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The first step in gaining awareness is to pay attention to what’s going on. On the surface, this sounds simple enough. However, the devil is in the details. You must be intentional about looking for, and noticing, different components of your classroom. (Hall & Simeral, 2015, p. 52) Read more
I recently read the following quote and thought it a great reminder as a new school year begins:
“…development and learning are primarily social processes, and learning cannot be separated from its social context.” (Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition, 2010 cited in Ruiz-Primo, 2010)
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August is the time of year when finalized standardized test scores are released to school districts and shortly thereafter shared publicly. It is a time for celebration, frustration, disappointment, and sometimes even a sense of panic or urgency that leads to questions such as, “What are we going to do? How do we share these with our community?” Read more
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It’s been well-established in the literature around professional learning communities that team-developed common assessments can serve as powerful tools to monitor students’ level of proficiency in the essential standards (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, and Mattos 2016). Read more
A deeply held and widely shared belief in education is the “summer slide.” For nine months, teachers and students work tirelessly to build student achievement only to have it unravel over the summer. Upon returning to school, teacher conversations are laced with laments of the learning lost. This blog post is not an argument concerning the reality of the summer slide; rather, I am pondering why the idea of a summer slide makes me so uncomfortable. Read more
Think of any group of thirty people whose only commonality is their age. Would it be reasonable to expect that each member of that group has the same ability in mathematics? That they all read at the same level with the same fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary? They all have the same writing ability and can produce high-level prose on any topic? Would they all demonstrate the same self-regulation in social situations? I think we can readily agree it would be folly to make those broad assumptions. Read more
As a classroom teacher I studied, routinely, how to become a better teacher. I constantly questioned how I could improve instruction so that the students I was teaching could learn at high levels. It was important for me to improve my craft so that I could help my students maximize their potential. When I became a campus administrator I began thinking about my teaching in a different way.
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I have been working with a teaching colleague in her first and second grade combined classroom for the last number of months. Together, we have been exploring ways to enhance young learners’ abilities to self-assess. Over a series of lessons, we have focused on inviting students to practice some of the sub-habits needed for self-assessment (I have outlined these habits in a previous blog post). This past week, we were working on the sub-habits of revisiting, revising, analyzing, and decision-making (all important parts of a strong self-assessment process).
Since schools and districts transitioned to using the Common Core standards, I’ve been asked a number of times to show teachers how to write questions similar to the new high stakes tests. For example, PARCC has three different types of ELA items: Evidence-based selected response questions, technology-enhanced constructed response items, and prose-constructed response items.
The average…I can’t remember how many times as a student I was told, “It will all average out in the end.” It was said time and time again that things would be fine even if I had a low score here and there. Read more
