inside jokes are my favorite. you had to be there.

i don't know where i'd be without a sense of humor,
but i'm betting it's a darkdark place that smells like fear and urinal cake.

live from new york, it's saturday night,
and i'm hard at work in the library.

Natan Edelsburg, a junior in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, got sold on Twitter at the Eden Rock Hotel in Miami, Florida. While exercising on a LifeFitness machine, he sent a tweet to the company: LifeFitness Love your new machine. Within a few minutes he got a thank you and a recommendation for a portable treadmill for his New York City apartment.

Edelsburg, who is interested in new digital media, PR, social media tools, advertising and other forms of marketing, liked the way that Twitter allowed you to pose a question to your followers and hear back immediately. He was also taken by Gregory Galant, the CEO of SawHorse Media, a guest lecturer in his production class. Before his lecture, Galant tweeted to his followers: Going to speak at NYU, what should I speak about? One of the tweets he received from a follower was: Why don’t you talk about how in the future there won’t be a New York Times because their stock is worth less than the Sunday paper?

Edelsburg kept Galant’s business card. He was interested in how the CEO's media company developed Twitter sites to mainstream conversations among niche communities. Higher education was the niche community Edelsburg knew best. He created GlobalQuad, a site that aggregates tweets from colleges and universities, during his internship with SawHorse.

“The site links different schools across the country and the globe, and you really get a sense of those who had been smart enough to venture onto Twitter to try and connect with current and prospective students,” Edelsburg said.

GlobalQuad picks up all tweets from NYU’s official Twitter accounts. At any given moment, a visitor can read a post generated from Steinhardt’s Undergraduate Student Government, NYUAlumni, and even select faculty.

“If you follow NYU's feeds, you'll learn who Jay Rosen is,” Edelsburg said. “Professor Rosen has over 28,000 followers and is constantly ‘mind-casting.’”

Edelsburg notes that GlobalQuad is not only an easy way to see these different conversations, but “it's a fun and exciting portal into the minds of many of the influential people who make up our great university.”

Follow Natan Edesburg on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/twatan.

November 5, 2009

Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20202

Dear Secretary Duncan:

I appreciated your recent visit to New York and was present for both your speech on community schools, hosted by the Children’s Aid Society and the National Center for Community Schools, and your speech on teacher education, hosted by Teachers College.

You paint a very discouraging picture of teacher education in our nation’s universities. Yet many of your suggestions for improving teacher education are already being implemented in many schools of education. Consistent with your recommendations regarding recruitment of high quality teacher candidates, New York University undergraduate students are accepted into our program through a central admissions process and must meet NYU’s criteria for acceptance. Our freshman class’ SATs are regularly over 1300 in average scores; at the graduate level, we require a minimum GPA of 3.0. All of our students have majors in arts and science disciplines.

Students are placed early and often in high need public schools in Harlem, East Harlem, the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. They are supervised by a mentor teacher, University supervisor, and school site supervisor. We have memoranda of agreement with 21 host schools with whom we partner; we place aspiring teachers, America Reads/Counts tutors, coaches, faculty teams, and University courses in these schools. The NYU pre-student teaching internship requirement includes observations of teachers and classroom systems, interactions as tutors with individual struggling learners, observation of the systems of the school (leadership, counseling, social work), interactions with parents and other community stakeholders, and service learning projects. By the time they graduate, students have completed a minimum of 660 hours of school-based work. All undergraduate elementary education students are prepared for dual certification as elementary special education teachers.

We agree that evidence needs to inform every aspect of a teacher education program. Students at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development study the current research on best practices in teaching and student learning, with emphasis on second language learners, children with special needs, and children living in poverty. Students also are learning to use the Achievement Reporting Innovation System (ARIS), the New York Department of Education’s tool for evidence based decision making. However, we need more research that identifies the best practices in each subject area and for different ages, abilities, and developmental levels of children and youth.

While we agree that there is a broad consensus in the research and policy communities that a high quality teacher is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for student learning, the pathway that leads to high quality teaching and student achievement is less clear. While some studies indicate that teachers who are certified are more effective, a number of studies have tried to identify whether traditional teacher education programs, alternative routes, or programs like Teach for America are more likely to produce teachers who are highly effective. The conclusion from this research is unambiguous: there is more “within group difference” than “between group differences.” In other words, just knowing the route through which one enters teaching, is not very helpful in predicting which teachers will be highly effective. The more important question is: what are the ingredients of a good teacher education program?

You said at Teachers College, “I don’t think the ingredients of a good teacher preparation program are much of a mystery anymore.” However, a number of studies are pointing to the complex and multifaceted activities that characterize effective teaching and need to be part of an effective teacher education program. We need more of these studies to direct quality teacher education programs; we need more research that identifies best practices in each subject area, and for different ages, abilities and developmental levels of children and youth.

