Group items tagged

This is going to be SLA’s seventh year. In those seven years I’ve had seven superintendents. [Laughter, applause.]

And what is driving all of the decisions right now in cities all over this country? It’s this question: ‘How good are your test scores?’

For example, in this state [New York], the state-wide English Language Arts Regents exam was a high-stakes test for students and for teachers. It determined students promotion. It determined whether or not teachers would keep their jobs. It determined whether or not schools would stay open. There was question about a talking pineapple. And again, Adam referenced this earlier. But again, the amazing thing was that they claimed that they took it from this children’s author. They interviewed the children’s author. He said they got it wrong!

do you know who made the test? Anybody? Pearson. Not educators. Not state officials. Not the way that it used to be, when at least these tests were designed by people who did not have a financial stake in the game. Instead, this test was designed by a company that was deeply, deeply concerned that it be financially profitable.

educators have more stuff thrown at them than they’ve ever had to think about before. I am the child of a lifelong teacher and a union lawyer, so all of these ideas are incredibly derivative and I take them from my parents

we wonder why so many teachers push back as we say, ‘Oh and by the way, you’ve got to learn Twitter and Edmodo and this and that and the other and all of these tools.

powerful question: Is school relevant? And behind that is the question that many of us as teachers are asking: Am I relevant?

t if you ask her, ‘Who are you?’ the first thing she says isn’t ‘Oh, I’m a publicist.’ But if you ask a teacher, ‘Who are you?’ they are going to say, ‘I am a teacher.’ Who we are is wrapped up deeply in what we do and what do is under attack and changing rapidly, and that uncertainty is very difficult to deal with.

Johnny Learned to Read. Johnny went to the Store. Johnny went to the Park. Johnny killed himself because learning was boring! [Laughter.]

I respect what Deven Black said about the idea of ‘get out of school before the school kills the joy of creativity and kills that joy of learning that you have’ I also believe that school can be amazing places of learning. Schools can teach us how to learn, more than any fact or figure that we can get in a classroom. What schools should teach us is how learn, that metacognitive practice of figuring out, ‘How do I learn best? How do I make sense of our world?’ And when I do that, schools can help us learn to live.

Spanish 4 class at Science Leadership Academy. Now, what the kids had to do was to write an essay about hwo they were. Identity is a frequent theme at SLA. The essay was of two parts: One, what was visible about them and, two, what was invisible about them.

Schools can help us learn to live.

The incredibly reflective moment they were going through was, ‘How could we have prevented this as teachers? What are we doing wrong, that these are the students we are creating? These are the citizens we are creating?’

I think that when you are told the whole purpose you are learning this stuff is so you can work for somebody someday and that you can be part of the global economy. I think that’s an isolating feeling. I don’t think that builds community or gets us where we need to go.

we need to start talking about ‘the global citizen.’ We need to start talking about community

We would instead make sure that every child had a deep and powerful understanding of statistics before they left formal education

We’re creating a profoundly innumerate society and solving problems that we face today are going to need people who understand numbers.

but school belongs to our best, most powerful democratic instincts as a society. And what we are seeing right now, is a lot of people saying that schools need to be just like business.

If not that corporate model, then what model?

there’s a profound difference between these two statements: ‘I care about kids, and I care for kids.

We need to stop saying, ‘I teach math. I teach English. I teach art.’ We need to start saying, ‘I teach kids.’ And then we build systems and structures that reflect that.

we’ve got to understand that an inquiry-driven education is the most powerful way to learn

By the way, there is one questions that every teacher should ask a bazillion times a day that they don’t know the answer to. That question is, ‘What do you think?’

Want to see a really amazing thing with a group of kids? Read a book with them freshman year. Have them write their reflections on the book. Read it with them again in their senior year. See what the book holds for them now. Teach them that ideas and answers can change. And that that’s good.

It’s called the Dialogic Curriculum. It’s by a woman named Patricia L. Stock.

