Group items tagged

Only about six percent of teachers are ineffective, she continues. For the remaining 94 percent, the emphasis should shift from ratings to learning.

And what do we know about professional learning? That it requires: • Active intellectual engagement – That is, self-assessment, reflection on practice, and on-going conversations; • Trust – “Fear shuts people down,” says Danielson. “Learning, after all, entails vulnerability. The culture of the school and of the district must be one that encourages risk-taking.” • Challenge – “The culture must include an expectation that every teacher will engage in a career-long process of learning,” she says, “one that is never ‘finished.’ Teaching is simply too complex for anyone to believe that there is no more to learn.” • Teacher collaboration – PD and supervisory suggestions rarely drive classroom improvements, says Danielson. “Overwhelmingly, most teachers report that they learn more from their colleagues than from an ‘expert’ in a workshop… or being directed by a supervisor to read a certain book or take a particular course.” Most often, classroom improvement comes from working with colleagues analyzing student work and planning curriculum.

a new system should include: -   An emphasis on professional learning in a culture of trust and inquiry; -   A career ladder from probationary to continuing status after about three years; from that point on, the main emphasis becomes professional learning; -   Differentiation in the evaluation system, with novice teachers getting support from a mentor and being evaluated every year; -   Career teachers assessed periodically to ensure continuing quality; -   Teacher leadership positions (mentor, instructional coach, team leader) for which experienced teachers in good standing are eligible to apply; these come with training and support, extra compensation, or released time during the regular school day; -   The ability to identify seriously underperforming teachers, support their improvement, and if sufficient progress isn’t made, deny them tenure or continuing employment.

“Former service members tend to be committed to their students and tenacious in their efforts to improve,” say Parham and Gordon. Some early studies suggest that over time, veterans are stronger in classroom management, instructional practices, and student results.

Veterans who have had life-and-death combat experiences “tend to have low tolerance for petty politics in schools or for initiatives that seem unrelated to educating students. Former service members may sometimes seem overly assertive in discussions with colleagues.”

Veterans entering the classroom may feel like novices and have to adjust to their students not snapping to attention when given an order.

Veterans who are used to explicit operating procedures have to decode the unspoken expectations on how to relate to colleagues, handle student discipline, deal with parent concerns, get supplies, and get help.

“Discussions of shared experiences, shared values, and shared goals can help veterans and other teachers begin to build relationships.”

This might consist of a well-chosen mentor (similar to their “battle buddy” in the military), a support team (perhaps a grade-level or subject team that meets regularly), and a support network with other veterans in the school or district.

Veterans need an especially thorough briefing as they enter a new setting, including policies, procedures (copying machines, grading, and more), formal and informal rules, and a map of the school.

up to speed on teaching priorities, curriculum breadth versus depth, dealing with student differences, lesson planning, instructional materials, and, of course, discipline.

Support for this common challenge can come from peer coaching, observing expert teachers, workshops, articles and books, and seminars.

Rather, the mastery of new concepts happens in fits and starts. “Content should not be kept from students because it is ‘developmentally inappropriate,’” says the report. “To answer the question ‘is the student ready?’ it’s best to consider ‘has the student mastered the prerequisites?’”

Effective teachers make content explicit through carefully paced explanation, modeling, and examples; present new information through multiple modalities; and make good use of worked problems.

Effective teachers assign tasks that require explanation or require students to organize material in meaningful ways. Stories and mnemonics are also helpful in getting students to impose meaning on hard-to-remember content.

we shouldn’t push skeptical students to say, “Natural selection is one of the most important ways species came to be differentiated.” Better for them to say, “Most scientists think natural selection is one of the best explanations.”

Practice is essential to learning new facts, but not all practice is equally effective.

Frequent quizzes with low stakes, and students testing themselves, help establish long-term retention through the “retrieval effect.”

Each subject has basic facts that support higher-level learning by freeing working memory and illuminating applications.

Good feedback is specific and clear, focused on the task rather than the student, explanatory, and directed toward improvement rather than merely verifying performance.

