Need Education? Head to Germany!

Valerija Schwarz the guide for Kirk Carapezza, the reporter for WGBH,Boston, was an intern with the GAPP New York office in 2014.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/how-german-higher-education-controls-costs (Part 1) 

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/american-students-head-germany-free-college (Part2)

What are two 2014 graduates of NKHS doing?  Heading to Germany for college -- Brilliant!

Time to Add Language Learning to Teacher Preparation

Ed. Week March 19:  COLUMN:  GLOBAL LEARNING

March 17, 2015 1:45 AM

By guest bloggers Emily Liebtag and Caitlin Haugen

Today, Emily Liebtag, Manager of Curriculum and Instructional Design, VIF International Education and Caitlin Haugen, Executive Director, Global Teacher Education argue that preparing globally competent teachers should include learning another language. While this is not yet a widespread practice, there are some promising examples.

Lack of Language Learning Opportunities for Future TeachersIt makes sense that teachers would study another language to meet the needs of their ethnically and linguistically diverse students. Teachers who study world languages can better communicate with students and their parents, understand the difficulties and frustrations of language learners, and experience a window into other cultures. Multilingual teachers model global competence and prepare their students for working in the 21st century.

And what better place to be exposed to language learning than during teacher preparation?

Unfortunately, exposure during teacher prep is not common. One study found that teachers study languages at an alarmingly low rate, and if they do, it is because of personal motivation, not out of requirement. Over two-thirds of pre- and in-service teachers did not complete any language training at all, but 90% of them felt that their undergraduate education should have required language training. This is particularly problematic considering today's teachers are homogeneousand overwhelmingly monolingual—and the demographics in teacher preparation programs suggest this trend is likely to continue.

Leading supporters of internationalization from organizations and institutions of higher education—including unions—have long advocated that the study of world languages is a necessary element for developing globally competent teachers, but teacher education is still slow to change. There are a few programs, however, that are an exception.  

Promising PracticesThere are some teacher preparation programs that are embracing the need for language study. Teacher candidates at the University of San Diego (USD) are required to take courses that emphasize pedagogy for English language learners, including a course focused on first and second language development for teachers that explores world languages. 

Starting in the late 1990s, the Oklahoma State Board of Education began requiring teacher candidates to achieve language proficiency before completing their programs and teacher preparation responded. Lack of enforcement led to steady declines in foreign language study among pre-service teachers, but the state's policy can act as a model. 

The New York Univ. Dept. of Teaching and Learning responded to the rising demand for language savvy teachers by offering a Bilingual Education program designed to help prepare educators to work in multilingual settings. It includes a field experience in a bilingual setting. This program is innovative because it not only provides language learning options to future educators, but also strengthens the pipeline of available teachers.

International experiences such as student teaching or study abroad programs can inspire future teachers to pursue foreign language study and illustrate the importance of language learning. Gabrielle Malfatti, Dir. of Int'l and Intercultural Initiatives at the University of Missouri College of Ed., notes that students who participate in MU TeachAbroad programs return with a craving for a deeper connection to the host culture, which can be aided by language acquisition." Some student teaching abroad programs such as Bridge, provide language immersion opportunities specific to education. Many teacher preparation programs have started to offer international field experiences, but overall only 4% of education majors study abroad. This is certainly a catalyst for some, but presently it only applies to a very small number of future teachers. 

Teacher Educators Are KeyWe recently posed a question to the Developing Globally Competent Teachers LinkedIn group about language learning among pre-service teachers. It sparked a lively discussion, indicating there is a communal feeling that language needs to be considered in teacher preparation—and that teacher educators hold the key. Teacher educators can encourage pre-service teachers to pursue language study, and there are some examples of teacher preparation programs supporting their faculty in this endeavor.

Paula Cordeiro, Dean of USD's program, noted she actively seeks faculty who speak multiple languages and provides incentives for language learning. To support faculty and students who want to develop world language skills, Malfatti recruits native Spanish speakers to participate in monthly Spanish round-table discussions and hopes it will spark interest in other languages. Jayne Fleener, Dean of the College of Ed. at NC State University, is leading a major internationalization effort with multiple institutions in her state. She challenged other leaders to consider alternatives outside of coursework for credentialing language competency as a road to language learning for more teachers.