This isn’t just about talking. What I see in a lot of classrooms when I visit schools is people talking and listening—but not really. I see in a lot of classrooms debate, where kids are listening for the thing they can disagree with. So that way they can make their point. Right? We’ve all had that experience where the teacher says, ‘Wait a second, I’ll get back to your comment in a minute.’ Three or four more kids have said the thing and the kid says the exact same thing that they were going to say four questions ago, because they didn’t listen to the four things that the other kids said. We need to teach kids that we can argue and we can discuss to learn.

Teach kids to build their ideas off of others. Teach them not just to disagree, but run a classroom where no one is allowed to talk until they first express their idea, before they first echo back what they’ve heard from someone else. What did I learn from what you just said? ‘Well, I understand that you just said this, and I thought that this was really interesting. And where I found disagreement or disharmony was here.’ But first I’ve got to acknowledge the things that you said. First I’ve got to acknowledge that you said that with which I can find common cause. Teach kids to build, not just tear down.

What they’re selling to us as personalized learning is, ‘everybody does the exact same content, only at your own pace.’ That’s not personal!

If someone shows up and says, ‘We’ve got a great new personalized learning system. You put the kids on the computer and they all go at their own pace.’ Say to them, ‘That’s not personal. When do they get to do the things they care about?’

This is two of our students competing in a kinetic sculpture contest. Think about that. And what’s cool about it is that they built this device in their engineering classroom. Our kids in our engineering classrooms have built a solar water heater, and Engineers Without Borders took the actual thing that the kids built, shipped it to Sierra Leone, where what our kids built is now being used to heat water in order to sterilize instruments in a hospital for amputee victims. Our kids have built flow-process biodiesel generators, and they have then released the designs to anyone who wanted to use them, under a Creative Commons license. What we found out was that students in Central and South America built what are kids designed and are using it to take their schools ‘off the grid’ by powering their own schools.

Ask powerful questions. Seek out answers. Build real stuff. That’s inquiry-driven project-based learning.

world

What we are really trying to do is help our kids change the

Project-based learning is when the kids own head, heart and hands—when the work that they do, that matters to them, is the most important thing in a classroom—is the highest form of work that gets done. That’s true project-based learning.

In every single class at SLA, for all four years that they are there, every quarter has what we call a benchmark project in each class that that allows every child to build something that serves as the signpost of their learning every single quarter.

nquiry—what are the questions we can ask; Research—how do we find the answers to those questions; Collaboration—how do we work together to make those answers deeper, better and richer; Presentation—how do we share what we’ve learned; and Reflection—

You must build systems and structures to allow kids to do real stuff, and then get out of their way. By the way, once they have, you’ve got to let them share it.

You can share stuff in the physical world, you can share stuff in the virtual world, but kids have got to understand that they can be expert voices in the world. Create the space for them to do it. You don’t have to tell them how.

She said, ‘I just expose them to a whole bunch of different ideas and then said, go learn the stuff you need to learn.’

you have to share what you know

Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann) is the founding Principal of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA)

honored by the White House as a Champion of Change for his work in education reform. In June 2010, Chris was named as one of the “30 Most Influential People in EdTech”

being able to mobilize energy when it’s needed – depends on two things: (a) alternating between intense work and recovery; and (b) developing regular rituals to build in recovery.

For those of us who are not professional athletes, regular workouts each week, coupled with good nutrition and sleep, make a major difference in work productivity and enjoyment.

Positive emotions have a remarkable impact on reducing physiological stress, whereas negative emotions, even simulated, increase stress. The key, psychologists have found, is to “act as if.”

Here are some workplace conditions that increase emotional labor: -   A mismatch between your personality and what’s expected on the job; -   A misalignment of values, especially if what you’re asked to do is in conflict with what you believe; -   A workplace culture in which particular ways of expressing emotion are endorsed, or not endorsed.

The key to improving cognitive work is focus, say Loehr and Schwartz. A big part of that is managing down-time – knowing the body’s need for breaks every 90-120 minutes – and using meditation and visualization.

Practiced regularly, meditation quiets the mind, the emotions, and the body, promoting energy recovery.” Experienced meditators need considerably less sleep and have enhanced creativity and productivity.

Spiritual capacity – By this, Loehr and Schwartz mean “the energy that is unleashed by tapping into one’s deepest values and defining a strong sense of purpose.”

