Thursday, August 19, 2010

Finding the Light in their Eyes: Ideas

PBS shares its Innovation Awards winners. One teacher's ELL kindergarteners publish digital stories that can be shared with relatives abroad and the wider world. Another connects the arts and poetry with her upper elementary students. In the midwest, elementary art students created the Young Sloppy Brush. There are many stories worth checking out. It's so much more fun and enriching to read these stories as opposed to those that feature which teachers raise test scores and which don't. While test scores can offer one window into teacher and student learning, it's certainly a small picture. Rather than forcing teacher test score data to be made public, what about encouraging teachers to publicly share what's happening in their classroom - what projects their students are doing and how they find the light in their students' eyes?