Malfatti sums it up well: "I know that foreign language fluency and cultural understanding are attained by those who take ownership of their cross-cultural learning, not necessarily by those who are required to enroll in a course." When all teacher education programs take ownership of ensuring their candidates are globally competent, we will see a demand—and drive—for language learning for future teachers and teacher educators alike. 

The Liberal Arts Majors That Pay the Most

Education

Salaries / Starting Salaries  1:46 pm ET  May 15, 2014 By Lauren Weber

Parents, don’t despair. Even if your child spends four years of college reading Hungarian poetry or delving deep into the Faulkner oeuvre, he or she can still earn a decent salary shortly after packing up the senior-year dorm room.

So says the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which reports that the top-paying liberal arts majors for 2014 graduates are foreign languages and literature (average starting salary $46,900) and English ($42,200). The results are based on job offers that students accepted earlier this year and were reported by employers in February 2014 primarily through a variety of government surveys.

The lowest-paid? Criminal justice and corrections ($36,200). Even visual-arts majors did marginally better.

“Employers hiring foreign languages and literatures majors did so primarily to fill elementary and middle school teaching positions,” according to the organization, which primarily represents companies that recruit on college campuses.

Indeed, the educational services industry regularly scoops up the most new college grads, said NACE, which found that schools and other employers in the field hired 463,500 individuals awarded bachelor’s degrees in 2014, with an average starting salary of $40,894. The next biggest employer for this cohort was health-care and social assistance organizations, which hired 296,000 graduates (average salary $42,623).

Employers hired English majors to work as teachers, editors, writers, managers, paralegals, and legal assistants, NACE said.

In all, the average salary for all humanities and social-science majors was $38,365, up a healthy 3.5% from 2013. Engineering majors—the highest-paid of those tracked by NACE—saw their pay rise by just 0.3%, to $62,719.

For all U.S. nongovernment workers, average weekly earnings rose by 1.5% from February 2013 to February 2014, according to the Department of Labor.

Are you a fan of "Cursive Writing?"

It's just about time for you to fill out those GAPP applications.  This is something which is done by hand.  I'm amazed by how often I find myself returning an application to a students with the request that it be written in pen, not pencil, and that it be legible.  Your host family will want to read every word.  I'd like to learn that our school district cares about this subject.

On the other side of the ocean, our partners generally write their GAPP applications using cartridge ink pens.  These applications are a privilege to hold in your hand, and I'm proud sharing them with my students and their families.  It is clear that penmanship is an important subject in their curriculum.

Psychology Today published this article earlier this year, which I'm happy to have found, and excited to share it with you.  It's not too late! 

What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain

Cursive writing makes kids smarter 

Published on March 14, 2013 by William R. Klemm, D.V.M, Ph.D. in Memory Medic

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inShare

Ever try to read your physician’s prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don’t know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren can’t read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can’t (or won’t) write his own name on the new money being printed.
When we adults went to school, one of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an “ancient skill.”[1]

 

The primary schools that teach handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation's largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Cursive is not generally taught after the third grade (my penmanship class was in the 7^th grade; maybe its just coincidence, but the 7^th grade was when I was magically transformed from a poor student into an exceptional student).

 

Yet scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn “functional specialization,”[2] that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.

There is spill-over benefit for thinking skills used in reading and writing. To write legible cursive, fine motor control is needed over the fingers. Students have to pay attention and think about what and how they are doing it. They have to practice. Brain imaging studies show that cursive activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding.

Much of the benefit of hand writing in general comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of drawing letters. During one study at Indiana University to be published this year,[3] researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters. The brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading was activated during hand writing, but not during typing. This lab has also demonstrated that writing letters in meaningful context, as opposed to just writing them as drawing objects, produced much more robust activation of many areas in both hemispheres.
In learning to write by hand, even if it is just printing, a child’s brain must:

• Locate each stroke relative to other strokes.
• Learn and remember appropriate size, slant of global form, and feature detail characteristic of each letter.
• Develop categorization skills.