Sometimes, when we’re doing work that isn’t in synch with how we feel, we have to put on our professional game face. That effort is known among psychologists as “emotional labor” – remaining energetic and upbeat despite a bad night’s sleep,

framing his response in positive language.

If you’re in a job that’s meaningful and largely aligned with your values, the best way to reduce emotional labor, says David, is to substitute surface acting with what she calls “deep acting.” Some tips:             • Remind yourself why you’re in the job you’re in.

Explore “want to” versus “have to” thinking. What aspects of the job energize you? How can other aspects be made more efficient and pleasant?

Do some job crafting. Can you and your boss tweak the work so it’s of greater value to you and the organization? Or is there a new project that would be fun and productive?

“Drill-and-practice is boring. But thinking, for most students most of the time, is actually fun.”

four strategies to engage students in higher-order thinking:             • Open questions – Every lesson should have two or three of these to highlight key content and thinking skills.

Wait time is important. Think time, no hands up, is a good admonition. “If you don’t provide enough wait time, you’ll get either no responses or surface-level responses,

In all-class discussions, teachers should resist the temptation to comment themselves, instead asking specific follow-up questions to get other students involved.

Another approach is asking “what if” and “what else” questions to push students to expand or elaborate on what they’re studying

Students thinking, not just retelling

The way out of this dynamic is posing a thought-provoking problem

All too many student projects are simple regurgitation,

Self-assessment – “Students who can self-assess are poised to be life-long learners,” says Brookhart. “They are poised to use self-regulation strategies and to be their own best coaches as they learn. They are able to ask focused questions when they don’t understand or when they’re stuck.”

Teach students to self-assess with rubrics. It’s important that the rubric goes beyond the basic level and stipulates higher-level criteria like stating a position, defending one’s reasoning, using supportive details.

Use confidence ratings. For example, students might be asked to use the “fist of fives” on their chest to indicate how confident they are that they understand a particular term or concept

Have students co-create success criteria. Studying material with which students are familiar, they can jointly create what the teacher and students will look for in their work.

consultant Karin Hess suggests analyzing student work in three layers: first describing the student work we actually see (or what students tell about it); then interpreting what the evidence might mean (specific to the intended purpose); and then evaluating what next steps should be taken. Hess outlines how the process of analyzing student work can be helpful to teaching and learning:

• Purpose #1: Improving the quality of tasks/prompts and scoring guides – Piloting tasks and looking at student work helps to clarify prompts, make tasks accessible and engaging for all students, trim unnecessary components, modify the wording of scoring rubrics, and tweak questions so they will measure deeper thinking.

Students can use assessment evidence to set and monitor progress, reflect on themselves as learners, and evaluate the quality of their own work. “Valuing both one’s struggles and successes at accomplishing smaller learning targets over time has proven to have a profound influence on deepening motivation, developing independence as a learner, and building what we have come to know as ‘a growth mindset,’”

Purpose #3: Monitoring progress over time – A good pre-assessment focuses on the core learning or prerequisite skills that students will need to build on, and teachers can sort and work with students according to what they need to learn to be successful in the unit.

Purpose #4: Engaging students in peer- and self-assessment – One approach is having students look at two pieces of work by other students side by side and asking them (for example): -   What does each student know and understand and where might they improve?

What does the student know now that he or she didn’t know how to do as well on the first task? What were the areas of improvement?

Which piece of work comes closest to the expectations? What’s the evidence?

Purpose #2: Making key instructional decisions – Observing and taking notes on students’ responses to this task gave teachers two specific teaching points.

Purpose #5: Better understanding how learning progresses over time – Many skills, concepts, and misconceptions revealed in student work analysis are not explicitly addressed in curriculum standards. Looking at students’ learning trajectories in interim assessments and student work can guide teachers in the next step that students at different levels of progress need to take. • Purpose #6: Building content and pedagogical expertise –

it is analyzing evidence in student work that causes teachers to reflect on how students learn and how to make their instructional and assessment practices more effective.”

