Matthew Lynch is an educational consultant and owner of Lynch Consulting Group, LLC. He is a former K-12 social studies and special education teacher who now researches policy and education reform. He also is the owner and editor of The Edvocate (www.theedadvocate.org) and The Tech Edvocate (www.thetechedvocate.org). This blog is no longer being updated.
Education
Opinion
The Newest Trend in Data-Driven Decisionmaking
In recent years, there has been a shift from a focus on summative assessment data, such as state test scores, to formative assessment data, to help improve student learning outcomes across all subjects and grade levels.
Education
Opinion
How to Teach Digital Citizenship to Your Students: Part II
The more people rely on technology, the more important digital citizenship becomes. In the early days, it was like the Wild West where there were no rules and people fended for themselves as best they could. With the rise of the Internet, a digital society began to form, bringing with it a slew of social norms and etiquettes.
Education
Opinion
How to Teach Digital Citizenship to Your Students: Part I
Digital citizenship is an important responsibility that everyone needs to understand as it encapsulates as many aspects of behavior and actions as physical interaction does. Depending on the age of the student, there are different areas that you can focus on.
Education
Opinion
How the SAT Is Providing a More Equitable Path to College
Earlier this week, Khan Academy, the College Board, and Turnitin released tools to give all students the chance to practice for the SAT without having to drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get the kind of relevant practice required.
Education
Opinion
The Virtual Classroom and Its Metacognitive Benefits
When one examines the triangulated nature of student, teacher, and curriculum, the challenge set forth before them is to achieve a harmonious balance that has an end result of student learning /mastery.
Education
Opinion
Why K-12 Students Have to Be Taught How to Think Critically: Part II
I was a public school teacher for many years in a state that suffers from low test scores year after year. For many teachers, the way that they want to teach and the way that they are forced to teach vary greatly, and much of that is due to unreasonable accountability standards that include student performance on standardized tests.
Education
Opinion
Why K-12 Students Have to Be Taught How to Think Critically: Part I
Everyone can agree that applied knowledge is crucial to the learning process, so standardized tests need to do better when measuring it. Every child needs to be able to articulate what he or she knows, not just repeat it. While it may not be as efficient to grade answers that go beyond filling in a bubble, these are the questions students need to answer to apply their knowledge in real-world applications. Instead of simply finding the answer, students need to explain their answers.
Education
Opinion
Black Boys in Crisis: The Lack of Positive Role Models
There are plenty of black men who positively impact the young men coming up in their communities. Some are high-profile while others are local businessmen or even teachers. As a general statement, however, black boys have fewer people to look up to and hold accountable than their white, and even other minority, peers.
Education
Opinion
Black Boys in Crisis: How to Solve the Black Boy-Special Education Problem
The statistics on high numbers of black and Latino boys in special education programs is more than an interesting tidbit—it's a call to action. What can we do to identify true learning delays and isolated behavior problems and disseminate them from disabilities?
Education
Opinion
The Power of Measuring Social-Emotional Learning
An assistant superintendent shares how his district's quest to gather data on social-emotional learning helped it place relationships at the center of education.
Education
Opinion
Why We Should Integrate Technology Into Assessments
Students who take tests on computers or tablets will be more comfortable with the material at hand, and it will feel like more of an integrated process. To remain a world leader when it comes to the fast-pace of technology, we as educators need to insist that technology is part of not only the teaching process but also of assessment policy too.
Education
Opinion
Students Need to Learn How to Obtain Knowledge: Part II
In Part I of this series, I discuss why students need to be taught how to obtain knowledge. In Part II, I will discuss how we can educate our learners about how to obtain the BEST knowledge from the pool of available options.
Education
Opinion
A Community Unites to Send Low-Income Kids to College
Even in the face of such challenging poverty and language-related barriers, Alder students and staff continue to amaze our community and beat the odds by holding the title of fastest improving school in the Reynolds School District. Test scores over a recent two-year period show that reading proficiency in 3rd grade doubled. Over the same period math proficiency for 4th grade tripled, giving us the number one rate of growth in math among all middle and elementary schools in our district in the last two years.
Education
Opinion
Students Need to Learn How to Obtain Knowledge: Part I
In this vast digital age, there is more information available than can ever possibly be processed, and the way that students vet this data is incredibly important. While the internet has opened up the world in amazing and beautiful ways, it has also skewed the way information is obtained. Instant knowledge, or perceived knowledge, is available as soon as kids are old enough to type in a computer password or swipe the lock screen of a tablet or smartphone.