While key leaders agree that understanding how to help an individual become an effective teacher is essential, research that can inform policy makers, teacher preparation faculty, or practitioners is sparse. According to Bruce Alberts, Science’s Editor-in-Chief, “Teacher recruitment, preparation, retention, and professional development all need to be informed by scientific research in education” (Science, 323, January 2, 2009, p. 15). Recognizing that much of this scientific work remains to be done, Alberts pledged to devote regular space in Science to research on K-12 curricula, pedagogy, assessment and school management. However, less than half of 1% of the federal education budget is spent on education research (compared to about 20% of the health budget). A fraction of the education research budget is devoted to identifying what variables, in what order, and in what form of delivery are requisite for preparing effective teachers. Furthermore, measuring teacher effectiveness is complicated by the fact that many districts assign new teachers to the most troubled schools and to teach the students with the most challenges.  We need increased funding for education research that identifies what teachers should know and be able to do so that all children in all disciplines achieve at high levels.

We also engage in continuous examination of the evidence about our teacher candidates’ effectiveness. Steinhardt’s Center for Research on Teaching and Learning assesses aspiring teachers using a battery of instruments:

1. GPA of core content, pedagogical core, student teaching and liberal arts courses;

2. Student Teacher End of Term Feedback Questionnaire;

3. Educational Beliefs Questionnaire;

4. Supervising Teacher’s Ratings;

5. The Domain Referenced Teacher Observation Scale (DRSTOS-Revised), a teacher observation instrument that is based on the work of Charlotte Danielson (Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching, 1996);

6. One-year follow up surveys; and

7. New York State Teacher Certification Exams.

Our ongoing research on program effectiveness now includes matching exit data on our graduates with their students’ New York City achievement data and with other observation tools that assess teacher effectiveness. We have been tracking these measures of our graduates for several years, including employment in NYC public schools and value-added standardized test scores for their pupils. In addition to tracking these data for individual graduates, we have administered surveys to cohorts of graduates, including exit surveys and one-year follow-up surveys. This December, we will administer a five-year graduate survey. Results of our assessments are reported to the Teacher Education Accreditation Council annually. Additional funding for longitudinal and controlled experimental studies that examine the behaviors of effective teachers, and the training they received, would move forward your agenda to have every teacher be highly effective.

Regarding your speech on community schools, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development embraces your vision of educating the whole child. We prepare professionals to work collaboratively across the fields of education, psychology, health, media and the arts. We understand that while effective teachers are essential for children’s learning, the teacher and schools only control about 45% of the variance in student outcomes; health, poverty, and English language proficiency all affect students’ ability to learn.

We applaud you for putting your office and talents behind efforts at NYU Steinhardt and other universities to provide highly effective teachers for our nation’s schools. We look forward to partnering with you to achieve that goal. We respectfully ask that you increase the resources devoted to research on teacher preparation, support university efforts to make teacher education an all-university commitment, fund innovative efforts to provide full service and community schools, and make funding available to build strong university-school partnerships.

Thank you for all your efforts on behalf of the children and youth of America.

Sincerely,

Mary Brabeck, Ph.D.

Dean and Professor of Applied Psychology

tonight i'm at a loss for words. my head and my heart are with the wounded.

okay, fine. i'm starting this off by blogging about blogging.
(forgive me not.)

i could bombard you with my thoughts on the matter,
or list the intimate details of posting my first post,
but it's early and i'm running late for work.

i mean, i always knew my first time would be a total disappointment.
but whatever. who else do you know that got a Blog Job from NYU?

so i'm walking back to my place with my sony walkman blaring, hardbodies everywhere. new york at night is something you have to see to believe. while i'm sidestepping puddles and i start thinking about the lifelong process of identity development, a common theme to every class i've taken at NYU, minus basic statistics, but math doesn't count for anything other than major requirements. i do believe that there is no better time or place to examine these defining qualities of self and other than here in these moments, in this city. this city that keeps us up at night with its freedoms, its big, fat licenses to be whatever our little hearts desire. no prerequisites, and no commitments until the morning comes, this is what we love.

so we spend all kinds of time deciding what to wear and then even more hours actually getting dressed and deciding how we look. we look hot and we're forever running late. but we make it just in time and we cram ourselves into a room somewhere, and look up in hopes for high ceilings (is there roof access?) as we talk amongst ourselves about how ridiculous everyone else looks. amidst the loosely organized chaos, we'll note the excessive make-up and too tight clothes, the hot and the heavies. you'll laugh a lot at some things, and something else will make you want to cry as there will be some sights you'll wish you had never seen. you'll wonder what your mother would think as you wait in line for the bathroom and wonder what in god's name is taking so long. then something else will catch your wandering eyes. some thing will amaze you, and somethings will attract you (hey, nice glasses...). plus you'll get offered all kinds of candy from all kinds of strangers, you'll give up trying to catch a cab and in that long walk home you'll see a lot of men in very little women's clothing. it's great.

believe it or not, a lot of that happens on halloween too.
really the only difference between halloween and any other night in new york is that on halloween a bunch of people dress all crazy-like and take to the streets.
really the only difference between halloween and any other night in new york is that on no other night is there easy access to so many pumpkins.

when i got home i realized, there are no more barriers to cross. all i have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem i have caused and my utter indifference toward it i have now surpassed. my pain is constant and sharp and i do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact i want my pain to be inflicted on others. i want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and i gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. this confession has meant nothing.

relax, it's from a movie based on a book.
RIP Patrick Bateman.

and tonight's developmental psych lecture is cancelled. go team.