TeacherJay's EduBlog

Ralph Tyler presented a model of curriculum design in 1949 that is still the foundation of many designs used today.

The latest book by Peg Tyre, The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do takes a long-deserved look at the way that male students are falling further and further behind their female counterparts.  For the last few decades there has been [...]

Although I am not a big fan of studying history by only learning about wars, like the Vietnam site I posted previously, World War II Remembered, a project of Unified School District 230 in Spring Hill, Kansas, focuses on the effects of the war by preserving the oral histories of veterans.  The site offers [...]

Vietnam: 30 Years Beyond War is a beautifully arranged site by the San Jose Mercury News contains photo-journals of post-war Vietnam and could become a valuable tool for teachers of history, social studies and even politics to make real for their students what it means to rebuild nations and some of the lingering effects of a war that has long since ended.

Not too long ago, a regular commenter on this blog, Faiza Khan, let me know about her startup company, WordAhead.com – a collection of short videos that can help a person to learn some new words and even participate in creating the content.  Always interested in expanding my very own veritably voluminous vocabulary I [...]

FreeRice is a great way to get some practice building up your vocabulary while simultaneously helping to provide free food for hungry people. Every question you answer correctly translates to 10 grains of rice that will be sent to people who need it.

Warren Bennis’ 1989 book, On Becoming a Leader, was revised and expanded for a 2003 edition (the links provided are now for the 2009 edition). In this classic, Bennis outlines some of the key characteristics that are common to leaders in all fields. He draws these conclusions from many interviews and biographies of past and present [...]

Jonathan Kozol’s 2005 book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America , looks at the issue of racial integration in the nation’s schools. Over 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and forcing the integration of America’s schools, we [...]

While browsing for reference materials to support essays I am writing, I stumbled upon an excellent site that is a project of The Street Law & The Supreme Court Historical Society, Landmark Supreme Court Cases is designed to help teachers review the issues and decisions made in 17 of the most influential cases in [...]

It is fascinating to read about events such as the American Revolution in a French textbook … 1) History becomes compartmentalized into an abstract string of facts that is not relevant to the world in which we live today. 2) It fosters a seperationist attitude in American students which will become increasingly damaging as the world grows more and more globally connected … So what should be done about this?

The concept is simple – write Wikipedia articles using a more basic vocabulary and grammar then appear on the main English language site. This makes the articles more accessible to children and those who are just learning English, by reducing the relative reading level needed to read and comprehend the article.

Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan B. Scovronick teamed up to show the ways in which the public education system advances, but also hinders, the ability to pursue the “American Dream”, in their 2003 book The American Dream and the Public Schools.  After first coming up with a definition of what the American dream is, they explore what [...]

Neil Postman, the NYU professor perhaps most known for his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, originally published in 1985, on the pervasive manner of television into our lives and our ways of communicating had previously written a book exploring the concept of childhood. The Disappearance of Childhood was [...]

As an editor of the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough is also a leading author on the issues of poverty, education, and the achievement gap. This new book takes a look at the idea Geoffrey Canada, the President and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, has for improving the success rates of African-American students, who, [...]

Although this book is now a bit dated, its effect on the reader is not diminished. Kozol takes a look at the stark differences that are experienced by students in the public schools in the United States. Visiting schools in some of the poorest and wealthiest districts in the nation, Kozol speaks with students, parents, [...]

TeacherJay has been a fan of this site for quite some time and is an active member.  The idea is to collaboratively form an ideal curriculum with professional educators as the contributors.  This approach is similar to the way software developers create open-source software – by making the programming code public and inviting anyone [...]