Year after year, NAEP science scores demonstrate that the way the U.S. tinkers with “business as usual” in schools isn’t improving education far enough or fast enough to meet the needs of students.  Today’s students must know more, do more, and create more to thrive in a global community. It is time to remake American education. The NAEP study revealed that students have higher NAEP science scores if they engaged in “hands-on science...

Teacher Appreciation Week has once again resulted in the extension of good will to teachers in the form of tweets, articles, and various other virtual shout-outs. Although it is nice to see this outpouring of appreciation for teachers (who are the lifeblood of the much-maligned public education system), it is essential that we take a stand to support teachers not only this week, but next week and every week hereafter by putting systems in place...

In a recent video, Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, offers a thoughtful, concise list of do’s and don’ts for policymakers who seek to make large-scale changes in education in the United States. Fullan first describes commonly employed strategies that do not lead to better teaching and learning: Using heavy-handed external accountability as an incentive for improvement, Focusing on individual teacher...

  As a partner in the 100kin10 movement, NCTAF has committed to hiring, developing, and retaining teachers in the STEM disciplines. 100kin10 has a goal of providing America’s classrooms with 100,000 excellent science, technology, engineering and math teachers over the next ten years. In February, the partners in 100kin10 convened for a summit in Washington D.C. to discuss the urgency of STEM teaching in the U.S. and to highlight work...

Pam Grossman, Professor of Education at Stanford University, makes the case for investing in quality teachers in a recent blog for Huffington Post. In “We Need Experienced Teachers,” Grossman describes debates in the education arena, such as those on eliminating tenure, as distracting from what’s needed most:  preparing and supporting excellent teaching.  The author concludes that as a nation, we are at a fork in the road with two...

In a recent article in THE Journal, Kathleen Fulton, the former Director of Reinventing Schools for the 21st Century at NCTAF, reports on a group of innovative teachers who are embracing technology in their classrooms with outstanding results. Ms. Fulton illustrates the power of teachers coming together to solve a common problem: how could they increase their students’ achievement levels with fewer resources? The district profiled in the...

What does it take to integrate technology into teacher education? And how can technology help universities and districts work together? Seven years ago the faculty members and site professors from the University of Colorado Denver and Denver Public Schools (DPS) established a need for greater communication among all the stakeholders involved in teacher education. Though there has been a long-standing Professional Development School Model in the...

Since 2009, the University of New Mexico’s College of Education (UNM) has been a partner in NCTAF’s Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC®) project. Through TLINC, our college has been working to support our teacher education programs with increased collaboration, both online and face-to-face, and with added technology resources. Early efforts to integrate technology had been challenging because some faculty members and even...

How might global warming alter coastlines and coastal regions? Last summer during a NCTAF planning session, a team of five teachers selected this question to be the center of their work with their students for the academic year. The teachers, representing science, technology, engineering, and math classes, make up the Learning Studio at Wilde Lake High School in Howard County, Maryland. The teachers work together to create student-driven...

What if every student had the opportunity to defend their work to a real NASA scientist? DuVal High School students had that exact opportunity this Thursday during a day-long STEM event organized by a team of teachers as part of NCTAF’s Learning Studios program. DuVal’s Learning Studio consists of five teachers who teach grades 9-12  and across multiple STEM disciplines. The teachers in Prince George’s County, Maryland have...

NCTAF is pleased to announce that our longstanding partner, Project Tomorrow, has just launched a new component to its annual Speak Up research project:  “Speak Up 2012 Survey for America’s Future Teachers.”  The aggregated national data findings will be used to inform national policies on technology use in education, and to inform K-12 school and district leaders on the aspirations of tomorrow’s teachers. This is a unique opportunity...

The March 2nd  issue of Science includes the report “The Effects of Experience and Attrition for Novice High-School Science and Mathematics Teachers.”  Gary Henry and Kevin Bastian from the University of North Carolina and Kevin Fortner from the University of Georgia examined over one million test scores taken by students of almost 8,000 teachers in North Carolina.  Using a value-added methodology, the authors were able to analyze the...

Last week, Cindy Gutierrez of the University of Colorado Denver, Carolyn Awalt of the University of Texas El Paso, Jody Britten of the Metiri Group, and Tom Carroll, and I presented at the SITE conference in Austin. Our panel focused on NCTAF’s vision for 21st century teacher preparation in which student teachers are members of dynamic professional communities of their peers, cooperating teachers and university faculty. Teachers Learning...

During Howard County Public Schools February 2nd Design Session, DaNel Hogan, an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy, was introduced to the Learning Studio team at Centennial High School. This team, currently in their third year of the Learning Studios program, is examining the question “How does climate affect us?” across their science, math, technology, and engineering classrooms. At the...

Enough is enough! As a nation we say that we value teachers, but the way that we treat them says otherwise. The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher released today found that teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent since 2009, the lowest level in 20 years. Teachers are more than four times as likely to say they do not feel their jobs are as secure as they were five years ago, and not unsurprisingly, there has also...