Cursive writing, compared to printing, is even more beneficial because the movement tasks are more demanding, the letters are less stereotypical, and the visual recognition requirements create a broader repertoire of letter representation. Cursive is also faster and more likely to engage students by providing a better sense of personal style and ownership.

Other research highlights the hand's unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington, reported her study of children in grades two, four and six that revealed they wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.[4]

There is a whole field of research known as “haptics,” which includes the interactions of touch, hand movements, and brain function.[5] Cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate visual, and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity. School systems, driven by ill-informed ideologues and federal mandate, are becoming obsessed with testing knowledge at the expense of training kids to develop better capacity for acquiring knowledge.

The benefits to brain development are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper. Not everybody can afford a computer for their kids−maybe such kids are not as deprived as we would think.

Take heart. Some schools just celebrated National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23. Cursive is not dead yet. Parents need to insist that cursive be maintained in their local school.

-----

Obama Features German Education

in his State of the Union Address, 2013

Here are two quotes:

•  The CEO of Siemens* America – a company that brought hundreds of new jobs to
North Carolina – has said that if we upgrade our infrastructure, they'll bring even more jobs.


             * Siemens is one of Germany's largest technology companies.

•  Let's also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they're ready for a job.  At schools like P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York, and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering.


This isn't to endorse Mr. Obama, but rather to highlight the positives in German education.

You can read the president's address at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/13/state-of-the-union-full-text

Newburyport MA to reinstate middle school German

Gute Nachrichten  ( = Good news.  Another community is smartening up regarding the enormous deficit that comes with denying language learning in schools.) 
August 20, 2012

Foreign language making comeback

Fund will begin to restore middle school program

By Lynne HendricksCorrrespondent

NEWBURYPORT — Thanks to an unforeseen uptick in Chapter 70 funds from the state, the Newburyport School Department is making good on a promise to restore Spanish and German classes at Rupert A. Nock Middle School this year.

While the new foreign language program won’t match the robust curriculum that dissolved in 2007 to balance a decimated budget, Superintendent Marc Kerble said it represents a creative use of approximately $94,000 of additional funding.

The return of the classes is being applauded by both parents and School Committee members who went on record earlier this year in expressing a fervent desire for the restoration of the program.

“At the School Committee (budget) meeting, I said I was committed to bringing back some of the foreign language program if we got more money,” Kerble said. “We’re going to start this in September 2012, and hopefully we can grow the program over a three-year period by extending the time.”

Under the new program, middle school students will receive some level of foreign language curriculum. Sixth-graders will receive 20 sessions, or a trimester, in either Spanish or German. Seventh-graders will get a half year and eighth-graders will receive an entire year of study. Class time will be offered to all students twice in the six-day schedule....

Kerble said the program will cost approximately $63,000 to start, .... and expects (that) finding the right person who is capable of providing quality instruction in both languages will be key, he said.  “What’s most important is that we get a highly qualified, dynamic teacher,” Kerble said.

The superintendent said his plans to grow the program next year will be guided by a mini ad hoc committee that he hopes to assemble early this year.

Kerble said the expansion of the school district’s foreign language program is vitally important, especially given the hurdles students face in tackling languages for the first time when they get to high school.

“I think people are pleased we’re moving forward,” Kerble said. “I think people would like to have a robust foreign language program right out of the gate. But this is going to be exciting. It will be new, and it will be exciting.”

Apprenticing with Siemens (Free College Education/Training)

Rethinking those expensive U.S. college degrees... [In North Kingstown, when we hosted the German Company EWAG, it used to offer these same amazing 4-year apprenticeships.]  

A Different Road To Work, Bypassing College...

NPR BROADCAST  July 26, 2012 from WUNC   by Asma Khalid 

Rebeca Espinal admits with a shy smile that she's a straight-A math student. She's a high school graduate who dreamed of going to college.  Instead, Espinal, 17, is working in a Charlotte, N.C., factory that makes gas turbines and generators. She is an apprentice with the German company Siemens.

