Teach Effectively!

Under the headline “Harvard Offers New Doctorate for School Leaders Who Aim to Shake Up Status Quo” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Schmidt reported that Harvard University announced a grant-funded doctoral degree program to leaders in education. The graduates are supposed to be people who can engender “major school reform.”

The program’s mission will be to train top officials of school districts, government agencies, nonprofit groups, and private organizations who will be equipped to shake up the status quo in elementary and secondary education.

“Our goal is not to develop leaders for the system as it currently exists; rather, we aim to develop people who will lead system transformation,” Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of Education, said in written statement.

What reform, one might wonder? Transformed to what? Just any old transformation? I’d like it if the transformation was toward adopting evidence-based practices. Will the graduates of the program know anything about effective teaching?

Read Mr. Schmidt’s article.

I don’t have much idea whether it’s an honor, but I note here that Teach Effectively! was included in one of those “top-100″ lists of blogs. In a post on its blog, Accredited Online Universities (AOU) headed the list with this statement:
Continue reading ‘TE recognized’

Over on Children of the Code David Boulton published a transcript of an interview with Siegfried Engelmann, the primary force behind the development of the Direct Instruction methods. In “Instructional Design 101: Learn from the Learners!,” which provides only part of the material that CoC will publish, Mr. Boulton asked Mr. Engelmann a wide range of questions and recorded his answers.

Engelmann recounts how he entered education, how he came to develop scripts, and lots more. Also, there are insightful anecdotes. For example, in one segment Mr. Engelmann recounts a story about the development of the Corrective Reading Program.
Continue reading ‘Engelmann interview on instructional design’