To transfer learning to a novel problem, students need to know the problem’s context and its underlying structure.

Explicitly comparing the examples helps students remember the underlying similarities. With multi-step procedures, students need to identify and label the sub-steps so they can apply them to similar problems. It’s also helpful to alternate concrete examples and abstract representations.

Motivation is improved if students believe that intelligence and ability can be improved through hard work, and if adults respond to successful work by praising effective effort rather than innate ability. It’s also helpful for teachers to set learning goals (e.g., mastering specific material) rather than performance goals (competing with others or vying for approval).

Intrinsic motivation leads to better long-term outcomes than extrinsic motivation.

It’s difficult to gauge one’s own learning and understanding. That’s why students need to learn how to monitor their own learning through assessments, self-testing, and explanation.

Students will be more motivated and successful when they believe they belong and are accepted.

Teachers need to recognize and dispel a set of incorrect beliefs about teaching and learning: -   Misconception #1: Students have different “learning styles.” -   Misconception #2: Humans use only 10 percent of their brains. -   Misconception #3: People are preferentially “right-brained” or “left-brained” in how they think. -   Misconception #4: Novices and experts think in all the same ways. -   Misconception #5: Cognitive development progresses in age-related stages.

having students work in groups for 30-45 minutes coming up with test questions that might be used (or reworded) in the actual exam. This is a two-fer, says Lang: it not only gives students a sense of control over their learning but also serves as an effective review session.

Open assessments – This involves leaving 10 percent of the syllabus for an assignment that students create with the instructor.

Class constitutions – Having students collectively come up with ground rules for a course gives them a collegial sense of working together toward a shared purpose.

“Teaching evolutionary theory is not in and of itself religious indoctrination.” That’s because evolution is not a religion. “How could a religion have no beliefs about the supernatural? No rituals? No moral commandments?”

ask students to learn about evolution without insisting that they believe it.

Students learn new ideas by linking them to what they already know.

“It turns out children are better able to cope if they understand what they’re going through is normal, that it affects everyone, and that it will pass,” comments Adam Gamoran of the William T. Grant Foundation. “How we think about a stressful situation influences how we feel and how we perform.” Studies like this, he says, “show how deeply intertwined are cognition and emotion.”

use of Twitter in his middle-school science classroom

Connecting students to reputable, relevant scientific people and organizations in real time

Twitter as authentic audience – Students constantly tweet ideas, assignments, projects, suggestions, and photographs to each other, broadening the reach of their thinking.

Twitter as embedded literacy – Students get plenty of practice with succinct writing as they share analyses and observations.

Managing students’ encounters with objectionable material from the outside world, including occasional use of profanity and sexually suggestive follower requests.

Comparing services – Proportional reasoning, equations, creating and analyzing graphs, and number sense; -   Planning a budget – Organizing and representing information and number sense; -   Determining the costs and payoffs of higher education – Percentages, compound interest, and rates; -   Playing the Stock Market Game – Ratios, proportional reasoning, reading and analyzing reports and graphs, and algebraic thinking (e.g., gains and losses).

“The term generally refers to using a wide variety of hands-on activities (such as building, computer programming, and even sewing) to support academic learning and the development of a mindset that values playfulness and experimentation, growth and iteration, and collaboration and community. Typically, ‘making’ involves attempting to solve a particular problem, creating a physical or digital artifact, and sharing that product with a larger audience. Often, such work is guided by the notion that process is more important than results.”

The percent of teachers given the top rating ranged from 73 percent in Tennessee to 8 percent in Massachusetts and 3 percent in Georgia.

Many districts are drawing important distinctions between good and excellent teaching, but there is less differentiation among good, fair, and poor performance.

Why do so few teachers receive below-proficient ratings, despite the fact that school administrators estimate that more than a quarter of their teachers aren’t up to par?

The daunting workload involved in giving low ratings

Being merciful – Some principals said they were hesitant to give low ratings to rookie teachers out of kindness and a desire not to discourage (or lose) a teacher who had potential for growth.