"I was planning on getting a degree in international relations, but without financial aid, and how difficult it is to pay for college and everything," she says, "...when Siemens came along and gave me the offer, it was too good of an opportunity to just let it go."  With college costs rising and student debt mounting, a group of college-prep kids in Charlotte are opting for an alternative route: European-style apprenticeships.

Rebeca Espinal (center) and other apprentices work on Siemens' factory floor in Charlotte, N.C.   --Asma Khalid for NPR

Siemens hired her and five other apprentices last year. These days, Espinal works on the factory floor.  "Running a machine, learning about programs, how to set up a machine for a program, also learning how to use tools and learning how to read blueprints," she says.

Espinal learns all this with the help of her personal mentor, Danny Hawkins. He likes to call her Dora the Explorer. You can see the resemblance.

"It's a great way for these young people to learn that there is a demand for skilled workers," Hawkins says. "Siemens has a very large workforce that's fixing to retire, and there's nobody to replace them."

When Espinal finishes her four-year training program, she'll graduate with an associate's degree, a journeyman's certificate in machining and a guaranteed job that includes a starting salary of around $44,000 a year.

Pushing Past Stigmas

Espinal is part of Siemens' first apprenticeship class here.  But these apprenticeships in Charlotte go back to 1995 when the Austrian manufacturer Blum couldn't find skilled workers.  So Blum created Apprenticeship 2000, a co-op with seven other local firms. It was revolutionary for its time. But Andreas Thurner, who runs the program, says it suffered from an American stigma against blue-collar work.

"You have this one-way path in America — of college education.  So you can imagine, we had a lot of resistance from counselors, from teachers, from principals," Thurner says.

Over time, the stigma faded as the program grew. This year, Apprenticeship 2000 received a record number of applications. The companies foot the bill for training that costs about $160,000 per student over the course of four years.

"I think it's a small price to pay because I know the time when we couldn't do what we do now," Thurner says. "We couldn't grow the business. We could not get machines in that they wanted because we didn't have the people to run it."

Thurner says there's no alternative to this on-the-job training. Modern manufacturing is high-tech, so you're dealing with expensive equipment. Push the wrong button and you've got a $50,000 mistake.

Embracing New Dreams

On days when the apprentices aren't on the job, they're at Central Piedmont Community College in downtown Charlotte. The companies partnered with the school to develop a curriculum that mixes mechanics and electronics.  Today, the apprentices are learning about chain drives.

Espinal, the straight-A math student, says she doesn't regret giving up that international relations major.  "I don't regret it because you have opportunities in this company to grow," she says. "And so one of my goals ultimately in this company is to become an engineer, and possibly, you know, travel around the world, go to other Siemens factories, and maybe, you know, work with other engineers from other countries."

There are more than 20 other apprentices in Espinal's class. And they're smart — some tell stories of taking advanced placement courses or receiving the top grades in physics.  But apprenticeships are still fighting an image battle. Only 0.3 percent of the American workforce are apprentices, according to a report from American University economist Robert Lerman.

"It's a very minor phenomenon," he says. Lerman, a fellow at the Urban Institute, says studies show students truly benefit from on-the-job training.  "I do not understand why there isn't a much bigger push toward shifting funding toward apprenticeship programs," he says.  Lerman is hopeful, though. He says these days there's more willingness to discuss apprenticeships as a viable career alternative. It seems the crummy economy is encouraging parents and kids to rethink the value of an expensive college degree.

NOTE:  I worked (as Bilingual Export Administrator) for one of the many US branches of SIEMENS before I got married. This company is rock solid!

USA Schulen: FB-Spiel braucht Teilnehmer

Facebook Game promoted by former German pupil needs participants for Aug. 15 launch. . .

A new project called Ed Zed Omega is an alternate reality game spiraling around 6 high school drops-outs, who  crowdsource through social media explaining why high school isn't giving them what they need. It's an interactive documentary seeking to figure out what's wrong with the U.S. education system and the game launches August 15th. www.edzedomega.org


With game launch day sign just around the corner, there's a big push for sign-ups on the Ed Zed Omega  Facebook page, to engage with the characters in the game.

  http://www.facebook.com/events/155960857874048/?notif_t=plan_user_joined

Any help with outreach?  Super.  Danke.