Education Guide

Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete my recent survey about Teaching News. The responses were extremely interesting and they will certainly inform my planning and writing of posts on the site in the future.. I receive a considerable number of emails and press releases each week asking me to promote certain sites, resources, competitions, special offers and other things for teachers, so it is sometimes difficult to choose which ones to mention here. Your feedback will definitely help me with these choices in the future.

76% of those who completed the survey work in primary education and 24% in secondary this is probably due to the types of posts that I feature here, as well as my own area of interest as I am a primary teacher myself. If you would like to see a greater emphasis on secondary education, please .

The most popular types of posts were those which shared links to resources (e.g.

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Tags: Survey, Teaching News

I am at the first all-day meeting of the states new education finance review committee created by Gov. Nathan Deal and the Legislature it is the sixth such blue ribbon committee since the state adopted the Quality Basic Education Funding Act in 1985.

The most recent committee labored four years and came up with district contracts for flexibility rather than a revised funding formula.

None of the other committees yielded any results, either. Speaking now is state House budget staff director John Brown, who leaves the Legislature after 25 years to join the Regents tomorrow. So, Brown is speaking with a remarkable degree of candor to the 20-member committee about the earlier failed efforts and the state of education in Georgia.

Brown blamed the failures of the other funding review committees on two factors: Governors who wanted  only recommendations that were revenue neutral, and overly ambitious committee recommendations that were more wish lists.

And this may be the most candid comment of all that Brown made on the committees purpose:

We are not going to come up with a formula that reaches  for excellence. W

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Tags: New, New School

Roswells Saint Andrew Rowing Club (SARC) had an impressive showing at the 2011 US Rowing Youth National Championships last week at Oakridge, Tenn.  Out of a field of more than 1,500 elite rowers representing 148 teams and 23 states, SARC took two silver medals, advanced 4 boats to Grand Finals and one to Petit Finals.

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Tags: Andrew Rowing, Andrew Rowing Club, Club, Rowing Club

GRAND RAPIDS Former Grandville Board of Education member Steve Zinger has been chosen to replace The Rev. Ralph Carey on the Kent Intermediate School District board.

Carey, 78, resigned this month after serving 24 years on the KISD board. Zinger, a nine-year veteran who was defeated in a re-election bid in May, was tapped to replace him at a Tuesday special meeting.

Zinger will serve the two years remaining Carey’s six-year term. Carey also was from Grandville, and had served 17 years on that district’s board before joining the KISD board in 1987.

We will miss Ralph Carey and his insightful questions on issues facing the board, KISD board President Andrea Haidle said in a statement released by the district, which provides services to county districts, charter schools and private schools.

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Tags: Board, Member Steve, Member Steve Zinger, Steve Zinger

I am fond of the old-fashioned lecture. It gives me something to sink into, something to think about. It’s often supplemented with discussions and labs, so students don’t just sit and listen. If it is taught well, it can be intriguing, even rousing, even lingering. I remember those packed lecture halls in college, and other superb lecture courses as well.

But I must defer to research-based research. Research has just shown that certain research-based methods bring greater learning gains in physics than the lecture approach. Sarah D. Sparks describes the study in an Education Week blog, but I got curious and decided to for myself (Science, May 13, 2011, available by subscription or purchase only).

Yes, indeed. Researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver conducted a week-long experiment near the end of a year-long physics course. The

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