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October 15, 2015 | Sign up to receive The Teachers Edition.
In This Issue
 Part of New York City's SchoolEveryDay attendance initiative, which aims to collect data on attendance and to encourage kids to come to school.
Absences Add Up
Every teacher knows that you can't teach empty seats. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education heard teachers' concerns and issued guidance for how communities can improve student attendance. Among the ideas: implementing the Check & Connect program, looking deeper than attendance rates to figure out why students aren't coming to school, and encouraging kids to sign up for wake-up calls from celebrities to get them up and ready for the day. An estimated 7.5 million students are chronically absent each school year, and high rates of truancy start as early as kindergarten. Get involved and learn more here.
Toy Technology
 Children used to rely on their imagination to talk to Barbie. Now, they
can actually have a conversation with the iconic toy. Mattel's new Hello Barbie is programmed to talk to young children about career choices, interests, school bullies and their favorite clothes. Like Apple's Siri, her conversational technology has improved, and young children can interact with her in fun and imaginative ways.
Find out more about how she was created and the race to create artificial-intelligence-powered companions that are personality-rich and capable of conversation (Vlahos, New York Times).
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Teacher Leadership
Coming of Age
"If a significant share of our nation’s teachers — those who know students and families the best — are not leading the transformation of teaching and learning, then our society’s vision of a high-quality public education system for all children will continue to fall short," writes The Center for Teaching Quality's Barnett Berry in the September/October edition of Principal Magazine. Berry, a champion of the role of the teacherpreneur, typically spends 50 percent of her time teaching and the other half innovating. She also shares some examples of the growing number of places that are turning to teachers to innovate. Meanwhile, educator John McCrann's blog, “Two Things Policymakers Should Know about Teacher Leadership,” says that while everyone is talking about teacher leadership, “What we need is not one great solution, but millions of smaller solutions that work for the millions of different schools and communities that we have in this country” (EDWeek Teacher).
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Last week we wrote about Arne Duncan's announcement that he'll step down in December.
That leaves the Teachers@ED wondering: will he enter the NBA?
Watch a highlight reel put together by the Chronicle of Higher Education where you'll see the MVP of the 2014 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game make masterful no-look passes and three-point plays.
The NBA regular season starts in a few weeks. Just saying.
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The Teaching Profession
 For generations, high school English teachers have endured the complaints of their students when assigning the translation of one of Shakespeare's plays. Now, the leaders of one of the country's most prominent Shakespeare festivals have sided with dictionary-wielding students.
Leaders of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced recently that they will perform versions of the bard's plays that have been rewritten for clarity. Some purists are up in arms, while John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, writes in the Wall Street Journal that the change will improve how people experience his plays.
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What better way to learn about primary sources than by creating your own? Nonprofit radio-favorite StoryCorps is partnering with teachers to ask high school students to record an interview with an elder, as part of their Great Thanksgiving Listen. About the project, founder Dave Isay writes: "Together we will collect the wisdom of a generation and archive it for the future, while at the same time reminding our grandparents how much their lives and stories matter." Sign your class up here.
 • Maryann Woods-Murphy (2011 Washington Fellow) a Gifted and Talented Specialist, Nutley Public Schools (Nutley, N.J.) will serve a three-year term for The NEA Foundation’s
Board of Directors.
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 Did You Know
Nearly 9 in 10 parents—including more than 3 in 4 impoverished parents—attend general parent-teacher meetings each year, that's more than 10 percentage points higher than any other type of parent involvement in schools.
(2012 Child Trends and some states are giving it a makeover (Sparks, EdWeek).
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Savanna Flakes
Editor's note: The following is part of a series reporting on excellent African American educators. Educators were selected by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans.
 Savanna Flakes is a Secondary Inclusion Specialist in Alexandria City Public Schools, Virginia. She also works with Leading Educators and has received several educator awards, including the National Association of Special Education Teachers Outstanding Special
Educator Award, a Sontag Prize in Urban Education Award, The College Board Minority Professional Fellowship, and the Alexandria City Jaycee Public Service George Webber Award for
Excellence in Education.
Why and how did you decide upon a career in
education?
Growing up I was privileged to have
teachers and counselors that held high expectations and believed in my
potential when I didn’t believe in myself, and so I wanted to teach in urban
divisions where I could be the same inspirational impetus to our students who would benefit from my motivation the
most. My career in teaching started from
my high school days of peer-mentoring elementary students, to my internships
with Upward Bound, America’s Promise, and AmeriCorps. In many ways “teaching” has always been a part of me; I am honored to have the
opportunity to play a role in my student’s lives and contribute to their active
participation in our community.
What is the one thing you most celebrate about your students?
I celebrate students’ “Growth Mindsets,” the belief that through hard work and
resilience they can get smarter, better, and stronger. I appreciate and praise students for
their growth-oriented process—what they accomplished through their struggles,
efforts, and positive choices: practice, study,
persistence, and using/sharing good strategies. I encourage my collaborating
teachers and students to create classroom posters that celebrate effort,
growth, persistence and the idea of malleable intelligence such as “mistakes
are a part of learning, failure is simply the
opportunity to begin again” and “I've failed over and over and over again in my
life and that’s why I am successful."
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 Who does most of the work at your parent-teacher conferences? At one Chicago school, the students lead the conferences, explaining to their parents what they're proud of and what they still need to work on. Edutopia blogger John McCarthy shares some other tips for making parent conferences more valuable.
Unstructured Playtime
Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? asks researchers at the University of Virginia, led by the Daphna Bassok. They found that the American kindergarten experience has become much more academic—and at the expense of play. By contrast, Finnish youngsters are developing their language, math, and social-interaction skills through play. Read more about how Finnish kindergarteners spend their days (Walker,The Atlantic).
"Tag" Banned on the Playground. The game of 'tag' was temporarily banned at a Washington elementary school, until parents pushed back. "Kids need some unstructured playtime...I totally survived tag, I even survived red rover, believe it or not," one mother cried (Schouten, Christian Science Monitor).
 How Learning Works
The Deans for Impact, a group of leaders in educator preparation, think that if teachers understand how learning works, they'll be more likely to have lasting learning in their classrooms. The report connects cognitive principles with practical implications for the classroom in a way that everyone can understand.
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Sharing Knowledge
"Sharing is the essence of teaching. It is, I have come to believe, the essence of civilization."
(Bill Moyers, journalist and commentator)
Restorative Justice
According to one study, 48 percent of children have experienced trauma; meanwhile, many schools are questioning whether expulsion and suspension are appropriate reactions to behavior related to that trauma. Last week, in a class-action lawsuit against the Compton, Calif. schools, a judge ruled that students who experience traumatic events while growing up in a poor, turbulent community could be considered disabled (NPR.org).
Resources for Educators
 Wisdom from educators heard by ED
5. "We excel, we push, we expect, and as a staff we are all in this together." (Teacher, Iowa)
4. "I don't need this job any more. I own a restaurant. But my work is not done." (Teacher, Illinois)
3. "If life doesn't give you a dream, build one." (Teacher, Arizona)
2. "A professional development conference can't replace me going into a classroom and watching another great teacher." (Teacher, Iowa)
1. "I'm crazy happy that the pendulum in education is swinging toward equity." (Teacher, Michigan)
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