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About Educationbridges
Education Bridges is experimenting in a new means for nonprofit, business and government leaders to voice their concerns and opinions on the role philanthropy can play in addressing issues that will enhance the quality of conversation about education in communities we live. The philanthropic community realizes its dollars constitute only a small percentage of the budgets allocated to school districts across the country. But as stewards of public dollars, the philanthropic community can influence education policy and encourage innovation in thought that might not occur at a school board meeting, a superintendents office or within the State Departments of Education.
Nonprofit organizations as well as parents and teachers in schools share similar concerns. We invite you to participate in the blogs attached to the program areas listed below. These blogs will be complemented with community conversations which will be available on podcasts. We hope your discussion will result in a better informed and more viable community. Thank you in advance for your participation. Education Bridges is hosted by Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow and is sponsored by The Nord Family Foundation. We can be contacted at projects@educationbridges.org
Submitted by educate on Thu, 2006-03-02 21:45
Partnership Grant Expression of Interest
EDUCATIONBRIDGES
Partnership Grant -- Expression of Interest
Collaborative Learning Environment
Training, Implementation, and Site Maintenance
Purpose
To provide support for innovative collaborative learning environment projects. Applicants should represent a partnership of varying interests and skills, preferably but not necessarily from different educational institutions, groups or companies. The intention of these grants is to support individual educators by connecting them to a larger community.
Expression of Interest Guidelines
The purpose of the expression of interest is to allow teachers who are potentially unfamiliar with the granting process or with educationbridges to get a sense of the community and the grant process. The questions should be answered informally but as completely as possible. Complete honesty is the best policy. Applicants who clearly state their ignorance of 'server technology' for instance, stand a far better chance of funding than those who might try and ignore the subject or worse exagerate their competency.
This is a community process. It is as likely that you will be encouraged to join an existing community as be funded to start your own. All content that is posted on this website is licensed creative commons and will be accessible to all who wish to register. We are in the business of deceminating knowledge, not in protecting it.
Questions.
- Briefly describe the main goals of your project.
This description should not exceed two reasonably sized paragraphs.
- How would funding of your project help your team in your work and contribute to the communities that you currently work in?
One paragraph here should suffice.
- Who are the members of the partnership and what roles do they fill as part of the team?
Please include a one sentence description of the role and either a link to the person's work or a one paragraph description. Personal qualities are at least as valuable as professional qualities.
- What resources (people) and technology do you need that is not currently in your partnership?
Don't worry too much about the details for this question. It is meant to give us a broad understanding.
- What similar projects have you found to the project you are considering, and how is your project similar and what differentiates your project.
This is a tricky question. It is not meant to imply that being 'different' is necessary. It is a context building question. The more our community knows about what you find interesting and how your see yourself, the easier it will be for us to understand your question.
Mom-Reader-Teacher-Mac/Lover
If you write to me, I’ll write back!
Name: Lynne Culp
Age: Let’s say over 39
Birthday: June1
College: CSUN/UCLA
Major: English
Favorite Color: various
Favorite Book: The Golden Bowl
Favorite Movie: Training Day
Favorite Food: Oysters
Favorite Quote: “Never take know for an answer.” (motto of Black Mountain College)
My photo albums
M&N
Spring 2006
Yearbook
May 2006
Best of Chico
July 2006
My favorite songs
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1.Executive Power
My favorite links
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Writing Project
The UCLA Writing Project, a site of the California Writing Project and the National Writing Project since 1977, is a professional development network for teachers of writing from elementary school through university. Each summer we offer invitational institutes which draw together experienced writing teachers who share their expertise, work on their own writing and discuss current research and issues in the teaching of writing. More than 700 teachers in the greater Los Angeles area have become UCLA Writing Project fellows. We also offer a variety of shorter workshops and institutes for teachers and students each summer and professional development series on school sites.
