Archives For In The News

What Are Your Students Saying About You?

June 27, 2011  3 Comments

Rate My Teacher What Are Your Students Saying About You?

Ever wondered what your students say about you behind your back?  In today’s Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) there is an article about a website called Rate My Teachers where students are able to go online and rate their teachers and leave a comment according to the following four categories:

  • Easiness
  • Helpfulness
  • Clarity
  • Popularity

When I first saw the website I immediately checked what students had said about me and my school.  I’m not sure if I was relived or annoyed that I hadn’t received a mention as of yet!  What I was surprised at was just how many teachers had been added and the number of ratings each teacher had already received.  I looked up both primary and high schools some of which were just small schools with a relatively small student population.  Seems like the word is definitely out there amongst the students.

  Leaves me wondering a couple of things:

  1. Is there any way to protect your reputation and defend yourself against claims made about you?  You can contact the site owners but there is no c0mmitment from them to answer your complaint.
  2.  Will the education department will put any weight behind these ratings when appraising their teaching staff under the latest push to reward teachers based on their performance.

 What are your thoughts?

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Does Australian Culture Oppose Learning?

May 16, 2011  2 Comments

Australian learning culture1 Does Australian Culture Oppose Learning?

There was an article in The Age today discussing Australian culture in relation to learning and our need to compete globally.  What I found most interesting was the timeline of attitude change towards education.

The article can be summed up as follows:

”Not all people think it is smart to learn; some feel it is not going to help them much and they think people who do well at school are wankers. It is a view pretty commonly felt and is not terribly conducive to having a highly educated population.”

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Rewarding Teachers – Will it work?

March 26, 2011  1 Comment

model why 150x150 Rewarding Teachers Will it work?

Yesterday I posted about an article in the Chicago Tribune reporting that Florida had finalised their plan to modernise teaching.  There were a range of changes about to be rolled out – one of them being that teachers were to be rewarded based on how much their students learn.

The idea of providing financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world but it would appear that the evidence shows that this strategy simply won’t achieve the desired outcomes. At best the  jury is still out as to whether or not this approach to improving student outcomes actually works, however I think most people have made up their mind.  (I have previously written about the potential problems of rewarding students.  You can see those posts here and here).

I was interested to see a report release by the National Bureau of Economic Research about a study that was conducted as a randomized trial involving over two hundred public schools in New York City.  The report found that:

Continue Reading…

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Friday Funny – Geography in the Classroom

March 25, 2011  1 Comment

I am currently teaching my Geography class about natural disasters.  We were talking about the recent events from a couple of months ago when Australia was hit by Cyclone Yasi.  I was looking a map of Australia showing where Yasi hit the coast and found this picture from CNN.

Apparently Cyclone Yasi blew Queensland all the way down to Tasmania!

map of Australia Friday Funny Geography in the Classroom

CNN version of the location of Australian states

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The Plan to Modernise Teaching

March 24, 2011  7 Comments
modernising teaching 150x150 The Plan to Modernise Teaching

Teacher Report Card

There was an article in the Chicago Tribune earlier this week that reported on the progress of the plans in Florida to finalise their ‘Roadmap for modernizing the teaching profession’.  According to the article Florida has passed legislation that will formalise their plans that will apparently (and I quote) “transform the educational status quo”. The summary of the changes are as follows:

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