Hello My Fellow ISPI Collegues,

We are the verge of our next meeting but there are a few things to REMEMBER!!!

THIS MEETING and this meeting only has been MOVED TO WEDNESDAY NIGHT.

PLUS the Golden Corral is changing names so the sign is covered up BUT it is OPEN

We will be having a very special guest speaker - Dr. Sharon Nichols.

Dr. Nichols is an Assistant Professor at UTSA in the College of Education and Human Development.  Her emphasis and Ph.D. are in Educational Psychology.  Her focus is how children and young adults learn.  She has written a great many articles on the subject and has published two books.

Her books are:
Collateral damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts America’s schools. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.)
and
America’s teenagers—Myths and realities: Media images, schooling, and the social costs of careless indifference.  (NJ: Erlbaum.)

So if you are looking for someone who can talk about High-Stakes Testing - this is the meeting not to miss.

Now, you may be asking how is this an ISPI topic.  Part of the HPT model is EVALUATION and in the case of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) their testing of the children (their evaluation of the teachers and schools) is the ONLY evaluation.  Schools live and die by these tests, so ask yourself how do these tests effect the direction of improvement that will be fed back into the NCLB System.  Plus what about the "Human Element" and one's drive to prove they (teachers and scools) know what they a doing and has that or will that lead to corrurption in our schools. 

This should be a very interesting subject and talk.  I expect lots of discussion.

Along the same line there is an interesting article in PerformanceXpress on the "Things That Work" model.  Ask yourself - when you propose a solution, what makes you think that it will work? 

Think of Things That Work as a table of evidence to support your proposed solution and add it to your selection criteria for solutions. Follow these guidelines:

• Avoid any solution that has already been shown not to work as intended; it is Snake Oil
• Proceed with any solution that is a Hunch or comes from Intuition by acknowledging it as a Hypotheses and being prepared to try something else if it doesn’t work
• Recognize any Respected Practice solution as one that has worked many times, although we don’t know exactly why it succeeds
• Recommend any Research-Based solution with confidence because there is significant research to say that it will work

The article will help you to make sure you are not selling "Snake Oil".

See you at the Meeting and don't forget that it is one day earlier on Wednesday, September 24th.