National Writing Project
http://www.writingproject.org
Contact:
UCLA Center X
Writing Project
1320 Moore Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521
General Information
310-825-9495
Fax
310-206-5369
310-267-4751
Book Talk
Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms
Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, Lori Hurwitz
Published in Partnership with West Ed Jossey-Bass Publishers
San Francisco, 1999
Reviewed by
Lynne Culp
Dorsey High School
What if every incoming freshman in your high school received the same high quality instruction to optimize her/his reading? What if students who say "I hate reading" met with teachers who could afford the time and care to delve Into the problem? And what if teachers had the luxury of working with researchers on an ongoing basis so that together they could fine-tune what happens when kids read? As long as we‰re dreaming, what if you could set up a program that would take 200 students from reading Charlotte‰s Web to the literacy level required by To Kill a Mockingbird in a single year? Such a program has been implemented and achieved just such results. Test scores jumped in reading from seventh to ninth grade levels across the board. Perhaps even more remarkable, the rate of growth in student reading levels continued after students moved from their ninth grade English and social studies classes where the program was initiated into the next school year‰s classes.
If it sounds like an intriguing solution to what is often viewed as an intractable problem, then the Jossey-Bass publication of Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, and Lori Hurwitz, will be a must for your professional bookshelf.
Before strategies or program comes the story. The setting is Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco, a relatively new school in a poor community with a diverse minority population. (Stats: African-American, 30%; Latino and Chinese, each 25%, and Filipino and White each about 8%.) The program that made the work possible was the Strategic Literacy Initiative which brought teachers and researchers together to focus on reading. Using a model previously employed by Writing Projects, teachers became researchers for practices that improved reading in their classrooms. A key and unusual element was the fact that all first year students—not just honors or remedial—were enrolled in the Academic Literacy course. (Surely students feel the difference when instruction is systemic and not merely aligned to the knowledge and skill of one instructor, no matter how competent that person may be.)
While strategies were piloted initially in social studies and English classes, from the beginning the purpose was all-inclusive. Program teachers consulted with science, math, and other disciplines so that techniques introduced in the ninth grade would be continued and consistent beyond a single year. Having been taught certain ways to "preview a text" in her ninth grade class, for example, a student would find the same terminology and method reinforced in her tenth grade biology class.
Examining what other content disciplines required for reading, teachers discovered powerful things about the act of reading itself. It is—as students know and as the authors remind us—"not a basic skill." Reading demands not simple concentration, but multi-tasking far greater than what computers do. Reading different kinds of texts requires skills that go beyond variations on a theme. It is highly possible to be a proficient reader in one discipline, but lacking skills for another. Discipline-based knowledge definitely promotes greater facility in finding your way around certain types of texts, but to complicate matters further, different kinds of texts within the same discipline demand dif- ferent reading approaches and skills. If comprehension is to be achieved, reading strategies for different types of text need to be taught in context. What is often invisible—what happens when you read—has to become visible for both student and teacher.
Learning how a text works is key in developing the will to read. For every teacher who has assigned a few pages of reading homework and listened to ensuing groans, the connection between ability to do the job and will to do it is not news. Far more common than teachers like to admit, though, is the practice of "spoon feeding" texts and lightening the students‰ load in the service of coverage of a topic. As a result, many of our students are not confident to tackle the difficulty of what RFU teachers view as gatekeeper texts. Among these are exam texts, job applications, and college texts—reading that prevents or allows students access to opportunity.
Assignments, techniques, and strategies employed throughout the program kept the goal of reading independence for students central.
Many strategies laid out in the book are impressive, coherent, and transparent in their effectiveness. For example, I was tempted to excerpt the Concentration Cockpit—a student‰s self-directed look at concentration while reading—and try it the next day with a class or two. To excerpt bits and pieces, however, does this text and the lesson it teaches a disservice.
Reading for Understanding is a guidebook for reform as much as it is a text about literacy. Present this text in your curriculum committees, share it in your department meetings, and take it to Site-Based Management discussions on test scores so that your school community can begin to examine the real work of literacy.
