest underway that can earn $3000 for your school!

Articles of Interest 

Education Alone Can Not Save Our Economy by Anthony Cody in Teacher Magazine writes the following in his blog Living in Dialog:

Our goal should not be the degree at the end of college. Our goal is knowledge and the ability to do useful, creative and productive things in the world. The quality of education needs to be measured not by how well we get our students to score on tests, but on how capable they are at interacting powerfully with the real world. Are they able to do skillful work? Are they able to express themselves through writing, music and art? Can they invent solutions to the problems that have landed in their laps?

Getting it Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn by Henry L. Roediger and Bridgig Finn in Scientific American Online debunks the myth of errorless learning.  Research shows that learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.  Just remember how much you learned when you went over the test in class the next day. 


Thought for the Week
Restructuring Teacher Compensation

There has been much in education news lately about changing the way teachers are compensated.  There is a movement to find effective teachers and reward them with monetary compensation.  I hope that we spend some time thinking about this before we mandate how it should be done.

Who will receive compensation for the student who drops out and takes the GED and then sucessfully completes college?  Education, as it is currently structured, is an age dependent process that requires teamwork over a 12 year period of time.  If we compensate a teacher for one effective year, shouldn't we find the previous teachers of all those students and reward them?

How do we identify the most effective teacher?  Are we going to pick out the best test scores and reward the teachers of those students?  What about the teacher that motivates children to want to learn?  Who will decide who gets the bonus or higher pay?

The  current system of rewarding longevity and more education needs to change.  Perhaps that system can be incorporated into one which rewards increasing responsibility for teachers who are willing to hold leadership roles in curriculum and teacher training at their schools and districts.

The state of New Mexico has begun this process in their teacher licensing.  They have a three tier system that requires teachers to progress from one tier to another by attaining further training and proving effectiveness through the use of testing and portfolios.  Teachers in the top tier are required to provide leadership in their schools.  It is not a perfect system, but it is a beginning and New Mexico is not the only place this is happening.

School systems must look beyond narrow definitions of teacher effectiveness and create one which rewards departments, schools, and districts for excellence.  A system that satisfies its customers should be among those receiving extra compensation.  It seems to me that students and parents should have more say in how their teachers are compensated than the results of a once a year test score!