Archive for the 'Administration' Category

Free DI reading program downloads!

Published on 1 February 2012 in Administration, News, Reading and Technology. 0 Comments

As noted in a post a couple of weeks ago (“Free Funnix returns!”), the folks at Royal Limited Partnership are giving away free copies of Funnix, a beginning reading program. Funnix is a sequence of instructional lessons that shows young children the basics of early decoding as well as the fundamentals of comprehension. They are packaged as computer programs (note bene: Because they are Flash-based, they only work on some operating systems) with all the necessary accompanying worksheets and such. Learn more about this opportunity to receive a copy of the program by visiting this special page of the Funnix Web site. Go there during the month of February 2012.

These programs are built on Direct Instruction principles, so they have the entire line of research associated with those principles standing behind them. They require that an informed adult guide the student (checking answers, providing feedback) either in tutorial or small-group situations.

Read Free Funnix returns!, if you wish.

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Free Funnix returns!

Published on 17 January 2012 in Administration, News, Primary, Reading, Technology and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Loyal readers of TE will recall that the folks at Royal Limited Partnership gave away copies of the Funnix Beginning Reading program in 2011. Welp, it’s going to happen again! Yes indeedy! Quoting from a page on the Funnix Web site:

From February 1 through 16th, the Funnix Beginning Reading program will be free for download–no strings, no hidden costs.

The Funnix sequence teaches 2 year’s worth of reading skills. During last year’s promotion, more than 40,000 people received the Funnix Beginning Reading program free. Even higher numbers are anticipated for this year.

If you’re in the market for an excellent beginning reading program, sign up for your free download of Funnix Beginning Reading. The program has been offered for $25 during most of 2011; however, the price will rise to $38 following the giveaway in February.

Funnix is a computer-based early reading program that delivers the essential components for decoding instruction. A teacher, parent, teaching assistant, or other competent reader can work with an individual child or small group and provide the guidance needed by the student or students as they go through the instructional activities provided via the computer. It’s predicated on all the principles of Direct Instruction (its authors are Zig and Owen Engelmann). The lessons are lively and fun. There’s plenty of monitoring and opportunities for individualization.

Now, you can’t register early for this giveaway. You have to arrive after 1 February 2012. But, you can go to the Funnix giveaway announcement and look at the various offerings now, and you can become familiar with the products in advance, and you can be prepared (i.e., bookmark the site, put a reminder in your calendar, and so forth).

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Free gift from Education Consumers Foundation!

Published on 6 December 2011 in Administration, Arithmetic and mathematics, Assessment, Behavior Management, Bookshelf, Content learning, Elementary, News, Policy, Primary, Reading, Research, Secondary, Spelling, Standards, Teacher education, The press and Written Expression. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

partial image of cover of Clear Teaching

Isn’t it unusual to get something for free that is actually worth a lot? The good folks over at Education Consumers Foundation (ECF) are giving away a small book that is quite valuable, and I encourage readers to download it, read it, and tell their friends to get it, too.

What are they giving away? It’s a book called Clear Teaching: With Direct Instruction, Siegfried Engelmann Discovered a Better Way of Teaching by Shep Barbash. As one can tell from the subtitle, it’s about Zig Engelmann’s work on education. I talked with Mr. Barbash as he worked on the manuscript for the book, read an earlier version of it, and am very impressed with this finished product. It’s even more impressive that the book is now out in the wild for free. Kudos to Mr. Barbash, John Stone, and all the others at ECF who made this happen.

Clear Teaching – The Book
Written by veteran journalist Shepard Barbash over a period of 10 years, Clear Teaching is a well-researched, highly readable introduction to Direct Instruction (DI), a systematic teaching approach which for more than 40 years has dramatically improved learning outcomes for students of all abilities and from all walks of life. The book looks at the development of DI through the early experiences of its creator, Zig Engelmann; explains the principles that underpin this approach; and looks at DI’s reception in the world of teaching, where it has been effectively shunned despite a formidable research base and example after example of transformative success.