Though newspapers locate the wars over reading almost exclusively in elementary school battles over phonics vs. whole language, high schools and middle-schools too occupy front lines. Typically, shots lobbed back and forth call for remedial classes which never bring about the desired improvement. Students and teachers remain trapped in the trenches.
Abraham Lincoln was said to have reminded Harriet Beecher Stowe that some books—Uncle Tom‰s Cabin as a prime example—start wars. With the publication of Reading for Understanding, let us hope that books also end wars. If anything could do it, this book—read and taken seriously by educators—could redirect our efforts to produce not only accord among ourselves, but also a generation of more literate, capable graduates.
Reprinted with Permission of California English.
About DWDT and Troy
Digital Writing, Digital Teaching is a blog written by Troy Hicks, a doctoral student in Teacher Education at Michigan State and professional development coordinator for a Red Cedar Writing Project. It explores the variety of issues related to teaching writing with new media for K-12 teachers and teacher educators. For more on this, see my longer explanation below, originally posted on my first blog in the summer of 2005.
Special thanks to Lunar Pages for donating this space for me to work in as I try to share new media writing with teachers at our writing project.
Contact Troy via email at hickstro at msu.edu.
As I begin writing my first “official” post for my blog—which is the longer addendum to post one that I alluded to—I immediately begin wondering what this is all going to be about. For instance, I was talking yesterday with some other English educators at Michigan State about different genres in which we might represent our work. After all the traditional genres of academe were named (journals, conference papers, websites, syllabi, CVs, assignments, digital portfolios, etc.) I suggested blogs. Moreover, I posed a question: How might an academic be able to get his or her work “out there” through a blog, and how might he or she be compromised—perhaps by someone plagiarizing them?
This was an interesting discussion. It yielded some fruitful discussion about authority and the ways in which academics, particularly graduate students, could and should represent their work to the larger fields in which they work. A few weeks ago, I had talked with two colleagues from the National Writing Project—Will Banks and Maria Angala—at the NWP Tech and Writing retreat. Both of them encouraged me to begin blogging. Blogs are, of course, something that I have known about for a few years and, to some degree, even began playing with a while ago (more on that in future posts). But, as a young scholar, preparing to write a dissertation, I was concerned that it is still risky to put my ideas out into cyberspace in such a manner.
But, as you can see, I took the leap. After looking at Maria’s blog and thinking carefully about what other English Ed scholars, like Rob Rozema, are doing with blogs, too, I figured that I had to get into the fray. So, here I am.
Thus, I begin my blog in earnest by asking myself two questions. First, what, specifically is it that I have in mind as a purpose and audience for this blog? Second, with what authority do I have to speak to that audience about such issues?
The answers are intertwined. First, I believe that I do have a few things to say about digital writing. As a teacher, a professional developer, a budding scholar, and a technologist, I feel that I have some right to speak on this issue. When other people in your field begin asking for your advice, opinions, and expertise on topics related to technology and writing, I think that it is safe for an academic to say that he or she has expertise in it. I am not trying to brag here—far from it, because I know that there is plenty about literacy research and technology write largely that I don’t know—I am simply trying to understand what it means, as a scholar, to become an “expert” at something. Always becoming, they say. From my perspective, once your colleagues in a field begin saying that you are an “expert” in a certain area, however, then you have their backing to speak out on some issues related to it. Also, and again not to break my arm to pat myself on the back, I feel like I have a certain edge about using technology in education that I can share. I plan to use this blog as a forum to do so. (For the record, I am a graduate student at MSU in the teacher education program and I work at the Writing Center as the Outreach Coordinator for the Red Cedar Writing Project. More on all that soon.)
