By now hopefully you’ve read about Frederick Douglass High School‘s national championship team in the Capitol Hill Challenge competition — either in the AJC or right here (and right here) in Talk Up APS. They’ve become quite the celebrities, and will be featured at noon Sunday on CW69’s “Focus Atlanta.” Here we speak with team sponsor and Douglass history teacher Jill Beracki (center) along with team captain and rising junior Brandon Dykes (left) and rising senior Tydious Mitchell. Students and teacher are in Douglass’ Business and Entrepreneurship academy.
If you’ve been following Talk Up APS this week, you’ll notice we’ve been offering sneak previews of the Spring issue of The Atlanta Educator. So far we’ve given little bits of profiles of some of our middle-school chess champions and a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that will boost our Effective Teacher in Every Classroom (ETEC) Initiative.
We also recommend that you check out this video from our media-production team of Armon Moore and Scott King, as they highlight two other features in the issue: an exchange program between teachers at Bolton Academy that led to a visit from by teachers from Turkey, and a profile of veteran Gideons Elementary Gifted and Talented instructor Darlene Johnson Dobbs (pictured, above). These are just a few examples of the wonderful articles you can read in the Spring edition of The Atlanta Educator.
We here at Talk Up APS want to make sure that everyone is able to share all the good news that’s going on around the district with as many people as possible. Often times, we cut and paste links/URLs of certain blog posts into emails to friends and supporters. Have you? And have you ever had trouble sending a copy of a particular link? It may be because, when clicking on our blog, you’re probably only getting the “masked domain” name of the WordPress site we use. And everytime you click on www.TalkUpAPS.com and the click on links to stories, you will keep getting www.TalkUpAPS.com instead of a unique URL.
So, next time you’d like to share a link to a story on our blog, simply remember to type in “www.TalkUpAPS.WordPress.com” (or without all those capitalized letters!) and THEN click on the headline to the story. You’ll then find a unique URL that you can cut and paste and share with as many people as you like!
We just learned we already have enjoyed our busiest month (in terms of page views) for Talk Up APS since starting the blog last summer, and we want to keep you, our readers, coming back. We’d also like to encourage you to take advantage of our Comments link to provide feedback on the stories we post. (We sure saw that used to great effect on the many wonderful comments you had for APS Teacher of the Year Hilaire Anelone!) Keep reading about how APS is making a difference in our students’ lives.
APS Superintendent Dr. Beverly L. Hall expressed a hope to explore ways to reward quality teachers who want to stay in the classroom without having to promote them into administration positions as part of a “listen and learn” event with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (Ga.) on Monday morning at Tech High School.
“Human capital management strategies have to be implemented,” Dr. Hall said as Duncan nodded his head. “We’re going to have to look at how to incentivize the best and brightest to teach. We know what the best practices are [for teachers]. But now the question is how do we provide professional development, and give [teachers] the opportunity to lead and still teach. Our survey shows that 82 percent of our teachers said there were open to pay-for-performance. So it’s about effective leadership, and effective teachers, and wrapping that around our services to our students.” Hall made rewarding quality teachers a part of her State of the Schools speech back in August. (View the speech here.)
We here at www.TalkUpAPS.com know that our primary mission is share the incredible things that are going on around the district to show how APS is making a difference in students’ lives. So we think we know effective communication when we see it. That’s why we’re so happy to pass along a little memo about the accomplishments of Inman Middle School, assembled by Principal Dr. Betsy Bockman. We couldn’t break this down any better ourselves! We encourage all schools within APS to prepare something like this and share with their communities. Here it is, after the jump …