EDLD 5364 Week 4 Knowledge

Linda Darling-Hammond (2007) expressed in a video this week that school teachers and leaders need training to be emotionally and socially intelligent in order to educate the whole child. I believe this would allow children to handle the stress in their lives and to relate well to a variety of peers. I have students in my district from under-privileged homes and strong, positive and continued relationships at school could be a source of confidence and strength for these students. Many students have no stable authority figures and staying with a teacher longer than one school year could make their educational experiences better. Teachers and leaders must be prepared for social and emotional learning to help kids from these challenged homes.
Schools that have fewer blocks that integrate subjects such as art and science by having them produce books or videos about their science projects instead of every 45 minutes having them go to another class. Have teams of teachers of different disciplines teach 50 or so kids a day instead of 1 teacher seeing over 100 kids par day.
She also speaks of less than optimal schools with large numbers of people and students who are grouped by age and move to a new teacher every year and with older kids, every 45 minutes. She said that we need to have smaller numbers of people where teachers and kids stay together and teams of teachers work together with groups of kids for longer periods of time.

Darling-Hammond also mentions that teachers need to work together well to solve hard problems. Project-based learning, performance and exhibition learning take time to plan, but are the most effective learning activities. Collaboration among students requires a lot of socially intelligent work, such as relating to one another, dividing work assignments, and redirecting plans when dead ends occur. These skills assist students in being intellectually capable to work on student-centered projects.

New school designs have teachers staying with kids for about 2 years and each student having an advisor and each teacher having about 15 kids to advise.

I have heard for years, after joining the teaching community, that we should steer non-college bound students toward vocational programs similar to some other countries, but Rosenstock (n.d.) conveys in his video interview, that we shouldn’t have programs for non-college bound students because at a certain point, they’ll be segregated from other students based on their parents education and their socio-economic station thereby excluding them from programs that could help them be the first generation college graduates in their families. These strong, academically integrated schools that have multiple teachers with smaller groups of students for a longer period of time could indentify students who could be first generation college graduates. All teachers had a planning period that was deemed indispensible at the beginning of the day and meeting was crucial to planning for the students’ learning.
The most memorable HS learning experiences most people recall are projects involving community, it had fear of failure and recognition of success, it had a mentor and a public display of work.

I worry just as much about professional development that takes place during the workdays before school starts as I do about “just in case” training. We always provide band-aid training for special education modifications, gradebook use, CSCOPE, Eduphoria and a few more. There is no way that teachers will remember all of that information in a meaningless setting. On the occasions that the ESC provides training, everyone receives learning that occurs naturally through activities, context and cultures (Solomon and Schrum, 2007), but lacks the practice to make it meaningful at the time that it’s needed. It is frustrating for me, as the district technology coordinator, to retrain everyone individually when the time comes actually use the applications.

As an educator, I am excited by Darling-Hammond’s and Rosenstock’s visions of collaborative classrooms. The examples they give in their respective videos are also bittersweet in that teachers have very little or no control over how they’re assigned. Public schools are bound by prohibitive regulations that make these utopic schools impossible. Funding excludes multiple teachers of differing specialties from leading smaller “pods” of students for more than one school year. We have so many mandates that must be met and with the looming budget cuts, we’re just struggling to have things remain status quo. I understand that these changes must be made from the top down and our current training is an attempt to cultivate a legion of “new age” administrators who can make this vision reality.


Solomon, G., & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0: new tools, new schools. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

Edutopia.org (December 10, 2007). The collaborative classroom: an interview with linda darling-hammond. Filmed at the CASEL forum in New York City. Retrieved on Oct. 5, 2009 from http://www.edutopia.org/linda -darling-hammond-sel-video

Edutopia.org (nd). High tech high taking the lead: an interview with larry rosenstock. Retrieved on Oct. 5, 2009 from http://www.edutopia.org/collaboration-age-technology-larry-rosenstock-video