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Dear [member_name_first],
May 8th, 2012 is National Teacher Appreciation Day to honor the crucial role our teachers play in the educational guidance of our children. For those of you who are teachers, we hope you find yourself surrounded by appreciation and celebration.
Mother's Day falls on May 13th this year. Help your students express their admiration for Mom this Mother's Day by utilizing free lesson plans at educationworld.com. If your students are having trouble getting their thoughts on paper, visit journalbuddies.com for some inspired writing prompts to help them get started on that Mother's Day card.
Let's not forget about Memorial Day. Teachervision.com has printables, lessons, and references across your curriculum for k-12 students to help them observe this holiday as much more than just a day away from school.
Struggle over how to evaluate special ed teachers
Since the first day of class this school year, Bev Campbell has been teaching her students how to say their names.
Some of the children in her class have autism. Others have Down syndrome or other disabilities. "People don't understand where they've come from," she says. "It's slow."
Just one has learned how to say his name. Still, the South Florida teacher sees signs of growth in the nine kindergarten to second-grade students in her class.
Those little steps are what teachers like Campbell consider major leaps for students with the most significant physical and cognitive disabilities - and what are the most challenging to capture on a test. Yet that will be a significant part of the way school districts in Florida and in many other states will evaluate teachers.
Spurred by the U.S. Department of Education's $4.35 billion Race to the Top grant competition, more than a dozen states have passed laws to reform how teachers are evaluated and include student growth as a component. For most students, that growth will be measured on standardized tests. But for special education students that is considerably more complicated.
"I don't know how they would ever do that for my students," said Campbell, who has 28 years of experience teaching special ed.
In its guidance to states applying for the funds, the Department of Education set as a priority increasing the number of effective teachers in special education, language services, and hard-to-staff subjects such as science and math. Effectiveness would be determined, in part, by whether students reached "acceptable rates" of academic growth. Federal officials provided some criteria for what should be included in teacher evaluations, but left states to decide how student growth should be measured.
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