Murphy Educational Consulting (MEC)

If you haven’t seen this video yet, it is worth taking the 8 minutes to do so. It’s a video of a young boy in the Dallas ISD who talks to members of the school district’s staff about believing in children and about how much each adult means to the students’ success. Often adults don’t believe. They say it’s “too late” or there are “too many problems at home” and the list goes on and on. This child makes you want to think differently and to go into schools and really cherish and educate all of our children in this country.

John’s Hopkins Best Evidence Encyclopedia just published an updated review of middle school and high school mathematics program.  It’s a meta-analysis of all of the existing research, which is very hand for people who want to make evidence supported decisions, but don’t have the research degree necessary to sort through all of the published data out there to find the reliable and valid studies.  The end result of their work is a hand chart that identifies programs as and lists programs down into the categories of ‘Strong Evidence of Effectiveness’, ‘Moderate Evidence of Effectiveness’, ‘Limited Evidence of Effectiveness’, ‘Insufficient Evidence’ and ‘No Qualifying Studies’.

Interestingly, there were only two programs and the ‘strong’ category and none in the ‘moderate’.  Considering all of the claims out there of raising your students test scores by leaps and bounds, this is important to note.  Most of these programs fell under ‘no qualifying study’ meaning that the results that they tout were not gathered through a methodologically sound study.  The two top rated programs were:

• Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) (IP-Cooperative Learning) – nmadden@jhu.edu
• IMPROVE (IP-Cooperative Learning) – mevarz@mail.biu.ac.il

To see the rest of the list, click here.

I just read on the Public Education Network that Henry Lous Gates is working on an ancestry based education curriculum.  Now, if you don’t follow curriculum development closely, it might be easy to dismiss this as ‘already done’ or ‘more if the same’.  But I have hope for this being better than that and truly, enlightening, engaging and relevant.    I have watched “African American Lives” several times, and have even given it as gifts because I feel that it’s so important for people to watch. He describes dragging kids through ‘historical archives’, which is exactly what he did for his own family when making this series.  I imagine this is why he realizes the true potential of this type of curriculum.  I am excited to see the types of schools, and teachers, that will adopt such a curriculum.

Henry Lewis Gates working on ‘ancestry-based’ curriculum
In the wake of his highly acclaimed PBS series “African American Lives,” which traced the ancestry of 19 famous African Americans using genealogical research and DNA science, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is working with other educators to create what he calls an “ancestry-based” curriculum to teach history and science to African-American students in grades K-12. In a conversation with Learning First Alliance’s Public School Insights blog, Gates notes that half the African-American students in the United States are failing to graduate from high school. To help them become more engaged, he has been working on a six-week history unit in which kids will interview parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents — collecting family stories along with census information, tax records, and estate records. Gates says that if you “went into an inner-city school and said, ‘We’re going to drag you into historical archives about the Civil War,’ or the Great Depression, or the Great Migration, kids would say, ‘Get out of town.’ But if we said, ‘We’re going to trace your family through those periods and to those periods,’ my goodness, who wouldn’t be interested in that?” When students reach the Civil War period, adds Gates, they can be taught DNA analysis in a science class so they can continue to trace genealogy after the paper trail ends.
Read more at http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/?storyId=22061