Teacher Survey – Gates Foundation

Teacher Survey – “Teachers Know Best”: What Educators Want From Digital Instructional Tools 2.0

Teacher Survey – Tom McDonald’s Comments:

(1) The only reason education exists is to empower ALL students with successful outcomes (engage, retain, relevant adaptive skills, graduate, relevant job placement, sustained relevant contributions to society)

Where students = revenue; take away all students and imagine what’s left for those in education…not much left to do

(2) The next premise is that educators are professionals and their task as paid professionals is to empower students with successful outcomes (using proven advances in their field…Imagine what medicine would be like for all of us if medical professionals kept early 20th century methodologies to the disadvantage of their patients)

(3) Surveys are never perfect. Surveys with large sample populations are more reliable than surveys with smaller sample populations. BUT, surveys are better than no surveys, IF we desire to validate our assumptions of what may be occurring, with the goal of improving individual, lomg term,  student success outcomes.

(4) You can’t manage what you don’t measure. I sincerely hope we all agree that current student success outcomes are in need of improvement (I can provide validation for those of you that need it).

(5) To improve student success outcomes, you must understand, change management methodology,  what the problem is, why it needs fixing,  who is empowered to fix it, what the proven fixes are, what the obstacles are to the fix and what the challenges are with the best practices implementation.

(6) The research is clear that individualized, ongoing, reinforced, professionally facilitated, student, adaptive learning, is the key to 21st century deep adaptive learning outcomes, that advance individual, long term, student performance improvement outcomes.

(7) The research is clear that incumbent one size fits all teaching methodology does not empower students with long term, deep, adaptive learning.

(8) Individualized, ongoing, reinforced, facilitated, instruction cannot occur without technology (one teacher for each student is not economically viable)

(9) We are seeing little if any advances in student success outcomes under the one size fits all teaching paradigm.

(10) Traditional educators (65% from the survey), who are tasked with advancing student success outcomes, are embracing a 20th century, flawed, methodology, that is proven NOT to advance adaptive learning outcomes of their students. By embracing this old paradigm they are NOT embracing proven professional advances in their field, to the direct disadvantage of their students and contrary to their employment mission/vision.

Go figure…and we blame Gates and others who want to advance student success outcomes?

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Teacher Survey – ABOUT THIS STUDY

As part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to improve educational outcomes for all students, and particularly low-income students and students of color, we seek to encourage innovation in K–12 education by supporting educators to personalize learning for students. Personalized learning ensures that students’ learning experiences—what they learn, and how, when, and where they learn it—are tailored to their individual needs, skills, and interests and enable them to take ownership of their own learning. Personalized learning environments also help students develop meaningful personal connections with their fellow students, their teachers, and other adults. Our hypothesis, based on initial observations of schools that are developing these innovative approaches, is that access to a well curated set of high quality, Common Core-aligned digital instructional tools and content is foundational for teachers to be able to implement personalized learning models more efficiently and effectively. With great tools, teachers can better support students by targeting their specific needs and engaging their passions and interests. By doing so, they can attain dramatically better learning outcomes. To that end, the foundation is supporting ongoing market research through the Teachers Know Best series. Our aim is to generate information for the field about what teachers need to successfully design and use personalized learning approaches, and to draw attention to areas in which focused product development could more effectively support teachers and students in all classrooms, including those that are in schools developing personalized learning models. Our research focuses extensively on teachers’ perceptions and experience because, as those working directly with students, they can provide the best insights into the challenges of personalizing instruction and point the way for product developers and purchasers of curricular resources to address the greatest unmet needs of their users. Teachers Know Best: What Educators Want From Digital Instructional Tools 2.0 renews our understanding about how teachers currently use digital instructional tools, teachers’ attitudes toward digital technology, and teachers’ perceived effectiveness of digital tools. By sharing this information, we hope to enable product developers to be responsive to the emerging needs of teachers so they can create instructional tools that support teachers in guiding all students to accelerate progress toward college readiness. Our initial report was released in April 2014 to aggregate and amplify the voices of teachers and students to help strengthen digital content and tools. It surfaced valuable insights about the instructional purposes for which teachers use digital tools and identified gaps in the availability, usage, and perceived effectiveness of products across subjects and grade levels. The original report was followed up by two studies, the first focusing on teachers’ perceptions of the professional development opportunities available to them, and the second on a particular subset of digital instructional tools: those that help teachers collect and make use of student data to tailor and improve instruction for individual students. Since the release of the initial Teachers Know Best study, the market for K-12 digital content and tools has evolved significantly. And over time, teachers, schools, and districts have become even more sophisticated in their selection, procurement, and use of digital tools, and their expressed needs change accordingly. To continue supporting better connections among teachers, those who procure resources for them, and product developers, the field needs up-to-date knowledge about how educators’ needs are being met by digital instructional tools. We hope this report makes a contribution in this critical area.

Teacher Survey –Access the Study Here

Original Information Source – Read what Larry Cuban has to Say

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To Discuss how these Solutions will add value for you, your organization and/or your clients, Affinity/Resale Opportunities, and/or Collaborative Efforts, Please Contact:

Tom McDonald, tsm@centurytel.net; 608-788-5144; Skype: tsmw5752