Personal discomfort

Principals knew that teachers could lose their jobs as a result of a low rating, and were upset when teachers cried.

Her policy: use e-mail for non-urgent questions and texts when time is an issue.

2013 Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, which asserted that it’s possible to accurately evaluate teachers by triangulating data from student surveys, value-added scores, and classroom observations.

Google, General Electric, and other corporations shifted from rating and ranking employees to providing real-time supervisor and peer feedback and coaching aimed at fostering professional growth to meet stretch goals. This rethinking was inspired by three findings from educational research: -   Performance ratings tend to foster a “fixed” versus a “growth” mindset. -   Numerical grades or ratings lead recipients to ignore detailed feedback. -   Extrinsic rewards can discourage the behaviors they aim to improve.

A 2012 initiative in Cincinnati suggests a different approach. Mid-career teachers who were observed four times by peers and given detailed feedback showed marked improvements in performance and student results. The key elements were frequency, credible observers, formative feedback, and a simple, low-stakes process with no direct ties to promotion and retention decisions.

Studies point to the following levers for continuous improvement:             • Peer collaboration – Veteran teachers continue to improve their skills if structures are in place that get them working with colleagues in focused, results-oriented instructional teams.             • Teacher evaluation – The key is detailed, valid feedback on classroom practices and support for improvement from knowledgeable and well-trained administrators or peers.             • Tailored on-the-job training – Most PD is ineffective, but intensive coaching focused on the specific needs of individual teachers and sustained over time can make a positive difference.             • Organizational supports – These include an orderly, disciplined school environment, services available to address students’ social and emotional needs, and positive parent engagement. • Leadership – “Hiring principals who have the talent to identify organizational weaknesses, establish schoolwide systems to support teachers and students, and galvanize collective buy-in from teachers is a central lever for improving the teaching and learning environment,” conclude Papay and Kraft.

Not having access to books in June, July, and August results in a two-month loss each summer for poor children compared to a one-month gain for more-advantaged children, and that accumulates over the years into a crushing achievement gap. Getting low-SES children reading over the summer is the most effective way to change that dynamic, but what works?

a home library is as important as parental education and twice as important as the father’s occupation in predicting educational outcomes;

Establish virtual office hours. Tucker tells students at the beginning of the year the dates and times when she’ll be available for a Google chat or Google Hangouts screen-sharing session. She has colleagues who tell students they can e-mail between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. and any e-mails received after that will be answered the next day.

Limit communication channels.

Other reasons – These included racial concerns (for example, if a disproportionate number of minority teachers might receive low ratings); burdensome dismissal procedures; principals making deals in which teachers agreed to leave the school in exchange for a higher rating; and concern about ineffective replacement teachers.

Make information available online.

Set up a space where students can connect online. Tucker has a private Google+ community where students can share information, ask questions, and support one another.

Protect unplugged time at home.

Not every disagreement is a call to arms.

How and when I use my voice matters. “As I see it,” says Gannon, “my job requires that I advocate for both faculty members and students, and for both teaching and learning. Sometimes that means speaking truth to power; other times it means speaking truth to colleagues.” This is especially important with issues of gender, race, and bullying.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

“It’s all too easy to let the minutiae detract from the larger goal… I’m not useful to anyone I serve if I’m overcommitted.”

Support, affirmation, and collegiality are more important. For me, leadership has become a matter of knowing and respecting my colleagues all over the campus, appreciating the work they do, and letting them know it… There’s no daily quota on thank you’s.”

At their best, they promote academic achievement, stronger student connections to education, and improved initiative, teamwork, and social skills.

Has a well-thought-out coaching philosophy aligned with the school’s educational, athletic, and programmatic goals – Winning isn’t the main goal, says Gould. Rather, “coaches work hard to help student-athletes learn important life lessons from their sport experiences.”

Shares decision-making with students and provides rationales for coaching actions

effective coaches meet their athletes’ need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in an atmosphere where students feel they belong.

