A new report from Stanford University says that teachers in the United States average a significantly greater number of classroom-teaching hours per year than their counterparts in top-performing European and Asian countries, and thus have less time for planning and collaborative, job-embedded professional development activities that are common elsewhere.

U.S teachers spend about 80% of their working time teaching in the classroom versus about 60% for most other industrialized nations; they average 3-5 hours a week in lesson planning versus 15-20 hours a week in Europe and in Asia.

Many of the countries that do well on international achievement tests allow teachers more time to meet together to share ways of improving their teaching. A regular activity in Japan, for example, is the teachers' "lesson study:" colleagues observe one teacher's lesson and then analyze it for strengths and weaknesses.

The report also found that other countries typically gave teachers more autonomy at their school sites.

What's your reaction? Are U.S. teachers given too great a teaching load? Do you wish you had more time during the school day to work with colleagues on instructional issues? What would you do with 15-20 hours of non-teaching time per week? Join the discussion. 

See News Article here

As a rule, high school kids tend to avoid doing things with their parents. Like the plague.  So it's nice to read an article about mothers and daughters doing something significant together . . . such as making robots.

StarBot is a Miami-based organization that promotes robotics. They partnered with the Miami-Dade school district to host a workshop at Northwestern Senior High. Organizers of this workshop wanted to expose girls from low-income families to careers in science and engineering. Kathy Lyden, a computer-science teacher, picked ten teenagers who had expressed interest in science to participate.

Over the course of three meetings, the mom-daughter teams learned basic robotics. They built robots that can play soccer, culminating in a robotic soccer match.

Says Lyden, "Once they participate in a workshop like this--and see what they are capable of doing--they're hooked. It opens doors for them."

14-year-old Shantrice Mattis agrees. "It shows that women can do anything."

Read the complete article here.

I've been looking with great interest at the education portion of the economic recovery package recently passed by the House. $150 billion is a lot of money--in fact it's the single largest investment in public education in history. In a refreshing turn of events, education seems to be the top priority of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, as the stimulus package is called.

I like the American Association of School Administrators summary, which compares the House and Senate versions of the package. They also provide a link to the House Education and Labor Committee's district-by-district chart , which gives you an estimate of what the House stimulus package could mean for your district.

With luck, in the fall of 2009 our nation will begin some version of its two-year commitment to renovating and modernizing schools, and providing a higher level of funding for federal education programs as well as more money for states.

I'd be interested to learn what you think is the best use of your districts' monies.