Want a Teaching License? Just Pay Pearson!

A generous and forward-thinking company has finally stepped forward to help colleges and universities weed out those prospective teachers who just shouldn't make the cut... and it's Pearson, the company known for every textbook and basal reader not published by Scholastic, McGraw-Hill, or Cengage! They've offered to take on one of the most important roles that university faculty play in preparing students to become education professionals, the process of approving graduates for licensure.

Colleges (including Ohio University, which I'll get to in a moment) have already begun field-testing this system in the last year or two, but it's in the news now because instructors and student teachers at the University of Massachusetts are choosing to opt-out of sending their portfolios and final reports to a company best known in 2012 for introducing children across America to the story of a talking pineapple and other ridiculously unfair and biased test questions. (Pearson has since stated that its tests are valid and reliable. As always, it's the student's fault for not recognizing the moral of a story in which a group of animals inexplicably eat a pineapple because it doesn't have sleeves or something. I'm just as lost as everyone else.) I sure hope the 15-billion dollar company can maintain a profit in 2012.

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Valve's Corporate Culture Could Teach Us a Few Things About Education

Educators can learn a lot from video games without ever delving into the controversial subject of gamification. Instead, we can look at the hiring practices and corporate culture of the companies that create these games to realize that we are preparing students to work for companies that don't want anything to do with them.

Valve is a video game development company based out of Washington, and they are the geniuses behind some of the most critically-acclaimed games in the last decade, including the Half-Life series and the mind-bending puzzle/platformer Portal. They are also responsible for up to 70% of the digital market for games with their Steam service, packed with more than 1500 games.

Needless to say, they're a successful company. And if they continue to make money and grow, they're going to need employees... but not just any employees, according to a handbook written for new hires that leaked onto the Internet this weekend.

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Get the Fear Out of Your Classroom!

Given the assignment of indoctrinating a thousand kids at a time, the embattled school administrator reaches for the most effective tool available. Given that the assigned output of school is compliant citizens, the shortcut for achieving this output was fear.

Love him or hate him for his no-holds-barred approach to delivering the truth about the public education system (and I've been reminded several times that he is not an educator but a businessman), Seth Godin does have the masterful ability to make you think long and hard about your attitudes towards life's most important institutions. His most hated adversary is the lizard brain, his catch-all explanation for why humans are fearful of anything that could result in discomfort.

His latest book, a short but powerful read titled Stop Stealing Dreams focuses entirely on education, undoubtedly a result of legions of educators begging him to elaborate on the points he made previously in books like Linchpin relating to school.

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Promoting a Growth Mindset Should Be Priority One

I've written about my own personal growth mindset before, the belief that most human qualities - intelligence, some elements of personality, work ethic, self-concept, etc. - can be improved (or, on a less positive note, degrade). It's my opinion that this is the only way that one can hope to live a happy, productive life.

An article in Wired magazine backs me up on this and then takes the idea one step further, to a point where it becomes apparent that the growth mindset is essential for teachers to nurture in their students.

Jonah Lehrer explains:

The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?

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Piling On: Teachers Hate Creativity, Supposedly

A study published in 1995 is being dragged out of storage to create all new incendiary headlines for the upcoming weeks, which will undoubtedly prove once again that teachers are awful. Right?

The study itself is not at fault, of course (and rarely is). I did take issue with the researchers putting teachers in the uncomfortable position of actually choosing their favorite and least favorite students and describing them. Sure, we all play favorites, but I'm already wary of these teachers' disposition toward education if they can readily name their least favorite student in the classroom. I'm willing to bet that you'll find little Johnny in the back of the classroom, possibly facing the opposite direction of his classmates and working on uncompleted homework from the day before. But I'll get back to the point.

The results of the first part of the study showed that these teachers described their least favorite students as more creative (as defined by a list of characteristics deemed creative). Their most favorite students, on the other hand, were described as less creative.

At this point, the study could go in a few different ways, analyzing the elements of the classroom and our nation's schools that might lead to such results.

But that's not what the headlines are going to say.

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