“students who engage with rich, strategically-designed tasks on a regular basis learn that finding the answer is not as personally meaningful as knowing how to apply knowledge in new situations and explain the reasoning that supports their thinking.”

13 dimensions of school leadership

Public investment in the maker movement is critical. City governments help ensure that not only does this effort continue and grow, but that there is a focus on jumpstarting the local economy through increased entrepreneurialism and building local businesses. 

The maker movement cannot exist without a physical space where people can design and prototype creations. Cities can help meet this need by donating unused buildings or funding infrastructure projects that house collaborative makerspaces.

Cities play a key role in moving the maker movement forward. One of the critical outcomes of this investment and support are the numerous companies and partnerships that have been formed as a result of unleashing the creativity of makers.

Nationally, 26 percent of cities currently have makerspaces and 13 percent have hosted a Maker Faire.

Be sensitive to how diverse cultures deal with conflict. Many citizens of Asian countries avoid open conflict, believing that differences are best worked out quietly. Written exchanges might be preferred over face-to-face conflict resolution.

Clarify expectations. If you put students into groups, for example, explain and model the difference between “helping” and “doing the work for” a partner.

Emphasize a positive environment, not punishment.

Increasing punishment fails to change student behaviors.

earned students’ consent and trust through humor.

The ability to concentrate was the strongest predictor of success.

He advocates for a “digital sabbath” everyday, some time when kids aren’t being distracted by devices at all. He’d also like to see schools building exercises that strengthen attention, like mindfulness practices, into the curriculum.

Perhaps the most well known study on concentration is a longitudinal study conducted with over 1,000 children in New Zealand by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, psychology and neuroscience professors at Duke University.

“The attentional circuitry needs to have the experience of sustained episodes of concentration — reading the text, understanding and listening to what the teacher is saying — in order to build the mental models that create someone who is well educated,” Goleman said.

“This ability is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health,” Goleman said.

These are signs that educators may need to start paying attention to the act of attention itself. Digital natives may need help cultivating what was once an innate part of growing up.

“There’s a need now to teach kids concentration abilities as part of the school curriculum,” Goleman said. “The more children and teens are natural focusers, the better able they’ll be to use the digital tool for what they have to get done and then to use it in ways that they enjoy.”

the idea of multitasking is a myth, Goleman said. When people say they’re  “multitasking,” what they are really doing is something called “continuous partial attention,” where the brain switches back and forth quickly between tasks.

“I don’t think the enemy is digital devices,” Goleman said. “What we need to do is be sure that the current generation of children has the attentional capacities that other generations had naturally before the distractions of digital devices. It’s about using the devices smartly but having the capacity to concentrate as you need to, when you want to.”

To have value beyond a teacher's blog or Twitter feed, digital badges need to have both rigor and market worth.

A system filled with "junk" badges will have far less integrity than one filled with micro-credentials awarded by reputable organizations.

Research shows that teachers who earn a Master's degree don't necessarily see an increase in student achievement (3), and yet current salary structures and professional development models are often tied directly to those macro-credentials.

Building micro-credentials that have rigor and market worth could be the first step toward updating our current paradigm of how we credential learning. If we truly want to build school-wide cultures that empower learners to grow as individuals, we need to provide personalized learning opportunities for all of our learners -- including our teachers.

“Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?’

Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.”

Just as educators are pushing students to build a huge reservoir of knowledge, they are also focused on having students master material, sometimes at the expense of relevance.

Unfortunately, if someone questions whether this expertise serves students well and instead suggests more life-relevant topics, Perkins says the common reaction is: “We’re sacrificing rigor!”

Instead of building during the first 12 years of schooling toward expertise in an advanced topic like calculus that hardly ever comes up in our lives, Perkins says students can instead become “expert amateurs” in something like statistics — a rigorous topic that is also used in daily life. In fact, expert amateurism works great, he says, in most of what we do in our lives

There’s no list of 1,000 things we must know or teach. Perkins says there would be no way to create a definitive list because there are lots of things worth learning at any given time or for a specialized career or even simply because we enjoy learning.

