Rene Schillinger - The Benefits of Earning a Doctorate Degree

Making the decision to pursue a doctoral degree is not an easy one. Rene Schillinger is a doctoral candidate at the Teacher College at Columbia University and knows the heavy commitment of time and energy it is going to take to complete the program. However, both the practical and personal benefits are numerous. Here are some of the benefits you can expect when you receive a doctorate.

Earning Potential
Those that hold doctoral degrees have the highest earning potentials of all other degrees. When you hold this type of degree, you are qualified for the highest positions in academic and research settings, which have the best pay grades.

Career Flexibility and Security
When you hold a doctoral degree, you are qualified for the highest positions in academic settings, as well as some of the highest positions in non-academic settings. This provides you with the most flexible career paths.

Leadership Benefits
Holders of a doctoral degree are considered leaders in their respective fields. They regularly contribute to new, innovative ideas and are responsible for developing relevant knowledge and practices.

Along with the practical benefits listed above for those that earn a doctoral degree, it also allows you to receive an unrivaled level of understanding in your field. This, in turn, allows you to help society, like Rene Schillinger, an educational consultant in New York. As he pursues his doctoral degree, he is developing the tools that will allow him to contribute to his field's body of knowledge.

Rene Schillinger- How to Get Parents Involved in School Reform

Rene Schillinger has been an educational consultant in New York for many years. During his career, he has been involved with helping schools and school districts with improving their literacy rates and school reform. When it comes to school reform, parent involvement is an important part of the process. Successful parent involvement can help improve the behavior and attendance of students, as well as positively affecting student achievement. Many schools struggle with parental involvement and feel that their efforts to get parents involved are unsuccessful. Here are some ways to get more parents involved in their children’s education.

Improve Communication

Having an effective system of communication requires information to flow two ways. Not only do schools need to have an efficient method for getting information out to families, they also need to have a way to ensure feedback from parents is actively sought. Keep in mind that each strategy needs to be tailored to the population of the school.

Teach Both Parents and Teachers

Often times, parents remain uninvolved at their children’s schools because parents don’t know what they can do to be more involved. Taking an active role in helping parents learn a variety of ways to be involved can help increase their involvement. However, this can’t happen if the teachers feel they are unprepared to effectively involve parents.

Personalize

Each school is different; therefore, each strategy must be tailored to the specific needs of each school. Successful parent involvement programs are typically developed in response to a specific need in the school or surrounding community. They must be focused and flexible when addressing those needs.

The most important partner in a child’s education is his or her parents. Rene Schillinger has been helping schools and school districts improve literacy rates for more than ten years. 

Rene Schillinger - Teaching Vocabulary: Strategies That Work

Rene Schillinger has dedicated his life to education. He has been a consultant in the educational field for more than ten years. He spends his time working with schools that are trying to improve their literacy instruction. An important part of literacy is vocabulary knowledge. Critical to reading comprehension, it is important for young readers to develop a large word bank and effective vocabulary learning strategies. Below are some strategies that adults can employ with readers of any age. 

Pre-teaching Vocabulary Words
Before sitting down with the material, review it to determine which words may be unfamiliar to the child. Define and discuss these words to allow them to develop an understanding of the word's connotations and denotations. After you’ve pre-taught them the vocabulary words, they should read the text.

Repeated Exposure to Words
The more time we are exposed to a word, the stronger our understanding of the word becomes. Repeat vocabulary words often in order for the child to truly understand its meaning and solidify their understanding. 

Keyword Method
Prior to reading, unfamiliar words are introduced to the child, like with pre-teaching, but instead of encouraging them to remember the definition of the new word, you teach them a word clue to help them understand it. The clue might be a part of the definition, an illustration, or an image that is connected to the word to make it easier to remember. 

Restructure Reading Material
Many times grade level reading material is inaccessible to readers because too many unfamiliar words are used. Restructuring these materials in different ways can help readers comprehend them more easily. 

Vocabulary instruction involves more than simply looking up words in a dictionary and using them in a sentence. It is acquired both incidentally and intentionally through instruction and word-learning strategies. Rene Schillinger has been helping schools improve literacy through vocabulary acquisition for many years.

