---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: laurie ornstein <laurenmadeline@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students What Works in the Classroom is, in my opinion, "to the point"! (Not sure if that is a Freudian slip as there's a textbook of that name) I've been crying out loud forever and a day that unseen piled on unseen, Bagrut practice ad nauseam, is not the way to go. I've refused to "teach" module this or that and get upset when I find teachers sitting their kids down for just one more practice test. This is not to say that I send my classes to the exam without knowing what to expect; one practice test a month is enough. Let's stay with really teaching English and our pupils will go much further. Laurie Michele wrote: > Here's the end of the article: > > One notable early finding, Ms. Phillips said, is that teachers who > incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests > tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply > work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and > mathematics. > > Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of > time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make > smaller gains on those exams than other teachers. > > “Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. > Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.” Margie wrote: > What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students > The New York Times / International Herald Tribune > December 10, 2010 > > How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers? > Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from > a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of > distinguishing good teachers from bad. > (To read the whole article, go to - > http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html?_r=1&ref=sam_dillon ----------------------------------------------- ** Etni homepage - http://www.etni.org ** for help - ask@xxxxxxxx ** ** to post to this list - etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** -----------------------------------------------