Group items tagged

"This is how evaluation and reporting works in the student-centered classroom that I like to call a Results Only Learning Environment (ROLE). There is no room for numbers, percentages or letter grades in a ROLE. Instead, students collaborate with each other and with their teacher, in order to demonstrate mastery of various objectives contained in yearlong projects. Learning is a conversation built on a system of summary, explanation, redirection and resubmission - something all stakeholders in the classroom come to know simply as SE2R. If a report card is required, the student and teacher agree on what that final grade should be, based on how all feedback was handled throughout a grading period."

"Grade Essays Faster - "Impossible!" you say? Look, we can't grade the essays for you, but we can reduce the repetitive, inefficient manual labor involved - and in doing so we open up a new world of invaluable student data. Welcome to the future."

"At Harriet Tubman Elementary in Newark, New Jersey, 5th grade teacher Yvonne Copprue-McLeod teaches a lesson about reading comprehension and answering open-ended questions using textual evidence. Ms. Copprue-McLeod's strategy for her lesson is to have students work in groups, using specific details from the text to draw inferences and answer questions about the main character in the text. This lesson is aligned with multiple 5th grade Common Core ELA standards (RL.5.1, RF.5.4, SL.5.1, SL.5.4)."

"NEW YORK - Technology is in every room at P.S. 101 in Brooklyn - it's even in the hallways. Scan the QR code with your phone outside of the fourth-grade classroom of co-teachers Vanessa Desiano and Jamie Coccia and a video will pop up of a student giving a history presentation on early explorers. Step inside, and fourth-grade students are working together to discover the themes of chapter 13 in their latest book, The Birchbark House, and typing what they find on iPads."

"At the time of this writing, we are in the second year of a sixth-grade project-based learning program in a public school setting. In our two years of working to implement PBL, we have fielded a multitude of questions ranging from positive support to queries about the efficacy of policies that we feel best support PBL (grading for mastery, group work, etc.). Our experiences have taught us that district administration can fill three distinct roles to help streamline the PBL implementation process, which we'll discuss in this post."

"Adults forget all that they do while reading. We are predicting, making connections, contextualizing, critiquing, and already plotting how we might use any new insights or information. Yep, we do all that when we read. As teachers, we need to train students in each of these skills, and begin to do so early on. I was recently in a second-grade classroom where 70 percent instruction was in English and 30 percent in Spanish. Most of the children spoke Spanish as their first or home language. "

"Sunnyside Unified School District, a self-proclaimed "tech-savvy school district" in Tucson, AZ, has completed the introduction of a 1-to-1 program for the 2012-2013 school year for students in grades 4 through 9. As part of that initiative, the district, with about 18,000 students, implemented a new learning environment with digital curriculum aligning with the Common Core State Standards for core subject areas, encompassing math, language arts, social studies, and science."

"By setting up ways to get frequent feedback from students' works in progress, we can find out what they need-before it's too late. Several years ago, I decided that if I were going to spend time writing comments on my students' writing work or on assignments connected to their in-class reading, those comments had to do more than justify a grade. They had to give targeted feedback that would show students how to improve the quality of their work. I'd been finding the hours I spent writing feedback on students' work discouraging. For one thing, students didn't pay attention to my comments, and, for another, the quality of their work wasn't improving. A change in how I responded to their work was necessary. If I wanted my comments to fuel improvement, I realized, I had to build in time for learners to revise their work after receiving my suggestions. Not only did I change the timing of my feedback, but I also streamlined my process of writing comments, allowing myself more time to shift instruction in response to what I'd learned from reviewing work"

"This week I'd like you to meet top-notch STEM program developer Dr. Susan Pruet. I was fortunate enough to work with Susan as she developed and directed two remarkably successful NSF-funded school reform efforts involving STEM education: the Maysville/Mobile Math Initiative and, more recently, the middle grades program Engaging Youth through Engineering. Susan - best described as a high-energy dynamo - has a talent and a well-designed process for establishing successful STEM reform initiatives. And she is masterful at joining hands with teachers, administrators, and community & business leaders to make it happen. In this guest blog post, Susan passes along some of her wisdom on how to design and implement a successful, sustainable STEM program. Here are 7 tips Susan thinks you should know up front."

