The Tenacious Teacher (http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/teaching-strategies-for.../id263604316) does a good job of responding to a variety of areas like differentiated instruction, lesson planning, visual aids, and learning styles. I could see many teachers getting ideas and improving methods by listening to this podcast. I listened to the podcast on differentiated instruction and the teacher gave an example of a lesson with differentiated instruction using the same text. She recommended each student with the same text but different assignments for example lower level could do writing on characters, intermediate will write on the setting, and advanced will identify and write about the plot. She also talked about how magazines as an alternative to text books create interest and engagement. She then said student could have the choice in class to use an audio version of a book and read, or watch a movie and read the book.

The NPR Education Podcast (http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/npr-education-podcast/id270655782) is about National news and laws being looked at in education. The episode I listened to was on the hot topic of teacher tenure (airing 2-17-11) and the host interviewed two people on different sides of the issue. The two main arguments that came out of the episode were there are no jobs that don’t take into account performance and just look at years in the profession. (this was a person against tenure) The person for tenure said, that the union should come up with ways of evaluation and the most successful case is in California where teachers rate each other and discuss improvement plans together. The person for tenure also brought up an incident where a Principal of a school was evaluating teachers poorly before stepping foot in the classroom and telling there assistant Principal to do the same. I found this podcast to spark lots of arguments within myself because there are teacher who don’t try after they get tenure.  Those teachers are not there for the kids and hurt everyone else’s academic progress with the students. However there is a scare when people want to judge you on academic progress with each student sometimes we have no control over what a student does with their life.