See Me After Class by Roxanna Elden

My catchiest title yet!

Check out the article at Education Next or the Flypaper.

Frustrated rookie teachers: check out my newest Class Dismissed! column for Educational Horizons magazine. If you don’t need it, you probably know someone who does.

While you’re there, you can also order a free issue of the magazine.

NewSchools is a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm working to transform public education for low-income children through funding and guidance of entrepreneurial organizations. I was excited to be an invited speaker at their 2011 summit. My session was called LeNOIWTA: “Let’s Not Overdo It With The Acronyms” and Other Secrets to Buy-In and Retention.

Click here to read NewSchools’ writeup of the session.

Sara Mead is a senior associate with Bellwether Education Partners who writes about education policy, with particular attention to early childhood education, school reform, and improving educational outcomes for low-income students. She recently profiled 16 people in their twenties and early thirties who are likely to transform education in the coming years. Click here to check out my profile and those of the other 15 nerds, and to get a sample of Sara Mead’s clear, insightful writing on education.

Ben Riley: “Roxanna, thank you so much for agreeing to speak at our Summit this year, and to lead the session with the shortest title: “LeNOIWTA: ‘Let’s Not Overdo it With the Acronyms,’ and Other Secrets to Teacher Buy-in and Retention.” Let me dive right in and ask about a particularly controversial acronym, NCLB (short for No Child Left Behind), that’s been much in the news lately. Do you think teachers would have been more supportive of NCLB if it had just been called something else? I think of the Clean Air Act, which describes in three words its entire purpose. What if NCLB had been named the Educate Every Kid Act – EEK for short?”

Read my answer and the rest of the interview, and find out more about the exciting work that the NewSchools Venture Fund is involved in on the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit Blog. (NSVFSB for short.)

When I started teaching freshman English, one of my favorite lessons covered errors in logic, including these three terms:

·Oversimplification: The argument presents one cause or solution without considering other factors.
·Circular reasoning: The argument treats the point to be proven as if it is already a proven fact.
·Either/or reasoning: The argument reduces multiple possibilities to two options.

Want to find out how these terms apply to what we hear in the news about school reform? Click here to read the rest of this guest post at The Answer Sheet.

Educational Horizons Magazine is Pi Lambda Theta’s new quarterly advice magazine for new and incoming teachers. It’s got great features, legal advice, and teaching tips… plus my advice column, Class Dismissed, about balancing work and personal life. (It’s true. Some teachers have personal lives.) This season, the magazine’s theme is “Assess Yourself,” and my column topic focuses on building a teaching personality around your natural strengths so there’s less “faking it” and more “making it.” Click here to sign up for a free issue.