Group items tagged

What I will say is that any comparison of the Iowa Core to the Common Core is not an apples-to-apples comparison. The Iowa Core is not standards and benchmarks and has never pretended to be.

Clear achievement targets or criteria for success are provided to students and parents in student friendly language before instruction begins. Doing so informs students what is expected of them upfront. Imagine how difficult it would be for a young person to build a log cabin for the first time without a picture, and then get graded on how similar their log home is to the picture they did not get to see. That would not be fair. However, providing clear achievement targets to students and parents before instruction begins can be a very efficient, effective, equitable formative assessment strategy.

Yet in spite of growing awareness of the importance of developing global skills, few students around the world have the opportunity today to become globally competent.

People watch their leaders far more closely than most leaders will ever realize.

Teachers whose areas overlap - such as all the educators in the same grade level at an elementary school, or those who teach the same subject - meet twice a week to coordinate lesson plans and review data on students' progress.

It is a flawed assumption to believe that the presence of the right structures alone will ensure teams are successful.

One of the simplest ways principals can monitor the work of teams is to be visible and available.

Effective principals recognize that “a critical step in moving an organization from rhetoric to reality is to establish the indicators of progress to be monitored, the process for monitoring them, and the means for sharing the results throughout the organization.”

Instead, school leaders should ask that teachers meet with ONE collaborative group and one collaborative group only. Then, they should require that collaborative groups make formative assessment a priority. Meetings should focus on studying formative assessment data, creating exemplars, improving rubrics, and designing remediation and enrichment opportunities for kids. The simple truth is teachers just don’t have the time to do formative assessment correctly if their attention is divided between the kinds of traditional meetings we’ve always been required to attend.

When we discuss the Iowa Core, this is an example of what we need to do. Get rid of the rest of that stuff. Determine what is important. And then have a deeper lesson, leading to deeper conceptual and procedural knowledge, with authentic and formative assessment. Which will lead to permanent learning.

Developing the data collection system involves decisions about when to collect progress data and which rubric to use.

If a student has not made adequate progress toward an objective, the team needs to have a conversation to decide what to do.

The visual format of the intervention form enables team members to quickly review the data and make decisions about the intervention.