Farina Addresses Teachers
Chancellor Fariña Addresses Teachers
Her goal: Restore dignity and Respect to teaching
Chancellor Fariña addresses teachers, at a town hall meeting with UFT members.
- Her first priority — and the accomplishment by which she most wants to be judged — is restoring dignity and respect to the teaching profession.
- “No one works well if beaten down,” she said at the first in a series of five town halls with educators from each borough.
She called teachers “experts on the ground,” and “our best kept secret.”
Listen to this post!
SCHOOL COOPERATION
In a Q&A led by UFT head Michael Mulgrew, she answered a question about school cooperation:
- Fariña explained that she has been emphasizing collaboration and sharing in her meetings with principals, superintendents and network leaders. She also pointed to eight schools, all with high numbers of high-need students, which will serve as demonstration sites featuring best practices. She said she hopes to increase the number to 45 by September.
She also spoke about high-stakes testing, saying it was a problem, and that she was working on it.
UPDATE! Today the Chancellor announced a new promotion policy, which deals with this very question. Test scores are no longer the only measure of student promotion.
To develop the new policy, the Department consulted with and gathered feedback from families, teachers, principals, and education advocates. Many identified that, under the current policy, a student’s body of work over the course of the entire year was overlooked in favor of a single, standardized exam. To remedy those concerns and incorporate multiple measures in accordance with State law, the DOE plans to implement several important changes:Please share this if you find it useful!
TWO MORE POLICY CHANGES
Two notable changes (in the UFT address) from the previous administration: the gifted and talented programs will again have someone in chard after a several-year vacancy, and the DOE will set up interviews for vacant teaching positions with ATR (Absent Teacher Reserve) pool teachers.
She also promised to answer every question teachers had, encouraging them to write their question on an index card.
*** If you handed an index card in, please let us know what your question was, and what the Chancellor said in return! This seems to be a common theme when Chancellor Farina addresses teachers, where she asks for input in a way that feels very familiar to those of us who have been at Education Professional Development sessions. She seems to be practicing some educator best-practices even as she addresses teachers. We’d love to hear about the follow-through on these!
PRE K EXPANSION GUIDE
Find new full-day public pre-k programs, and Apply Online! (deadline April 23rd).
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Click below for the DOE Pre-K expansion guide:
PreKExpansionGuidewebversion.pdf,
with a full schools list, application, and instructions in several languages.
Early Childhood Certification
Become a Certified Early Childhood Literacy Specialist with our Master’s in Literacy. If you’re not certified in Early childhood, the Literacy program WILL certify you at the early childhood level but only as a Literacy Specialist, not Classroom Teacher. The Master’s in Literacy WILL certify anyone who has in Initial Cert in Early Childhood.
Please call us with any questions 877-922-2483 or [button link=”https://www.citeconcordianyc.com/professional-certification/”]Visit our Literacy Masters Program[/button]
Special Ed Certification
The Individual Pathways Deadline for the Special Ed Extension only applies to provisionally certified teachers. If you are professionally certified, you can still take your special ed certification classes this way. Please see our post on this. You can still register for classes and complete the coursework after 5/1/14 if you’re permanently certified.
[button link=”http://www.citeeducation-strose.com/login-and-reserve-courses/”]Register online for special ed grad classes[/button]
Our New Graduate Courses Schedule
Our schedule went out last week. You can download a pdf Grad Brochure here.
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