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MIRAMAR, Fla. – A South Florida music instructor is a finalist for the national teacher of the year award. 

Alvin Davis, Florida’s 2012 teacher of the year, was named a finalist in the national contest by the Council of Chief State School Officers Thursday. Finalists from three other states are also vying for the prize.

Davis is a music teacher at Miramar High School in Broward County.

As part of duties as the Florida Department of Education/Macy’s Teacher of the Year, he has been traveling throughout the state visiting schools and sharing information.

A panel of educators selected the finalists from all 50 states. The winner will be honored by the president in April.

Teaching ideas whose time has come…and gone? Courtesy of yours truly and Alice Wiggins, who oversees the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Schools Department, here are common classroom practices that need to go away, be rethought, or curtailed:

1.      Data Driven…What?

An increasingly common feature in classrooms are data walls—bright, cheerful displays that show if students are advanced, proficient, basic or below basic in ELA and math.  As Rick Hess has written, schools have gone from not using data to inform decision making, to using data in half-baked or simplistic ways. Displaying decontextualized data is a prime example.  What exactly do we expect a third-grader to do with the knowledge that he or she is “approaching proficiency” in reading?  If data isn’t being used to drive instruction thoughtfully, what’s the point?

2.      Fiction Only Read-alouds

Fortunately, very few elementary school teachers need to be sold on the .  They’re great for language development and exposing kids to rich vocabulary, since a child’s ability to read with comprehension doesn’t catch up with listening comprehension until about 8th grade. But if teachers aren’t devoting significant class time to nonfiction readalouds, they’re missing out on a golden opportunity to build background knowledge, which is essential for reading comprehension.

3.      Dumb Test Prep

Decrying test prep as a misuse of class time is a little like complaining that your kids are watching Fear Factor when they could be reading Chaucer. It’s true, but it’s not likely to change anytime soon.  But if we have to waste devote precious class time to test prep, let’s stop trying to teach and reinforce like making inferences and finding the main idea that are content-specific, and cannot be mastered in the abstract.  More effective might be what Dan Willingham calls practice that reinforces the basic skills required for the learning of more advanced skills, protects against forgetting, and improves transfer.

4.      Reciting Lesson Aim and Standard

There’s nothing wrong with standards for planning and focusing lessons.  However, the idea of standards-based instruction is often misinterpreted.  Sure, students should be introduced to what they are about to learn, but having kindergarteners recite, “Through this lesson I will develop phonemic awareness and understanding of alphabetic principles” does nothing to support attainment of this standard or develop these students reading achievement.  In other cases, rather than using the standards to guide instruction on meaningful content, the standards become the instruction. Neither practice is an effective use of limited instructional time.

5.      Overusing Teaching Strategies

Too many classrooms seem to function on the principal that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.  Group work and differentiated instruction are two prime examples.  In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov writes that group work is “as likely to yield discussions of last night’s episode of American Idol as it is higher-order discussions of content.”  Asking frequent, targeted, rigorous questions of students, Lemov believes, “is a powerful and much simpler tool for differentiating.”  Too many classroom practices are used based on a compliance mentality—students are in groups because “that’s what administration wants to see”—rather that because it makes sense for a particular unit, lesson or activity.  Like using data to drive instruction rather than as bulletin board fodder (see above) there needs to be a sound instructional strategy underlying pedagogical choices.  And let’s not even talk about learning styles.

6.      The “Theme of the Month”

It’s standard practice to organize instruction by “themes,” such as holidays, seasons, my neighborhood or foods of the world, for example.  Organize units around knowledge “domains” instead.  A teacher might use the theme “Our Great Big World” in kindergarten to invite children to explore the setting of a story.  But since every story has a setting, that “theme” is arbitrary and doesn’t coherently build background knowledge.  A domain-based approach to “Our Great Big World” might include teaching children about continents, countries, climates and land forms in a coherent fashion.

7.      Reading Comprehension Skills

We can’t say it enough and Dan Willingham said it best:  .  The most overused tool in the box in elementary school is reading strategies.  Yes, there are benefits to reading strategies, but there’s no evidence that repeated practice yields additional benefits.  Comprehension typically breaks down and test scores plummet because of a lack of background knowledge, not because kids have failed to master reading strategies.

The Application Form for the 2012 Miller Thomson Foundation National Scholarship Programme is now available for online submission. The Miller Thomson Foundation annually awards one-year scholarships of approximately $3000 to 100 recipients from across Canada. The purpose of the Foundation is to encourage and promote the attainment of higher education goals for individuals who have demonstrated a high level of academic achievement, have made a positive contribution to their school through extracurricular activities and have made significant contributions of time and energy to community service programs.

Students who are currently in their final year of high school and planning to attend a post-secondary institutions in the Fall of 2012 to pursue a course of studies within Canada leading to a degree or diploma from an accredited community college or university are eligible to apply. Students must have an overall grade average minimum of 87% and be citizens of Canada or permanent residents of Canada. The deadline for receipt of applications is March 1, 2012 and scholarship recipients are notified in writing towards the end of June.

The on-line application form can be found at and link to the Miller Thomson Foundation.

For more information contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  

Have you ever considered your children going to girls military schools? Such option may not be the primary choice especially when your child is a girl. But if you look beyond the feminine side of your daughter, things are really going to be different when she, from a dependent, immature, and irresponsible girl, grows up to be a matured and independent woman.

