"Harry Walker is the principal of Sandy Plains Elementary School in Baltimore County, Maryland. Fourth and fifth graders at the school are piloting one-to-one computing with iPod touches. In addition, Harry is a doctoral student at John Hopkins University. He's investigating the impact of iPod touch on student achievement."
"School and district leaders that are thinking about personalizing education tell us one of their top concerns is how to train, support, and develop teachers effectively to teach in ways that may feel new and unfamiliar. As former educators we agree that this is crucial, and are happy that they recognize the challenge and are ready to take it on.
First and foremost, in order to support the teachers we are asking to teach in blended learning environments we have to understand the implications on teaching practice. Over the past three years, we've worked with thousands of teachers tackling the question of how to personalize learning in their classrooms and we've gathered a set skills into 5 domains of blended learning teaching that we believe are new skills to master for veteran and novice teachers alike.
This five-domain rubric was created, not for evaluation purposes (there are enough evaluation rubrics out there!), but for teachers to be able to self-assess, set goals and progress. In the same way, we want blended learning to allow for students to have a better understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses, we want teachers to be able to identify blended specific skills and better understand their own strengths and areas for growth. We wanted to give teachers, their coaches, and their leaders, a sense of what to strive for, and help them plot a path to get there through aligned professional development. We also found that the teachers we work with cherish the opportunity to self-reflect, identify the skills they have and the skills they need, and take the time to set goals around where they want to shift their practice. Many of our schools infuse these concepts into community of practices discussions for continuous learning."
Wow, nice concept. Getting further into subjectivity though. Where do we get an understanding of how to determine a pieces distinct 'evaluative criteria'
Thus, the
dilemma: Either our instruction and
our assessment remain “out of synch” or the instruction gets worse in order
that students’ writing can be easily judged with the help of rubrics.
In fact, when the how’s of
assessment preoccupy us, they tend to chase the why’s back into the
shadows.
We have to reassess
the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it’s consistent
with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.