Builds strong coach-athlete relationships in a caring, supportive climate – Each athlete is known as an individual, made to feel welcome, and knows that bullying and belittling others isn’t tolerated on or off the field.

Is a knowledgeable and effective teacher – “Research reveals that coaches who give positive versus degrading and punitive feedback or no feedback at all have athletes who are more motivated, feel better about themselves, and achieve more positive developmental outcomes from sports participation,” says Gould.

Is intentional in fostering positive youth development – This includes attention to leadership, teamwork, and a work ethic.

What these parents didn’t understand, says Jones, is that “You are either consistent, or you are inconsistent. There is nothing in between.”

“The irony of consistency,” says Jones, “is that the closer you come to being consistent before you fail, the worse off you are. If the parent cracks easily, the child does not need to be a world-class yammerer in order to succeed. But, if the parent does not crack easily, the child must learn to play hardball.”

How does this apply to classrooms? Teachers must set clear, reasonable expectations, says Jones, and then be absolutely consistent in enforcing them.

Never make a rule that you are not willing to enforce every time.

If you are consistent, you can use smaller and smaller consequences to govern misbehavior. But if you are inconsistent, you must use larger and larger consequences to govern misbehavior.

“it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning…

“If you want to improve your reading speed, your best bet – as old-fashioned as it sounds – is to read a wide variety of written material and expand your vocabulary.”

you can’t take in words you don’t see, and you have a set-point for processing language that can be changed only by long-term improvements in vocabulary and knowledge.

when it comes to reading for deep comprehension or enjoyment, there are no shortcuts.

  1. Why is it so difficult to improve the teacher-evaluation process?   2. Another look at the Measures of Effective Teaching study   3. Conditions for the continuous improvement of teaching   4. Counteracting summer reading loss   5. Using Reading Recovery techniques in guided reading groups   6. Keeping our technology use under control   7. Advice for leaders   8. The qualities of an effective high-school athletic coach   9. Consistency with classroom discipline 10. Are speed reading courses effective? 11. Short items: (a) World population growth animated; (b) Two centuries of U.S. immigration animated; (c) Common Core math sequence; (d) Survey on teacher evaluation

In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, but for most it is slowly drained away until all that’s left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they’ll never move out of the basement.”

As of 2015, only 26.2 percent of African-American students have access to art classes.

Gregory has a startling suggestion: take the “art” out of art education and replace it with creativity education. Why? Because creativity is something that almost everyone agrees is vital to success.

We need to make sure that the kids of today (who will need to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use it.

A total of 21 percent of students said they had been bullied in the following ways: 13 percent made fun of, called names, or insulted; 12 percent subject of rumors; 5 percent pushed, shoved, tripped, or spat on; 4 percent threatened with harm; 5 percent purposefully excluded from activities; 2.5 percent told to do things they didn’t want to do; and 2 percent had their property purposefully destroyed. Girls reported more online harassment (16 percent) than boys (6 percent). These were the locations where students said the bullying occurred: -   42 percent in hallways or stairwells (similar for boys and girls); -   34 percent in classrooms (perhaps mainly during entry, transitions, and exit); -   22 percent in cafeterias; -   19 percent outside on school grounds; -   12 percent online or by text; -   10 percent on school buses; -   9 percent in bathrooms/locker rooms.

hallways and stairwells, taken together, are nearly twice as likely to be the source of the problem as the cafeteria, playground, or buses and bathrooms. Supervision and vigilance in those fluid spaces between classes is likely to benefit vulnerable students disproportionately.”

dance, gesture, and other forms of movement can improve motivation, engagement, and learning.

students in classrooms that integrated movement were “significantly more excited by, engaged in, and focused on the lessons” than they were with conventional teaching methods.

Dancing to memorize information

Moving among stations

Applying movement to assessments

Forming lines, rows, or other groupings – Each student gets a card with a punctuation mark or a word and students silently arrange themselves to form a complete sentence.

Representing terms or ideas with actions – After reading a book about emotions, students stand and act out furious, satisfied, courageous, and other words.