With high-stakes testing, he says, there’s a fixation on “summative” versus “formative” assessment — evaluating students’ mastery of material with exams and final projects (achievements) versus providing ongoing feedback that can improve learning.

“The fixation on the heap of information in the textbooks is itself part of the problem because the world we are educating learners for is something of a moving target,” he says.

Perkins says he’s not surprised that so many people have trouble naming things they learned early on that still have meaning today or that disengaged students are raising their hands, asking why they need to know something.

“This requires slowing down, checking to be sure we understand correctly, and sharing back what we hear.”

Meeting anger or frustration with genuine, compassionate interest builds trust.

Changing course based on input is a sign of integrity, not weakness.”

A key value she worked to communicated was about listening to dissent and changing course if necessary.

Fiarman found that making quick visits to classrooms every day communicated respect and made her far more knowledgeable about instruction.

it engenders trust when your boss can speak to the specifics of your work.”

for practice to be an effective tool for improvement, students need to be pushing the limits of current performance and getting continuous feedback – very difficult to orchestrate for 30 students working in their bedrooms. Second, as soon as teachers give grades for practice work, the incentive is for students to play it safe and not push into challenging or unknown territory.

Here are their ideas on making feedback less threatening and more productive:             • Separate coaching from evaluation.

“Coaching sessions should include no rubric scoring or other evaluations,”

Be thoughtful about receiving criticism. “The person getting the feedback has the power to decide whether it’s on target, fair, or helpful,” say the authors, “and to decide whether to use the feedback or dismiss it.”

When feedback rubs you the wrong way, it’s also important to dig deeper to understand what’s really going.

Be noisy about the importance of improving your school’s feedback culture – for students, for teachers, for parents, and for yourself.”

In this article in All Things PLC, consultant/author Douglas Reeves confronts these widely espoused misconceptions about grading:

if grades were effective motivators, homework completion, classroom engagement, and overall diligence would be sky-high. Not so!

“Asking such questions helps me counteract my unconscious bias,” says Fiarman. “Recognizing the pervasiveness of bias is an important first step. Acknowledging that I might make mistakes because of this bias – then actively working to counter it – builds trust.”

the only feedback that matters is that the work was finished on time and correctly.

it’s unfair and demotivating for students to have their final grade pulled down for practice work.

Myth #3: Grades drive future performance. True, there’s a correlation between good grades and college success, and between poor grades and dropping out of school, but Reeves questions whether grades cause success and failure.

While it is possible that intelligence and work ethic forge the path from kindergarten to Ivy League and Wall Street, it is also possible that zip code, tutors, and connections – all artifacts of family socioeconomic status – are the underlying causes.”

Teachers giving zeros for missed assignments and refusing to accept late work lets students off the hook – and starts a spiral of doom with their final grades.

Averaging grades through a semester punishes students for early failures versus rewarding them for using early problems to improve final performance.

“Rather than using the last two months of the semester to build momentum and finish strong,” says Reeves, “because of a punitive grading system, they are doomed to failure well before the semester is over. There is nothing left for them to do except cut class, be disruptive, or ultimately, quit school.”

“grading policies are matters of equity, with disparate impacts on students, particularly based on ethnicity and gender. Boys and minority males receive lower grades just as they are more likely to be more severely disciplined for an infraction. Girls receive higher grades for the same level of proficiency. If racial and gender disparities of this sort took place in any other area of public life, the consequences would be swift and sure.”

Instead, he suggests replacing each statement of fact – Punishment deters unwanted behavior – with a testable hypothesis – If I penalize students for late, incomplete, and absent homework, then student achievement will improve – and conducting real-time experiments within the school.

He’s found that non-evaluative comments are “easy to receive, easy to give, and easy to act on.”

Teaching sentence stems can be helpful: I’m not sure I understand the opening of this piece… I’m not sure why you did this; can you explain it more?

Be specific.

Prior to peer feedback, the teacher should introduce a rubric and lead the class in a group critique of an exemplar paper, focusing on suggestions that will make a difference.

The teacher might also display samples of feedback statements and have students break into groups and rank them from helpful to unhelpful, taking note of sentence starters and phrases they can use in their own feedback conversations.

