Here's to the Parents!

NBCT: Teachers' work goes beyond the school day

In this column, National Board Certified Teacher Jane Ching Fung responds to critics who label teaching as a part-time job, saying it actually is a full-time commitment that goes beyond the end of the school day. Fung writes that teachers work with students, parents and administrators after school, often open their classrooms to students before and after the school day, and provide extra help on weekends. Even summer breaks are spent in workshops and engaging in professional development, she writes. Education Week Teacher (premium article access compliments of EdWeek.org) (via Accomplished Teacher)

Reminder: Save Our Schools National Rally July 30

Watched Nationals beat Marlins with my former students and family...

D.C. special ed chief leaving

By Bill Turque

Deputy Chancellor Richard Nyankori is leaving after four bruising years as head of special education at DC Public Schools. He'll be replaced by Nathaniel Beers, director of the District's Early Stages diagnostic center for learning (read DC School's Insider)

Victory for National Board Certification in Mississippi

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour recently signed legislation paving the way for his state's National Board Certified Teachers to continue to receive state-awarded stipends for achieving National Board Certification, the gold standard for effective teaching. Read more (via Accomplished Teacher)

Teachers nationwide protest education budget cuts

Teachers throughout the country are protesting cuts to education funding by holding rallies and going on strike. Teachers in New York City are expected to protest today over cuts that threaten 4,100 jobs, and California teachers have been engaged in a week of protests leading up to five regional rallies scheduled for Friday. In Detroit, education advocates have held sit-ins since April. Experts attribute the increase in teacher activism to the severity of the cuts and teachers' desire to have more say in education. The Huffington Post (via Accomplished Teacher)

Here's to our students...

Here's to the Teachers!

We celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week with the release of a video we created to honor teachers. via Living in Dialogue blog





Here's to the teachers.
The ones who taught us to draw outside the lines.
The ones who opened wonderlands
of books and of numbers,
of questions and of curiosity.
The ones who went beyond just filling out bubbles
to get us to actually think for ourselves.
The best teachers do not give us all the answers.
The best teachers get us to question the answers we have been given.
We are standing with our teachers
at the Save Our Schools March on July 30 in Washington, DC.
Join us!

Teacher of the Year 2011

Teacher of the Year is from Maryland

By Valerie Strauss

Michelle Shearer was a pre-med student at Princeton University when, on the verge of burnout, she began volunteering in a class for deaf students. She loved it. That’s when she decided to go into teaching, starting on a path that led her to Frederick County schools and, now, to being named the 2011 National Teacher of the Year.

Shearer grew up with a love of numbers and earned dual certification in chemistry and special education. She has taught all levels of chemistry for 14 years at Urbana and at the Maryland School for the Deaf, where she also taught math.

There Shearer offered, in American Sign Language, a course in advanced placement chemistry for the first time in the institution’s 135-year history. She wrote on her contest application that when she suggested to her students that they also take AP calculus, they asked, “Why?” She signed back, “Because you can.”

Shearer said she is committed to helping children who have traditionally been underrepresented in science, including those with special needs and minorities. She has worked with students with poor vision, dyslexia, dysgraphia, attention deficit disorder and Asperger’s syndrome in her AP chemistry classes.

Shearer plans to spend next year traveling across the country and around the world to promote public education. With the steady drumbeat of negative news about it, she said she will try to make people aware of the many successes in public schools. The Washington Post blog