Your daughter must have been used to doing things yours or her way. She must have been growing up to be given with what she wanted, probably became spoiled. When she get to a military school, surely, she will have a different life.

If your daughter is used to become lazy and happy-go-lucky, in a military school, such attitude is not tolerable. She will have no room for idleness. The school will really push her to her limitations and release the kind of accountable and academically inclined attitude. Besides, with the kind of training and teaching she will encounter inside the school, she will be free from any drug or gang temptations, promiscuous behaviors, and extreme peer pressures. In fact, with the kind of life she will live as she stays inside the campus, she will become academically excellent.

Your daughter must have had a potential of an excellent leader and become a successful person in the future. With the proper training and development she will encounter in our military school, such potential will surely get untapped. Each lesson and activity she will live out from day to day is a stepping stone towards her personal success; thus become a better person. Many people have posted their testimonials and praise reports as to how they used to become too passive, dependent, and mischievous. But when they decided to go to military schools, especially those who had gone to military schools for boys in Texas, their old and rotten attitude melted and they developed a kind of attitude they and their parents will certainly be proud of.

So don’t hesitate to let your daughter—or even your son if you have one—to enrol to a military school. Look for options and various selections in our site if you are interested.

Para Jones will tread on very familiar ground come Feb. 6. She will return to an employer for whom she has worked for 22 years – but this time as president.

Jones said she is delighted to become the fourth president of the tax-supported Stark State College.

“To say that I have goals would be presumptuous,” said Jones, 56. “I do know what’s most important to us – access, affordability and, increasingly, accountability.”

Stark State hired Jones away from Spartanburg Community College, near Greenville, S.C., where she has been president for two years. But Ohio apparently was never far from her mind.

She was a finalist in 2010 for the presidency at Owens Community College near Toledo. That didn’t happen, so she applied to Stark State when John O’Donnell quit to accept a similar post at MassBay Community College in Wellesley Hills, Mass.

Stark State trustee chairman Dr. Michael L. Thomas said the search committee whittled the applicants from 35 to four and then to Jones, Stark State provost Dorey Diab and Quintin Bullock, president of Schenectady County Community College in Schenectady, N.Y.

Thomas won’t confirm written reports that trustees were divided over the selection of the president. “All three had avid supporters,” is all Thomas would say.

Jones emerged the victor because she had “the necessary charisma,” he said. “Her intellect and philosophy are aligned with the community and the school.”

Outside experience

Jones also comes to Stark State’s top job with more outside experience than many in higher education.

After graduating from the University of Mount Union, she edited books and manuals for flight simulators at Goodyear Aerospace, then went on to public relations and marketing posts at the city of Canton and Roadway. She spent a semester in journalism school before deciding that wasn’t for her.

Her interest in higher education administration was piqued when she joined Stark State in 1987 as head of public relations.

She earned an M.B.A. from Ashland University in 1994 and a doctorate from the University of Nebraska in 2008, the latter while vice president for advancement, planning, college and community relations at Stark State.

Along the way, she raised twin sons who are now 26, wedging study into the early morning hours before she went to work.

Expanding institution

She will rejoin an institution that’s been successful in many ways.

A surge of students propelled college enrollment to more than 15,500 last fall — an 82 percent increase since 2007 and the fastest rate of growth among Ohio’s two-year colleges.

As enrollment has grown, so has the number of students graduating with certificates and associate degrees – from 582 in 2001 to 1,084 in 2010, an 86 percent increase, according to the Ohio Board of Regents.

Stark State has kept a lid on tuition, which at $4,215 a year is less than half that of the University of Akron ($9,500) or Kent State’s main campus ($9,300).

Jones will oversee the largest college in Stark County — 73 acres in Jackson Township plus seven satellite locations. The college employs 428 full-time faculty and staff and hundreds of part-timers on a $70 million operating budget.

Fair offer

At the same time, though, Jones will not make as much as her predecessor or colleagues at other two-year institutions.

Her three-year contract calls for a salary of $225,000 a year plus standard Stark State benefits, while O’Donnell, her predecessor, made $284,000 plus fringes such as allowances for housing and personal travel and a $50,000 performance bonus in 2010.

In contrast, Cuyahoga Community College’s Jerry Sue Thornton makes $259,000 plus $44,000 for housing and $25,000 each for longevity and performance. And Roy Church, president of Lorain County Community College, made $256,500 plus a $76,000 longevity supplement in 2010, six weeks of vacation and up to four weeks of sabbatical leave yearly.

Thomas, the Stark State trustee chairman, said Jones is being paid “appropriately to her level of experience. We’re trying to be cost conscious with the taxpayers’ money.”

Jones implied that money is not her goal.

“The trustees made me an offer and I thought it was fair,” she said.

Now, she’ll return to the Tudor home in Jackson Township that she shares with her husband, Greg, who is the general manager of an industrial and commercial roofing company.

He stayed in Ohio to try to sell their home when she moved to Spartanburg.

Jones may be able to pursue her hobbies — reading and gardening — after she settles in. But she said she will spend the first three months conducting listening sessions with students, community leaders, employees and others.

Then she said she will come up with a plan.

The ultimate goal will be to help students to find employment and “earn a good, solid living. That’s what we’re about,” she said.