Dena Budrecki's List: Teacher Quality

• If school isn't for collaborating, why does anyone come?
• The world of work has moved on, but the educational structure, despite the efforts of many individual teachers and administrators, crawls along
• Somehow though, a vast assortment of educators, from that crusty old mathematics teacher proud that she has been "teaching the same way for thirty years," to Bill Gates favorite boy Salman Khan, believe that kids sitting alone, working by themselves, with canned, inflexible data in front of them, is the best preparation for life in the present and future.
• No wonder nobody wants to come.
• A learning environment in which students make most decisions.
• time environment in which students learn and work along a schedule which makes sense to them
• A technological environment which supports collaboration across every barrier.
• A social environment where adults do not rank students according to their oppressive standards.

6 more annotations...

• Let’s start with the researcher’s point of view. With a normal distribution of performance (the classic bell curve), a standard deviation is simply a more precise measure of how spread out the distribution is. Somebody who is one standard deviation above average would be at the 84th percentile of the distribution. If we then turn to the labor market, a student with achievement (as measured by test performance in high school) that is one standard deviation above average can later in life expect to take in 10 to 15 percent higher earnings per year.