Be timely. One of the greatest advantages of well-orchestrated peer feedback is that students can get comments on their work immediately, rather than waiting days, perhaps weeks, for the teacher to wade through piles of papers.

“Unfortunately,” Eden concludes, “by second-guessing teachers’ judgments about how to maintain order, policymakers and district administrators are likely harming the education of many millions of well-behaved students in an effort to help the misbehaving few.”

“[T]hey are encouraged more than ever to present themselves as ‘sexy’ – not about being attractive or beautiful, but a very narrow, commercialized idea of sexy. What’s particularly complicated is they’re sold that idea [of sexiness] as being a source of personal power. There is a complete disconnect between that image of sexiness and an understanding of their bodies, their own wants, needs, desires, and limits, what those might be, having those respected.”

young women “are almost conditioned, starting in middle school, to have their bodies publicly commented on by young men, [and] they don’t think they have any power to really stop it.” In schools, she says, the “everyday chipping away of girls’ self-worth by reducing them to their bodies is completely ignored.”

We tend to silo conversations about sex as if it is not about the same values of compassion, kindness, respect, mutuality, and caring that we want our children to embody in every other aspect of their lives.”

The Internet – “Unfortunately,” says Orenstein, “the first thing kids Google is porn. The average age that kids today are exposed to porn, either intentionally or not, is 11. We have to ask what it means that kids are learning about sex from that realm before they’ve even had their first kiss and how that’s shaping them, their attitudes toward sexuality, and their expectations of sex.” Parents and schools need to explicitly teach kids to apply a critical lens to what they’re seeing, and shape values that will help them safely and wisely navigate this very challenging era.

“If you want to be a lifelong employee anywhere today, you have to be a lifelong learner.” He quotes education-to-work expert Heather McGowan: “Stop asking a young person WHAT you want to be when you grow up. It freezes their identity into a job that may not be there. Ask them HOW you want to be when you grow up. Having an agile learning mind-set will be the new skill set of the 21st century.”

Birmingham Covington’s unique bee project, like much of the coursework prioritized at the school, was driven by student interest.

“Science literacy is teaching our kids to be curious about the world around them, with the problems they identify,”

“Kids need to learn teamwork-based skills because every other class in any other subject that they have—third through eighth grade—requires them to work in different sized groups accomplishing different tasks,” Heckman explains.

The school’s voluntary Teacher Labs—facilitated by an instructional coach and organized around a clear, written protocol—enable teachers to reflect on their craft with support from their peers. Through the labs, small groups of teachers observe each other’s classes and then offer constructive feedback around a stated objective.

They put these skills to use in Thinkering Studio, an elective class where they design their own independent learning projects, and Engage, a class focused on design thinking—a system of solving problems that follows the steps of inquiry, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

In Engage, teachers Roy McCloud and Mathew Brown guide students to work on various self-directed, team-oriented projects like designing a new sport for third graders or building a roller coaster. Their support and feedback direct students toward the right resources while encouraging them to dig deeper: Did students ask the right questions? Did they get the right information? Did they go to other groups for feedback?

What can we do? We can seek to decrease, wherever possible, the social complexity by slowing down, by working in the smallest groups possible, by building real community through meaningful work, by building expectations with students—keeping them simple and concrete—and then using those expectations to provide much-needed boundaries.

Administrators must seek to do the same: build appropriate, clear, simple, concrete expectations with teachers around expectations and routines for students and for one another and then present a unified front with the professionals in their classrooms.

We didn’t get here in a few months, and it’s going to take more time than that to get beyond it. We all must commit to actions and values that demonstrate a culture of support and above all flexibility. We’ve suffered a collective trauma—we’re still suffering it—and expecting business as usual or even more than that isn’t going to get us anything but anger, frustration, and hostility from those we seek to serve.

often, maker educators assume that because they’ve offered students freedom and choice, the space is automatically equitable. She says being intentional about how adults interact with kids in these spaces is more important than self-direction.

It would be easy to assume that the student was off task or didn’t want to do the activity, but instead of assuming the worst about the student, the facilitator went over and started asking her questions that centered around agency and how she’d like to be involved. This gentle support helped the girl figure out how to start the activity.

