Blog Recommendation - What the Research Says

Interested in research findings for best practices in literacy instruction? This is one of my new favorite blogs that I highly recommend: What the Research Says. Billing itself as "early literacy research distilled for educators" the site provides succinct summaries of research papers.

I'd love to find similar sites for keeping up with research in other content areas - if you're aware of any, please share in the comments.

Progress Towards National Standards

According to the June 11 edition of Education Week:

The National Association of Secondary School Principals calls on Congress to appoint an independent panel... to come up with a set of common guidelines for what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.

Maintaining a separate set of standards for each state simply does not make sense, and I do hope that Congress moves toward national education standards whenever NCLB is finally discussed and revised. As this article points out, "we have 50 states, which have 50 different definitions of proficiency, and NCLB never even describes what is meant by proficiency." We already know from national assessments such as NAEP that standards for proficiency vary widely between states. In this age of accountability holding students and their schools to a common standard is just common sense.

One of the original criticisms of NCLB was that it was an unfunded mandate - that states were suddenly all responsible for implementing statewide assessments without funding to support this undertaking. Streamlining this process by creating a national assessment aligned to national standards would lead to significant savings in state education budgets.

National standards would also relieve some of the inefficiencies in creating state and district curriculum. For example, I've learned that here in Ohio district technology standards are based on county standards, which are based on state standards, which are based on ISTE guidelines. Imagine the interminable faculty meetings and piles of paperwork as this process is replicated in districts across the country, and how much time could be focused on improving instructional quality instead of recreating the wheel.

However, if and when we do move towards national standards, we must ensure that the resulting standards are sufficiently challenging, and that the process for revising the standards allows for continuous updates and improvements. National standards should also allow enough flexibility for states to pilot innovations in curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

21st Century Learning

I just posted this here on the Ohio Education Technology Network:

What resources (books, blogs, whatever) do you all recommend that are related to 21st century learning? I mean, what have you been reading that furthers our understanding of what "21st century learning" actually means, and what implications it will have for our schools?

This weekend I've been reading Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century by David Warlick. It's been helping me flesh out my thoughts on how the meaning of literacy has changed.

Lately we've all been hearing about how our traditional definition of literacy doesn't sufficiently encompass the numeric, scientific, technological, informational, and various other "new literacies" that students need today. Instead of splitting our understanding of literacy into separate segments, I think that instead we should take a broader view of how the requirements of literacy have evolved.

The definition of literacy as the ability to read and write was sufficient when those were the essential tools to access information in the world. As more and ever-changing avenues for accessing information have developed, the meaning of literacy is expanding beyond the ability to read and write to include the ability to access and learn new information.

As Warlick puts it in this book: "In the twenty-first century, literacy involves... a wide range of skills associated with acquiring, decoding, evaluating, and organizing information within a global electronic library.... If all our children learn to do is read, they will not be literate." He also describes an interesting idea that the "two-dimensional" way of reading from left to right and from top to bottom has shifted into "three-dimensional" reading has information is digitally hyperlinked and layered.

Some pieces of the book are a little dated (published in 2004), but its ideas are still relevant. I also whole-heartedly recommend checking out the related Landmark Project, and some of Warlick's presentations that are available online, especially this one.