Education Week - August 22, 2012 - 21

EDUCATION WEEK

AUGUST 22, 2012

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in the state agency’s tif program because of difficulty reaching consensus with the Boston union. “We’re trying to think about how can we, as creatively as possible, still deliver on the grant and yet deliver on what we in Seattle believe is respectful to the educators,” said Clover Codd, the director of the Teacher Incentive Fund for the district. “We know that if we don’t have that partnership, we won’t be able to implement this grant.” She said that despite the challenges in navigating between the grant officials and the union, the program had benefits. “I don’t know that a system will ever be ‘ready’ for innovation,” Ms. Codd said. “I don’t think that pushing from the department was a bad thing.”

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Moving Beyond for 2012
Officials from the federal Education Department said that many districts had successfully implemented their tif grants, and anticipated that no other grantees would choose to terminate their agreements. Even so, they adjusted the program to accommodate some of the challenges that led Milwaukee, Chicago, and New York City to withdraw from the program and reflect the results of tif evaluations from prior years. The 2012 iteration of the Teacher Incentive Fund has expanded the components of teacher-evaluation systems to include extra compensation for new responsibilities, as in New York’s 2010 proposal. The 2012 program also eliminates the yearlong period in which districts could obtain stakeholder buy-in, instead requiring applicants to produce evidence of teacher and principal collaboration from the start. While the 2010 grants allowed districts to implement the program in individual schools, the 2012 program requires that the evaluation systems being developed be applied to entire districts, in order to facilitate some of the systemic changes needed to make a performancepay system viable. “Differentiated pay is still a critical element of tif, but we want to create greater opportunities to improve teaching and learning,” said Elizabeth Utrup, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Education Department. Representatives from Milwaukee, New York, and Seattle all discussed the broader guidelines for the 2012 grants favorably. “Hopefully, this program will tap into collaborative union partnerships to come up with a range of incentives to improve teaching and learning and won’t be tied necessarily to what I see as a fairly narrow set of test-driven incentives,” said Mr. Peterson of Milwaukee. Milwaukee and New York were among the 120 or so applicants for the 2012 grant. The applications, which were due July 27, are being reviewed, and winners will be announced before Sept. 30.
Coverage of policy efforts to improve the teaching profession is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, at www.joycefdn.org/Programs/ Education.

Texas Instruments TI-Nspire™ CX Technology Blends Math and Science Curriculum in Instruction
By Jeffrey Lukens
As a 27-year high school science teacher from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I have employed numerous strategies to help my students learn. I have used Texas Instruments technology in my classroom for the past 15-plus years, starting with the TI-82 graphing calculator. While this calculator was an excellent tool for mathematical calculations and graphing data, there were limited data collection options available to science teachers and students. Today, however, the TI-Nspire CX handheld allows
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classroom instructional time on their own subject. But I have discovered the opposite is true. TI products, along with its free digital content, make it easy to blend math and science, without sacrificing solid, rigorous instruction. Hundreds of standards-based, interactive lessons covering all of critical areas of science instruction are available in the online content areas known as “Science Nspired.”

By using the TI-Nspire CX handheld, data collection tools and the TI-Nspire Navigator system, I have actually seen more learning in each 50-minute class.
My handouts are now a page or two instead of 15 and incorporate open-ended, inquiry-based, exploration activities. During a lab on enzymes, for example, my students are able to perform more than a dozen trials in one class period! Most of these trials are studentled explorations after baseline data is established. Introducing variables and seeing the experimental effects of these variables brings ownership, discussion, interest and learning. My hope is that educators choose to do more than talk about having students “engaged” in the learning process; that they would actually engage them. By incorporating TI-Nspire CX technology into the classroom, this real student engagement happens. Where there is engagement, there is learning. Where there is learning, there is achievement. Interest is ignited, inspiring future scientists and mathematicians.

for a seamless integration of math and science through user-friendly data collection and high-powered data analysis. The device, coupled with dozens of data collection sensors, allows students to gather real-time data, get an immediate graphical “picture” of the data, and then evaluate the experimental results. As students analyze their data, predictions can be made and in-depth analyses developed. In addition, the data can be aggregated and analyzed as a class using the TI-Nspire Navigator system, which
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helps promote student discussion about the concepts. This wireless classroom network also allows science and math teachers to do ongoing formative assessment with every student in their classrooms and see where additional individual instruction is needed. Integrating mathematics with science instruction is new to many teachers who worry about losing valuable

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Education Week - August 22, 2012

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