They also focus on race and gender patterns around who is using which tools and the kinds of projects different kids are drawn towards. “There were some patterns around which students get intervened on more often and which students have projects taken out of their hands and fixed more often,” Vossoughi said. The video reviews help them notice these patterns and correct them.

A huge part of trying to bring equity to every moment of tinkering is to see students as full of strengths from their home community, their families, and their experiences. “Kids are brilliant and it’s our responsibility to notice their brilliance and deepen it,” Vossoughi said. This perspective has allowed kids who don’t fit into traditional ideas about what it means to be smart, or academic, thrive in the tinkering space.

The challenge, say the authors, is designing classroom observations that provide valid data on what’s happening day to day in classrooms, make meaningful distinctions among teachers, provide teachers with useful feedback, and support helpful, high-quality professional development.

I would suggest two more questions: First, are classroom visits announced or unannounced? If researchers don’t gather data on this, they are missing an important variable in the reliability of teacher assessment – teachers are likely to put on an especially good lesson when they know they’re being observed. Second, are teacher-evaluation rubrics used to score individual classroom visits, which is conceptually very difficult, or as end-of-year summations of multiple classroom visits with feedback conversations through the year?

Tomlinson and other proponents suggest that teachers differentiate by content (what is taught), process (how it’s taught), and product (how students are asked to demonstrate their learning).

students learn better, they said, when the work is at the right level of difficulty, personally relevant, and appropriately engaging.

trying to assess a teacher’s work asking, Is it differentiated? runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees. Better, says Marshall, to ask two broader questions (tip of the hat to Rick DuFour): -   What are students supposed to be learning? -   Are all students mastering it?

Good lesson plans build in multiple entry points, using the principles of Universal Design for Learning to make learning accessible to as many students as possible, and have clear goals; thoughtful task analysis; chunked learning; teaching methods appropriate to the content; links to students’ interests and experiences; checks for understanding; and accommodations for students with special needs.

a major factor in student success is a set of in-the-moment moves that effective teachers have always used, among them effective classroom management; knowing students well; being culturally sensitive; making the subject matter exciting; making it relevant; making it clear; taking advantage of visuals and props; involving students and getting them involved with each other; having a sense of humor; and nimbly using teachable moments.” But equally important is checking for understanding – dry-erase boards, clickers, probing questions, looking over students’ shoulders – and using students’ responses to continuously fine-tune teaching.

Timely follow-up with these students is crucial – pullout, small-group after-school help, tutoring, Saturday school, and other venues to help them catch up.

Among the most important life skills that students should take away from their K-12 years,” says Marshall, “is the ability to self-assess, know their strengths and weaknesses, deal with difficulty and failure, and build a growth mindset. Student self-efficacy and independence should be prime considerations in planning, lesson execution, and follow-up so that students move through the grades becoming increasingly motivated, confident, and autonomous learners prepared to succeed in the wider world.”

cold-calling actually increases students’ voluntary participation. “Cold-calling encourages students to prepare more and to participate more frequently,” said one researcher. “The more they prepare, and the more frequently they participate, the more comfortable they become when participating.”

If we don’t encourage students to come out of their shells for fear of putting them on the spot, we may be doing them a disservice… You’re curious about their views and their understanding of the issues being discussed. What they think is important – both to their own learning and to that of their peers.”

Drawing on two decades of data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the authors found that between 1998 and 2010, the reading readiness gap closed by 16 percent and the math gap by 10 percent. The black-white and the Hispanic-white gaps also narrowed by about 15 percent.

the gaps closed because of rapid progress by low-income children, not declines in the readiness of high-income children, and the gains persisted at least through fourth grade.

What brought about the early reading and math gains? The authors believe several factors contributed: • The availability of high-quality, publicly funded preschool programs – the percent of U.S. 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded preschools has increased from 14 to 29 percent from 2000. • The fact that more families are investing in books and other reading matter for children, as well as Internet access and computer games focused on reading and math skills. • More parents are spending quality time with children, taking them to local libraries, and engaging in learning activities at home.