Talk:Assistant teacher course/Proposal

The attached resource is copied from http://education.wikia.com/wiki/User:Fasten/school/ideas?oldid=13973. In the next revision, Fasten blanked it and replaced it with a deletion request. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:53, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
 * The deletion request was dated July 30, 2013. Some subsidiary pages have been deleted. Fasten is admin on the Education.wiki, still, so why he did not simply delete the proposal is mysterious. Still, this is copied here because it is referenced in the Assistant teacher course lede. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:03, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

---The material below was copied from the attached Wikia user talk page:

Tracking and assistant teacher programs

 * "International studies suggest that the school achievements of pupils improve if they learn in heterogenous learning groups - exemplarily one can refer to the Ifo Working Paper No 17 (2005) and the analysis of the PISA study about the "School structure and the emergence of differential learning and development milieus" by Prof. Baumert (2006) The good results of many schools without tracking in Germany and abroad challenge the reasonableness of the existing course model in comprehensive schools (and the tripartite school system as a whole). It is absurd that a swedish girl, who hasn't had any separation through tracking in her school career, can study in Germany while a north rhine-westphalian comprehensive school pupil, whose school hadn't implemented tracking, wouldn't have qualified for college." (quote from a motion of the Green party to the legislative assembly of North Rhine-Westphalia )

One could take the view that removing tracking was only a suboptimal solution compared to implementing an assistant teacher program: The goal of heterogenous learning groups is to benefit the overall academic performance of all pupils, while separation appears to increase the scattering of academic performance of individual pupils. This seems to accept that there are at least some pupils who may benefit from separation as individuals. An assistant teacher program can have the effect to allow those pupils to benefit from the beneficial effect of separation and at the same time give the pupils in less qualified groups the positive role model and accessible peers young assistant teachers can be. Assistant teachers can be motivated to act particularly commendable during their (infrequent) duty as assistant teachers, which may even amplify the effect beyond what can be achieved by heterogenous learning groups.

Assistant Teacher Course

 * Assistant teacher course

Waldorf education
Waldorf education does try to help all pupils, but all education has or should have this goal! Otherwise, where would the weaker students be educated?

My experience is that Waldorf schools generate enthusiasm in the students and parents; that's why they are so vibrant communities, not because they "drain off" the enthusiastic ones. They are exciting places to be as a student, because genuine learning takes place; as a parent, because the children come home with such interesting and diverse contributions - drawing, singing, poems, foreign languages, sculpture, handwork, and so on - and go to school with joy (generally; there are dissatisfied students in Waldorf schools too!!!)

Finally, they do recognize an obligation to other schools; there is a great effort to help non-Waldorf schools benefit from successful methods and approaches.

Oh...about anthroposophy. Waldorf education stands on its own. But its roots were and are in this particular philosophy/spiritual path. Parents have wanted to know this, and in general it is honest to stand up to it. It doesn't mean you have to accept anthroposophy, it just helps to know that this is what the education grew out of. --68.193.184.127

Indexing, whitelisting, blacklisting
A sensible index of suitable web pages for unlimited access by pupils in school could, for example, be built from the index of http://scholar.google.com/ (if available under license), the search index of the National Science Digital Library (if available under license) and further search engine indices (e.g. Search). A crawler could build a list of "neighboring pages" and permit websites into the index which were neither blacklisted nor filtered by automatic content filtering nor suspiciously "near" to blacklisted pages. Blacklisted pages could be pages without educational content but sufficiently interesting content so pupils could waste a lot of time on these pages. A small problem could be that some pages may contain games and edutainment adequate for younger pupils but inadequate for older pupils. A tolerant strategy would just allow these pages for all age groups.

School networks

 * Cologne Area Schoolnet (CAS)
 * Brühler Schulnetz
 * Stadtschulnetz Göttingen
 * c't: Lernen aus dem Netz

School district wiki
This section has moved to its own sub page: User:Fasten/school/ideas/School district wiki. --fasten 13:10, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

What's the point of suboptimal solutions in education?
Suboptimal solutions obviously have a place in education where pupils can modify the solution and find better solutions. Why anybody might want suboptimal solutions where pupils cannot change the approach remains a mystery. One type of "suboptimal solution" that may actually be desirable is teaching by pupils. Teaching pupils are bound to be inferior teachers (at least sometimes) to fully qualified academics as teachers, but this may be desirable anyway due to the beneficial effects of teaching for the teaching pupils. So maybe the prevalent system is (correctly) a suboptimal solution but just the wrong one?

Discussion in German
see: http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Bildung/Erziehung/K14

Verweise auf diesen Beitrag: CDU, SPD, Gruene, FDP, basis07.de, lsv-thueringen.de , lsvnw.de, referendar.de

Miscellaneous
In unrelated news: McCurry's famous Afghan girl portrait, taken in 1984 for the National Geographic, is a Kodachrome (K14)


 * (A previous title was "K-14 proposal" because the proposal included a grade 14; K-14 is more commonly used to refer to K-12 plus two years of college education.)