Rene Schillinger - The Process of Writing

Rene Schillinger is an educational consultant in New York who is dedicated to helping teachers improve their literacy instruction, including best practices relating to the teaching of writing. Writing is an important skill that is often not adequately taught in schools. As a vital life-skill that is important not only for succeeding in school, but the work world as well.
Learning to write isn't simply a question of grammar. While teaching proper sentence structure, appropriate use of tenses and punctuation is important, teaching writing must also include proper use of punctuation, paragraph structure, vocabulary, spelling, word choice, and other components of correct writing. For students to begin to understand that writing is a form of communication, they must first be taught the writing process. This process includes:

• Pre-writing – students gather information and begin to organize it into a cohesive unit. No matter the type of writing that is being done, this stage is the most important. The process includes brainstorming, reading, taking notes, and categorizing information.
• Writing – this stage is essentially an extension of the pre-writing process. The information that was gathering in the pre-writing stage is gathered and organized into a traditional format. This stage allows them to settle on the course the paper will take.
• Revising – this can include adding, deleting, rearranging, and substituting words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs. This helps them to make their writing more accurately represent their idea.
• Proofreading – in this stage, students are able to scan their writing for mistakes in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It is important for the child to do this stage themselves in order to improve their writing over time.

There are many best practices related to the teaching of writing. Rene Schillinger is dedicated to helping teachers understand these practices and showing them how they can improve their instruction in writing.

Rene Schillinger - Getting a Master’s Degree in Education

Rene Schillinger is an educational consultant who received his Master’s Degree from New York University in 1993. Like many others, he chose to obtain a Master’s in education in order to add a depth of understanding of the education he received when he earned his Bachelor’s Degree.

To get accepted into a master's degree program, you first need to obtain a Bachelor's degree from an accredited university or college. When you enroll in the program, you will need to decide on a specialty. For this, you can choose from a Master in Teaching, where you'll decide if you want to teach elementary or secondary school children, and what subject you want to teach, or you can choose a Master of Education. With this you'll need to choose between the following specialties:

• Curriculum and Instruction
• Educational Psychology
• Educational Leadership and Policy
• Special Education

The coursework for the program will depend on what area of expertise you choose to pursue. All the coursework will consist of upper-level courses, educational research, exams, and term papers. To fulfill the degree requirements, students are also required to complete a final project. This may include any of the following or a combination of these:

• A master’s thesis overseen by an adviser
• A written exam
• Non-thesis work (research project, internship, or special assignment)

Getting a master’s degree in education takes a lot of hard work and commitment to your studies, but it can be well worth it in terms of job opportunities and increased knowledge and skills. Rene Schillinger has used the knowledge gained during his master’s program to start a successful educational consulting firm, Schillinger Educational Consultants.

Rene Schillinger - Traveling Safely - Ten Important Tips

Rene Schillinger has been an avid traveler since his childhood. As the son of two parents that immigrated from Europe, he has had the privilege of being able to see the world. Travelling can be an exhilarating experience, but it can also be dangerous and scary. When you are setting off for an adventure in another part of the world, it is important to stay safe. Here are five important safety tips to keep you safe during your travels.

1. Always check with the state department before heading out. The state department provides updated safety information for every country in the world. They can provide you with travel warnings, local laws, and required vaccinations.
2. Review the escape route in your hotel room. If an emergency arises in the middle of the night, you’ll be glad you took the time to look.
3. Leave an itinerary with someone back home and check in with them every day. This way if something happens they can alert the authorities.
4. Email a copy of your passport to yourself and save a photo of it on your cell phone. It will be much easier to get a replacement if it is stolen.
5. Keep your cash and valuables out of sight. Keep some spending money easily accessible so you aren’t showing off a big wad of cash every time you pay.

Traveling to new parts of the world can be a great experience. Take it from Rene Schillinger, a man who has been traveling around the world since childhood, your trip will be much more fun when you stay safe.

Rene Schillinger - Top Ways to Reform Schools

Every year, hundreds of reforms are introduced into school systems around the United States in governance, curriculum pedagogy, technology, and many others. However, many of these reforms fail to achieve the improvements they are aiming for. Rene Schillinger has experience with Whole School Reform Models and is helping the schools in Poughkeepsie, New York improve education throughout the community. Here are some of the top ways to bring about school reform that works.

• Schools need to have a long-term vision on how education can improve equality, decrease poverty, develop a well-functioning culturally diverse society, and create a thriving economy.

• They must set ambitious standards for schools on a national level. When standards are set at the local level, they lead to varying expectations on performance and result in lower achievement overall.

• Reduce implementation gaps that are occurring within school districts. Systems that are lower in performance often have large gaps between policies that are being enacted and what is actually happening in the classroom.  

• There needs to be an effective use of resources. Schools whose expenditures are high, don't necessarily have high-performance numbers.

• Student motivation and engagement is important for successful reform. Being able to motivate students to study hard through both intrinsic and external incentives is important for student success.

School reform isn’t an easy process, but with some creative thinking and commitment, it can be accomplished. Rene Schillinger has been helping local schools with reform for over seven years.