Kentucky Teacher

C. Ed Massey

Boone County Board of Education member C. Ed Massey was named the 65th president of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) at the association’s Annual Conference in Boston recently.

David A. Pickler of Tennessee’s Shelby County school district was elected president-elect and Anne M. Byrne of New York’s Nanuet Union Free school district was elected secretary-treasurer by NSBA’s 150-member delegate assembly.

Massey has served on the Boone County Board of Education for 16 years and is a former president of the Kentucky School Boards Association. Massey was first elected to NSBA’s Board of Directors in 2008, serving as a Central Region director representing school board members in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin. In 2010, Massey was elected secretary-treasurer and in 2011 was elected president-elect.

In his one-year term as president, Massey plans to focus on NSBA’s service to its state associations. Continue Reading

Students between the ages of 13 and 21 who sing well and are members of 4-H or FFA are invited to submit videos of themselves singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

Videos will be posted online for popular voting to determine four finalists. The four finalists will be interviewed, and their performances will be recorded for airing on national TV. Online voting will determine the grand prize winner.

Videos must be received by June 15. For more details, visit www.fmccrop.com/grower/Anthem-Singing-Contest.aspx.

The Kentucky Behavior Institute is set for June 27-28 in the Lexington Convention Center and Rupp Arena.

The goal is to reduce barriers to learning and provide support for teachers, administrators and others who must respond effectively to challenging student behavior in order to provide high-quality teaching and learning in schools.

The institute includes more than 75 sessions featuring national experts, master teachers and successful administrators in Kentucky schools. National speakers will address a variety of topics.

Sessions are designed to increase knowledge and skills necessary to improve school climate, implement school-wide instructional discipline practices and reduce behavioral barriers to learning. Specific sessions will focus on ways to prevent school violence, teach responsible behavior, motivate troubled youth, increase student attendance, eliminate bullying, reduce dropout rates, implement proactive classroom management strategies, provide effective social competence instruction, redirect students who misbehave into preparation for college and careers, develop school-based programs for youth with emotional-behavioral risks, challenges or disabilities, and enable leadership to develop effective problem-solving processes to help students/teachers in trauma. Continue Reading

The Arts Education Partnership is announcing the release of ArtsEdSearch.org - the nation’s first online research and policy clearinghouse that documents the educational outcomes of arts learning for students and teachers.
ArtsEdSearch grew out of a need for high quality, centrally located and user-friendly information on the essential role the arts play in developing students’ creative thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration skills – attributes many education and business leaders identify as important in preparing young people for college and career success.
ArtsEdSearch’s easy-to-navigate design provides access to research summaries – written in everyday language – that examine the educational outcomes of arts learning and analyze the research for implications for education policy more broadly.
ArtsEdSearch has a unique focus on how education in the arts affects students’ cognitive, academic, personal, social and civic development. ArtsEdSearch also provides valuable information on how teaching strategies based in the arts influence educators’ instructional practice and engagement in the teaching profession.
Parents, school leaders, community members, and champions of arts education can use ArtsEdSearch to customize advocacy materials with the confidence that the information is backed by a significant body of high-quality research.

The National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, announces Mission 3 to the International Space Station. This opportunity gives students across a community the ability to design real experiments to fly in low earth orbit on the Space Station. The program is open to students in grades 5-14.

Each participating community will be provided with a real microgravity research mini-laboratory and all launch services to get it to the International Space Station and safely returned to earth.

An experiment design competition this fall in each community (Sept. 17 – Nov. 9) will allow student teams to design and write proposals for real experiments vying for their community’s reserved experiment slot on the Space Station. Flight experiments will be selected by Dec. 7. Additional programming leverages the experiment design competition to engage the community, embracing a learning community model for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

The flight of the payload to Space Station is expected in early April 2013, and a return to earth in mid-May 2013, so that the entire Mission 3 program is contained in the 2012-13 academic year.

For more information, click here.

NASA’s DIY Podcast offers resources for educators and students to use to create podcasts using free NASA images, video footage and audio clips. Various topic modules are available on the site, including:

• space station
• microgravity (micro-g)
• fitness
• lab safety
• Newton’s laws
• robots
• rocket science
• solar arrays
• spacesuits
• sports demo (science of sports) Continue Reading

Kimberly Shearer

Over the past few months, I’ve grown pretty accustomed to phone interviews. I’ve also discovered an interesting phenomenon that typically occurs during these interviews. While I love discussing my teacher colleagues, our collaboration and the instructional practices we’ve found to be successful, interview dialogue almost always seems to take an individualized slant. “Well, yes, but what do YOU do in the classroom?”

For whatever reason, there seems to be a need to strip education (and teachers) down to individualized efforts. The public likes to turn the long-distance relay into a competitive, Hunger Games fight to the death. Teacher versus teacher — whose test scores will allow her to survive? You know the song and dance: merit pay, accountability, test scores, tenure, Superman. There is a growing movement that makes teachers compete rather than collaborate. No one wants to hear about the ways we work together to ensure our students’ success, or the ways we learn from each other. Instead, they are lacing up our gloves and putting us on opposite sides of the ring. I don’t like it.

That’s why I was so surprised during a KET phone interview this past week. I wasn’t asked about my individual performance in the classroom. Instead, I was asked what a successful school looks like. I had to stop and gather my thoughts. Here was someone acknowledging that education is a system. Here was someone acknowledging that student success relies upon a number of factors, and that cooperation between teachers, administrators, parents and community members must align appropriately in order for true learning to occur. We must view all our efforts as important contributions to student learning, and we must view one another as teammates. Continue Reading

The Buck Institute Project Based Learning 3 Day Teacher Workshop will be July 11-13 in Corbin.

This three-day workshop engages participants in learning the principles for designing, assessing and managing standards-focused projects as well as using performance assessments to judge the relevant work generated by 21st-century learners. Through a combination of direct instruction, video analysis and hands-on group work, participants will have the opportunity to plan, design and receive peer feedback on an engaging and rigorous project using the Buck Institute for Education model and tools.

There will be a grades K-5 workshop and a grades 6-12 workshop.

Participates will select one workshop and attend that workshop for the three-day training.

Click here to register.

The Kentucky Literacy Leaders Academy for History and Social Studies, provided in partnership by the Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky Historical Society, will be June 19-21 in Frankfort.

This event will kick off a year-long project designed to train history/social studies literacy leaders who will focus on the integration of Common Core literacy standards/skills into history and social studies.

The academy will consist of the three-day session; two virtual academy sessions in the fall; and one virtual academy session and one face-to-face academy meeting in the spring of 2013.

Only 24 teachers will be selected statewide (preferably an elementary, middle and high school teacher from each of the eight educational cooperative regions in Kentucky) to participate.

Teachers will be required to train other teachers within their districts and education cooperative regions. Travel expenses, hotel accommodations, meals, stipend and books/resources will be provided to all participants selected. Continue Reading

Teachers and administrators can join international experts and practitioners as they showcase successful practices for implementing standards and effective assessment practices at the Meeting the Challenge: Implementing Standards and Assessment Practices conference.

This event will be July 16-18 in Lexington, and early-bird registration has been extended to May 25.

Pre-conference sessions provide an in-depth focus on implementing Highly Effective Teaching and Learning (HETL), focusing on the standards, assessment, literacy and leadership for effective change. Conference sessions provide a variety of curricular, instructional and leadership strategies for educators at all levels to assist in providing high-quality instruction to students, improving their learning and ensuring they are college- and career-ready.

A maximum of 450 participants can participate.

Go to http://www.uky.edu/p12mathscience for more information.