"A performance task is any learning activity or assessment that asks students to perform to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and proficiency. Performance tasks yield a tangible product and/or performance that serve as evidence of learning. Unlike a selected-response item (e.g., multiple-choice or matching) that asks students to select from given alternatives, a performance task presents a situation that calls for learners to apply their learning in context. Performance tasks are routinely used in certain disciplines, such as visual and performing arts, physical education, and career-technology where performance is the natural focus of instruction. However, such tasks can (and should) be used in every subject area and at all grade levels."

"Here's a fun thought experiment for teaching current events: With infinite class time and thinking time, how could I reach every single eighth-grade U.S. history student where he or she is most curious and invested? If one student can't get enough of foreign policy accords and another wants to read only feel-good stories about human nature, what could I do for each of them in class? How could this attention play out in their lives, now and in the future?"

"February 5, 2011 Paula Naugle and Jan Wells are 4th grade teachers from Louisiana and Kansas. In this webinar they share their lessons learned, experiences, and celebrations as Skype buddies."

"Just look at the fourth- and fifth-grade students at Dater Elementary School. They participated in a "Global Progressive Story," collaborating with students from 200 schools in 21 states and eight countries on 18 stories that are featured on the website writeyourstory.wikispace.com."

"As seventh grade students at Mt. Ararat Middle School finish reading a memoir by a former Afghan refugee, they had an opportunity to delve deeper into the narrative Friday by communicating electronically with one of the key characters via Skype. Using Skype, an online videoconferencing tool, the students conversed with Alyce Litz, who plays a prominent role in the book "The Other Side Of The Sky: A Memoir" by Farah Ahmedi. The book was previously published in 2005 as "The Story Of My Life, An Afghan Girl On The Other Side Of The Sky."

Included "grading" of states from A+ to F

"Most teachers use silencing methods, such as flicking the lights, ringing a call bell (see Teacher Tipster's charming video on the subject), raising two fingers, saying "Attention, class," or using Harry Wong's Give Me 5. There is also the "three fingers" version, which stands for stop, look, and listen. Fortunately, none of these involve medical hoaxes. Lesser known techniques are described in this post and categorized by grade bands:"

Children in the Mehlville district may have the chance in two years to attend an elementary school with an alternative curriculum - one that uses real-world problems to help students learn and without the restraints grade levels sometimes place on learning. It would be a school that parents would choose, and there would be no admission requirements. If more children apply than there are seats available, the district would hold a lottery. That kind of competition for classroom seats has largely been limited regionally to the city of St. Louis. There, district magnet and choice schools, along with independent charter schools, offer language immersion education and schooling that focuses on science, engineering, technology and math. Mehlville Superintendent Chris Gaines received preliminary approval from the district's School Board last week to move ahead with a "Choice School of Innovation" that would be the only of its kind in St. Louis County.

"All educators care deeply about their students' motivation. They want them to love learning, and to be resourceful and persistent in the face of learning challenges. They don't want their students to lose heart when they get stuck, make mistakes, or receive disappointing grades. In this context, the growth mindset entered the scene. A growth mindset is the belief that you can develop your talents and abilities through hard work, good strategies, and help from others. It stands in opposition to a fixed mindset, which is the belief that talents and abilities are unalterable traits, ones that can never be improved. Research has shown (and continues to show) that a growth mindset can have a profound effect on students' motivation, enabling them to focus on learning, persist more, learn more, and do better in school. Significantly, when students are taught a growth mindset, they begin to show more of these qualities."

"'We must reimagine middle school science and math not as a way to prepare students for high school, but as a place where students are inventors, scientists, and mathematicians today.' So say Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager in this exciting guest article about the Maker Movement and its implications for kids, schools and STEM studies. Martinez and Stager are the authors of a must-read book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. In this informative post, they encourage STEM educators, school leaders and teachers across the curriculum to transform our classrooms into centers of innovative thinking and experimenting. ~ Anne Jolly"

"3. Atop the Mountain, Into the Sea On the board, I draw a picture of a mountain overlooking the sea. A lone figure stands perched atop the mountain's summit and another swims among the waves below."