Second, I want this blog to be more than just a journal of what I am doing with professional development, research, and technology. Blogging is not a peer-reviewed medium, at least in the classic sense of that term, and I want to make sure that I am adhering to some level of professional and ethical behavior here. For me, blogging is about more than just keeping a diary. This comic seems to best sum up the difference between a blog and a journal/diary, although I know that the line can still seem slim. My intent is to keep the discussions here focused largely on issues facing teachers and teacher educators who are trying to incorporate digital writing into their teaching. This is not to say that I won’t offer some thoughts on my family and friends from time to time, but even that will likely take a literacy/technology focus.
Well, this is quite a bit to chew on for me as a writer and, I am sure, for you as a reader. I am hoping that between the podcast that I am doing with my best friend, Steve, my own digital portfolio, and this blog, I will come to better understand the ways in which digital writing can impact education. In that process, I hope that I can offer some insights and ideas—as well as pose some critical questions—that you might be able to talk with me about. If you are interested in joining this blog, just post a comment and I will try to figure out how to add you as a member through Word Press.
I look forward to the conversation.
Troy W. Hicks :: Professional Portfolio
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Welcome to the Northern Virginia Writing Project |
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Written by WEBMASTER
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Saturday, 12 June 2004 |
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 The Northern Virginia Writing Project is an affiliated site of the National Writing Project, the largest staff development project for teachers in the country. NVWP's mission is to improve writing and learning across Northern Virginia schools.
Through the professional development model of the National Writing Project, NVWP recognizes the primary importance of teacher knowledge, expertise, and leadership. NVWP is a cooperative effort of George Mason University, Northern Virginia Community College, and the public and private schools of Northern Virginia.
NVWP began in 1978, and has been directed by Dr. Donald R. Gallehr since its inception. Along with being a member of The National Writing Project, NVWP is also a member of the Virginia Writing Project, which consists of eight sites throughout the state of Virginia.
NVWP is housed at George Mason University in Fairfax. It works with public and private schools in the following counties and districts: Arlington, Alexandria City, Clarke, Fairfax, Falls Church City, Fauquier, Frederick, Fredericksburg, Loudoun, Manassas City, Manassas Park City, Prince William, Shenandoah, Stafford and Winchester.
The Northern Virginia Writing Project offers a wide variety of services to the public and private schools of Northern Virginia. These services include in-service programs, conferences, and other programs.
The goals of NVWP include:
- To improve writing and learning in kindergarten through university classrooms
- To extend the uses of writing in all disciplines
- To provide schools, colleges, and universities with an effective professional development model
- To identify, celebrate, and enhance the professional role of successful classroom teachers
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 14 October 2006 ) |
Eric Hoefler
Teacher / Consultant
Washington D.C. Metro Area
- Current
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Consultant/Technology Liaison at Northern Virginia Writing Project
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Teacher at Woodbridge Senior High School
- Education
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George Mason University
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Mary Washington College
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Mary Washington College
- Industry
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Education Management
- Websites
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Eric Hoefler’s Experience
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Consultant/Technology Liaison
Northern Virginia Writing Project
(Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; E-Learning industry)
August 2000
— Present
(6 years 8 months)
I teach courses and present workshops in writing and technology for the NVWP. In addition, I serve on the board as the Technology Liaison between NVWP and the National Writing Project.
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Teacher
Woodbridge Senior High School
(Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; Education Management industry)
September 1998
— Present
(8 years 7 months)
Woodbridge Senior High School hosts the Center for the Fine & Performing Arts program. I helped to design and implement this program, with a focus on the creative writing concentration. I have taught or currently teach: English 10 humanities, AP English 11 (Language & Composition), AP English 12 (Literature & Composition), creative writing (exploration, short story, script, graphic storytelling, portfolio and marketing). I also assist the CFPA coordinator in maintaining the program.
In addition, I help to manage the website for the school, the CFPA, and classroom sites for a number of teachers.
Eric Hoefler’s Education
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George Mason University
M.A., English (Teaching of Writing & Literature),
2002 — 2006
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Mary Washington College
B.A., English,
1996 — 1998
Virginia State Licensure: English Secondary
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Mary Washington College
B.A., Religious Studies,
1991 — 1995
Additional Information
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