The image at the top of the post is hot, but readers can also click here to go to the ECF page where they can download the PDF.

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It’s the teaching that matters

Published on 5 December 2011 in Administration, Musings, News, Policy and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Does all the verbiage about the ills of education make you wonder about the reasoning skills of educational reformers? Well, it does make me have questions. I practice resisting the urge to walk away when people start attributing educational underachievement to problems we educators can’t change (poverty, for example) or to features of schooling that are like nibbling on one’s napkin rather than eating food (e.g., walls height in classrooms).

I also get a bit incensed when folks go after teachers as the bad people in the equation. I find it foolish to suggest that education simply needs to raise pay to attract more qualified people into classrooms; it is an admittedly biased sample, but there are lots of smart people going through U.Va.’s (and similar) teacher education programs. (Sadly, too many teacher education programs fill their students’ thinking with Pop-Ed bologna.) And even though I talk about dysteachia and dyspedagogia, those are references to practices, not to the people—and some of the worst cases of dyspedagogia probably can be observed in the professoriate at schools of education!

Anyway, I am glad to report that a couple of my colleagues argued a coherent case about the importance of curriculum in the effects of teaching in an editorial for the New York Daily News. In “The teacher quality conundrum: If they are the problem, why are kids gaining in math? Curriculum design is key to reform,” Dan Willingham and David Grissmer use evidence and reason to explain that it’s not the teachers per se, but the teaching that matters. I encourage people interested in sensible reform of education to read it.

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FLASH! John Stuart Mill to the rescue!

Published on 18 April 2011 in Administration, Bookshelf, News and The press. 2 Comments

In Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools? Siegfried Engelmann and Douglas Carnine explain what Mill’s logical analysis contributes to understanding how students learn, what educators should do to teach, and the consequences of education’s failure to apply fundamental scientific reasoning. The publisher doesn’t seem to have a link to it yet, but the ISBN is 1-57861-745-6.

If you want to get an idea of what’s in this book, watch this 30-min video in which Mr. Engelmann explains the ideas.

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B. Cook on evidence-based practices

Published on 25 February 2011 in Administration, News, Policy, Teacher education and The press. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

Over on SpedPro I have a post about an up-coming Webinar on evidence-based practices presented by Bryan Cook. A product of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and and CEC’s Division for Research, the session is billed as helping educators answer questions such as these:

  • What exactly does evidence-based practice mean for practitioners?
  • How are evidence-based practices different from “best practices” and “research-based practices”?
  • Where can you find them?
  • How should you select them?
  • How can you use them?
  • How can you evaluate them?

I haven’t seen the syllabus, but I bet this will be a worthwhile session. For one small fee, one can register as many folks as you can gather around a computer and a projector; and then you get a copy of the Webinar to review later, as well. It’s like a ready-made, re-usable staff-development program. To read the SpedPro post, follow this link. Alternatively, simply follow this link to register for the session!

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Teach like a rockstar, legend

Published on 11 February 2011 in Administration, Musings, News, Teacher education and The press. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Mr. Hal Bowman is advertising professional development opportunities for US teachers. They’re promoted with the lead, “Teach Like a Rock Star.” Here’s the main content of two e-mail messages I received:

Principals from coast-to-coast are sending their teachers by the boatload to attend Teach Like A Rock Star.

Is it unconventional? Definitely.

Entertaining? Absolutely.

Effective? Beyond belief.
Continue reading ‘Teach like a rockstar, legend’

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Rigorous Evidence newsletter

Published on 27 January 2011 in Administration, News, Policy, Research and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which covers many different social programs in addition to education, announced the publication of an electronic newsletter that should be of interest to some readers. The current issue of RIGOROUS EVIDENCE Newsletter: Distinguishing Effective Evidence-Based Programs from Everything Else doesn’t have much that is precisely on point for education (though, check the entry about a teen pregnancy program), but one can bookmark the on-line site for the newsletter and check it regularly as a potential source for trustworthy content about effective educational methods.

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