– The teacher gives each group of students sets of fraction cards and they take turns moving to another group in search of equivalent fractions, bringing possible matches back to their group to see if they’re correct.

– To test knowledge of synonyms and antonyms, pairs of students jump straight up and down three times, then choose to land on either their right or left foot; if both land on the same foot, they must come up with synonyms for a word on the board; if they land on opposite feet, they must name antonyms.

– Doing a dance skip-counting numbers (5, 10, 15, 20…) to the “Macarena.”

Many teachers assigned tasks with complex instructions and procedures, but little higher-level thinking was required of students

How many of these do schools teach? Just three, say the authors, even in schools where students get high state test scores: application, recall, and (sometimes) analysis.

a synthesis of the skills they believe adults need for successful lives: Cognitive skills: -   Recall -   Application -   Analysis -   Evaluation -   Creative thinking Interpersonal skills: -   Communication -   Cooperation -   Empathy -   Trust building -   Service orientation -   Conflict resolution -   Negotiation -   Responsibility -   Assertiveness -   Advocacy Intrapersonal skills: -   Flexibility -   Adaptability -   Appreciation of diversity -   Valuing learning -   Cultural appreciation -   Curiosity -   Forethought -   Self-regulation -   Self-monitoring -   Self-evaluation

Most teachers presented students with complex content, but the tasks students were asked to perform were simple recall and application

interpersonal and intrapersonal skills almost never showed up.

These exceptional instructors created “a harmonious environment,” say the researchers, “demonstrating an understanding that doing so is a prerequisite to academic learning.”

It was the teacher, not the subject. This level of intellectual and affective demand cropped up in different subjects, grades, and classes with different student achievement levels. The variable was the teacher.

In a 10th-grade honors humanities class, for example, students were asked to invent questions to guide their study of Western imperialism in China (having just finished a unit on the colonization of Africa). Guided by the teacher, students brainstormed possible questions, decided which were most important, and edited questions until the questions were intellectually stimulating and open-ended.

These outliers managed to weave rigorous instruction of content across the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal domains, putting to rest the notion that content- and skill-focused instruction precludes higher-order thinking – and vice-versa.

Teachers adapted their teaching to the moment.

to teach a deep and broad range of skills while also addressing disciplinary knowledge – requires intelligence and years of practice.”

Instruction was tied to complex assessments. Often designed by the teachers themselves, these checks for understanding stood in contrast to the test-prep oriented assessments in other classrooms.

Teachers built strong relationships with students.

First, Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul suggest that schools need complex, high-level assessments to make all classrooms accountable for teaching the full range of adult skills. Second, “excellence requires highly skilled teachers with finely tuned radar and improvisational ability.” And third, “good teaching is about caring relationships, a parental affection that gives and receives, that honors the fundamentally human nature of our work as educators.

Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) stresses the importance of professional development starting with clear outcomes.

Polly details the 5E approach, in which students spend most of a lesson exploring mathematical tasks with limited support from the teacher, and some students get individual or small-group support: -   Engage – The class is given a math task or activity. -   Explore – Students have time to work on the task with their partner or a small group, with the teacher giving only instructions and circulating, sometimes posing questions to support students’ exploration. -   Explain – The class comes together to discuss the problem and how different students solved it. The teacher facilitates the discussion, perhaps choosing a main focus based on what was observed during the work time, and provides direct instruction as needed. -   Elaborate/extend – For the rest of the class, the teacher gets students working on activities, math games, and small-group activities that deepen understanding of the concept and zeros in on students who seem confused or off track. -   Evaluate – Students solve a final task or participate in a discussion of concepts, allowing the teacher to assess learning and plan for future lessons.

“Looking beyond the intended goals to the broader array of possible outcomes is an important aspect of evaluation and vital to judging effectiveness,”

What sparks robust discussions in PLCs is looking at variations in students’ responses to individual items on common assessments and writing prompts.

“The primary purpose of this collaborative data analysis,” says Guskey, “is to guide these teachers’ professional learning experiences so they can improve the quality of their instruction and help all students learn well.”

