Week+4

= Week 4 = === The readings this week were mainly focused on cooperative learning and professional development and most of the ideas expressed on the articles and books were very interesting. I always find that people in general has no idea of what a team and collaboration means. This is understandable since we are in a society where individualism is being infused into the souls of their citizens. Having them suddenly change their trained minds into something different is almost impossible. Everybody is being raised to be good individuals, not good team members. How can they teach association and group effort to students if they don't have an idea of what it is? How can they model it? Wong and Wong, cited by Pitler, //et al.// (2007), sound almost comical when they affirm that "cooperative learning is not so much learning to cooperate as it is cooperating to learn". Regardless of the way they play with the words, it is a wise phrase. We have to see teachers willing to throw away the feelings instilled in ancient times and embrace the sentiment of openness and willingness to increment their knowledge through the use of technology by collaborating with each other. Most of the authors cited on the books agree that the web is a wonderful medium for collaboration, so learning to use it properly will improve skills in technology and team working. After all, according to Collier, Weinburgh, & Rivera, cited by Solomon and Schrum (2007), teachers are expected to use any type of technology in their classrooms. ===

=== During my daily commute to my school in the morning, I was listening the NPR radio station and the spokesperson at the moment commented about a case in, I think one of the Carolinas, where the new requirements to keep your certification as a highly qualified teacher were not only to stay up to date in teaching issues and fulfill the requirements of testing, but also that you had to prove that you were a good teacher by showing an improvement on the scores of your students. Once the requirements were accomplished, then the Department of Education would allow you to have a 3 year permit to continue working. It sounded frightening and outrageous at the moment, but after some thinking it came to my mind the information shared on the articles and books from this week about the large amounts of money spent on training and professional development going to waste due to poor results since teachers kept instruction the same way they did before them without any intention to improve their results. It's shameful. I agree completely with the fact that teachers should be accountable for the results they get in the classroom. A good example is the one reported by Solomon and Schrum (2007) where an administrator promoted improvement in technology skills on teachers by forcing them to present once a year a lesson with integrated technology and goals to improve their technological skills as part of their annual evaluations. In any case we should model what we teach. If we don’t like it, we should be doing something else. ===