One additional cautionary note: PLCs tend to jump into “debating new ideas, techniques, innovations, programs, and instructional issues,” says Guskey. “While these are important issues, we must remember that they are means to an important end that must be determined first. Our journey always begins by deciding our destination… Ninety percent of essential questions in any evaluation are addressed in the planning process, before the journey begins.”

“When a teacher models and provides direct instruction at the start of a lesson, it rarely enables students to explore mathematical tasks or engage in productive struggle,” says Drew Polly (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) in this article in Teaching Children Mathematics.

researchers have found that if students grapple with a task before the teacher explains and models it (and receive appropriate follow-up), they’re more engaged and learn better.

What student learning outcomes do we aim to accomplish? -   What evidence will tell us if we met the goal? (ideally more than one source of data) -   What unintended consequences might occur, positive or negative?

“[T]he size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of his or her reading comprehension,” say Tanya Wright (Michigan State University/East Lansing) and Gina Cervetti ((University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Reading Research Quarterly.

Students who enter school knowing fewer words are likely to continue with relatively small vocabularies and struggle with text comprehension throughout school. Students who start with larger vocabularies, on the other hand, have broader general knowledge, need to spend less time accessing memory of words (which frees up working memory to grasp the meaning of a text), read and enjoy their reading more, and build stronger vocabularies – a reciprocal relationship that tends to widen the achievement gap.

Teaching word meanings almost always improved comprehension of texts containing the words taught. • Teaching word meanings doesn’t seem to improve comprehension of texts that don’t contain the target words.             • Instruction involving students in some active processing was more effective than dictionary and definition work at improving comprehension of texts containing the words taught. One caveat: researchers don’t know how much active processing is enough.             • Teaching one or two strategies (e.g., context clues or morphology) for solving word meanings doesn’t seem to improve generalized reading comprehension.

students would work with JeffDESIGN over the summer to learn valuable lessons about what it takes to get an idea from concept to production in the real world.

We have adopted the free and fabulous EPICS—Engineering Projects In Community Service—as the heart and soul of our program this year.

I love that the EPICS framework is just that—a framework. It provides a flexible structure I can modify as necessary to suit our processes and needs.

When we are done, we’ll have a powerful, document-driven, human-centered methodology to guide our work in design.

The new school year has gotten off to a good start. We’re creating an entirely new understanding of design thinking in Digital Shop, an amalgam of our shared past experiences and the practices of some of the world’s best design thinking practitioners. It’s ridiculously hard work, alternatively frustrating and exhilarating, but totally worth it.

Families send their kids to our schools, and we must prove that we are better than local public or other school options. In other words, we ask the majority of our families to give us financial support so that their kids can get more—not necessarily different—than what their taxes pay for; the “more” is the ROI.

Furthermore, this hierarchical worldview permeates our practices—from grading to sports, we promote hierarchies cemented on ability, access, and popularity, among other things. By viewing race problems in our schools in purely cultural terms, we are articulating our hope that we will promote some hierarchies while erasing other hierarchies based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. But as we know, hierarchies intersect and sustain each other.

the demand that our teachers get better or different professional development, that we hire and admit more people of color, and that we collectively become culturally competent is a way to deal with the symptoms of racism, not with a system of racism.

Why would those who have privilege, and want to keep it by paying for a special pathway for their children, want to give it up? Anyone familiar with the college admission process knows the tensions that emerge around race and class. If our students and families are happy to embrace the language of inclusion, such superficial pretense often evaporates when college admission lists appear. It is then that we see the hard limits of our inclusivity.   The families in our communities are essentially good people who want to share, but they don’t want to be left out.

They like the idea of “giving back” but do not want to take less.

many of our enrollment challenges derive from the fact that millennial families are looking for meaning and value—not access. We need to stop worrying about providing an illusory ROI and ensure that we help our students develop lives of meaning and purpose; we need to stop worrying exclusively about leadership and prepare them for ethical and active citizenship. It is only when we can talk to our students about the need to take less so that others can have their fair share that we will be able to honestly talk about race.