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Anne Bubnic

Putting comprehensive staff development on target - 0 views

  • Many professional development efforts are organized as a smorgasbord of courses offered to educators. The district measures the effort's effectiveness by how many courses staff complete or how satisfied teachers are with the classes offered. District leaders who use the smorgasbord approach may view professional development as an extra that potentially helps an individual's performance but is not absolutely essential. They probably invest little in professional development planning because they don't expect great results.
  • Other district leaders recognize how much professional learning contributes to the district's learning goals for students, and so they align individual, team, school, and system learning plans. At each level, participants consider what outcomes they want for students, the knowledge and skills teachers need, and the professional learning that will help staff achieve the system goals. To be results-driven means following Stephen Covey's advice (1989): "Begin with the end in mind." Once student outcomes are selected, professional development leaders identify the knowledge and skills adults need to help students achieve the district's standards of success. The knowledge and skills linked to the student learning goals become part of the comprehensive professional development curriculum
  • In too many schools, staff development is limited to teachers attending workshops, courses, and conferences. School districts can no longer afford staff development efforts that are predominately "adult pull-out programs." That kind of learning alone will not produce high-level results. Schools will achieve high levels of performance when professional learning is embedded in every school day.
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    Professional development planning focuses attention on how the system as a whole and individuals must change to achieve the district's goals. Rather than being outlined in its own plan, comprehensive professional development becomes a compilation of plans, each supporting different district and/or school priorities. These individual plans are most effective when they attend to what we know about effective professional learning and ensure that staff development is results-driven, standards-based, and focused on educators' daily work.
Anne Bubnic

Assessing What Matters [Robert Sternberg] - 0 views

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    Worthy assessments should reflect the broader capabilities that students need to thrive in the 21st century.
Anne Bubnic

Nine Powerful Practices to Help Raise Student Achievement - 0 views

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    Nine strategies help raise the achievement of students living in poverty. Students from families with little formal education often learn rules about how to speak, behave, and acquire knowledge that conflict with how learning happens in school. They also often come to school with less background knowledge and fewer family supports. Formal schooling, therefore, may present challenges to students living in poverty. Teachers need to recognize these challenges and help students overcome them. In my work consulting with schools that serve a large population of students living in poverty, I have found nine interventions particularly helpful in raising achievement for low-income students.
Anne Bubnic

Teaming for Success in Underperforming Schools - 0 views

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    Like never before, today's classroom teachers routinely are being asked to collaboratively analyze student data, develop or implement new mandated curricula, and assess the effectiveness of these innovations. Ironically, few preservice preparatory or in-service professional development programs actively train classroom instructors in the use of team-based inquiry or collaborative data- driven problem solving. Framed within the context of the literature and governmental efforts to achieve school reform, this article describes one such in-service program, in practice at public and charter schools in high-need communities in New York City. The Inquiry Based School Improvement Program (IBSIP) was created and designed to help schools serving high-need communities in New York City engage in the types of team-based inquiry and data-driven problem solving needed to meet the everchanging institutional demands on these schools to improve.
Anne Bubnic

Seven Steps to Creating a Data Driven Decision Making Culture - 0 views

  • In this post I hope to share the essence of some of the main ideas communicated in the speech. The format is: words from the slide followed by a short narrative on the core message of the slide. Hope you find it useful.
  • The biggest challenge in our current environment is that it is trivial to implement a tool, it takes five minutes. But tools are limiting and can just give us data. What compounds the challenge is that we all have this deep tendency to make decisions that come from who we are influenced from our life experiences. Based on my humble experience of the last few years here are seven common sense recommendations for creating a data driven company culture……
  • # 6 Reporting is not Analysis
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • # 7 Go for the bottom-line (outcomes)
  • # 5 Depersonalize decision making
  • # 4 Proactive insights rather than reactive
  • # 3 Empower your analysts
  • # 2 Solve for the Trinity
  • # 1: Got Process?
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    The title of this presentation at the Washington DC Emetrics summit was: Creating a Data Driven Web Decision Making Culture - Lessons, Tips, Insights from a Practitioner. Although meant for corporations, the advice applies just as well to academic institutions. The goal here was to share tips and insights that might help companies move from just having lots and lots of data to creating cultures where decisions are made not on gut-feel, or the proverbial seat of the pants, but rather based on data.
Anne Bubnic

SAT Scores Flat as Test-Taking Edges Upward - 0 views

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    Overall SAT scores remained flat this year amid continued but slowing growth in the number of high school seniors taking the widely used college-entrance exam, according to a report released today by the College Board, the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the exam.
Anne Bubnic

All About Assessment: The Mistaken Holy Grail - 0 views

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    Assessment validity refers to the accuracy of a score-based inference about a test taker's status. This definition sounds pretty highbrow, but it really isn't. Educators are interested in getting a fix on students' knowledge and skills so they can make sensible instructional decisions about those students. But teachers can't tell how much a particular student knows merely by looking at the student. That's because students' cognitive skills and knowledge are covert. Accordingly, we test students so we can use their overt responses to the test to make an inference about what's covert. Tests aren't valid or invalid; inferences are.
Anne Bubnic

Looking Back, Looking Forward / A Focus on Assessment - 1 views

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    During the last 65 years, ASCD publications have charted the education profession's perennial quest to design and use assessments wisely. ASCD and its members have consistently urged clarity about the purposes of evaluation and advocated the use of assessments that are appropriate for their specific purposes. A thread that runs through six decades of writing about assessment is the belief that assessments should answer two questions: How are we doing? How can we do it better?
Anne Bubnic

Ackerman releases 5-part accountability program | - 0 views

  • The five assessment areas are: student achievement, which could include success on state tests and graduation rates; school operations, which could include teacher vacancies, class sizes and serious incidents; constituent satisfaction, which will look at results of student, parent and teacher surveys; school-selected indicators, which could include the percentage of students passing advanced classes, for example; and extra credit, which would be improvement in areas identified as challenging, such as increasing the number of students in the advanced category on the state's math and reading test.
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    Philadelphia School District Superintendent Arlene Ackerman yesterday unveiled a new accountability system that will go far beyond standardized test scores to determine how well each school and region is performing. Ackerman is the former county superintendent of schools in San Francisco.
Anne Bubnic

Free tool for Student Technology Assessments - 0 views

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    Free Tech Literacy Assessment tool for students in grades K-12, specifically geared toward middle schoolers. who are required to be technology literate by 8th grade.
Anne Bubnic

Teachers Talking Together: The Power of Professional Community - 0 views

  • A school that is also a professional learning community recognizes that work with students and adults is on-going and embodies the values of continual growth, risk-taking and trust.
  • Now that we had a structure around which to build our professional community, we could explore what that community could do. We found that it allowed us to do several distinct things: as well as developing a shared accountability system, we could diagnose our students’ weaknesses, as well as the gaps in our own teaching; we learned to critique one another’s practice; and we found ways to get to know our students beyond the classroom.
  • As we scored student work together, and team-taught in writing seminar, we also identified skills that we needed to further develop as teachers.
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    Many friendships and emotional connections arise among teachers. These are important, but they do not substitute for necessary professional support and growth. Teachers must have structured time to share, write, and talk about their teaching and their students. Otherwise, teaching is a solitary activity, all too often leading to unsatisfactory results for both teachers and students. A school with a healthy professional learning community will maintain a razor-sharp focus on student achievement; its faculty will feel a common ownership and responsibility for that achievement; and its students will achieve success.
Anne Bubnic

Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Lea... - 0 views

  • The scenarios that illustrate each chapter come from two case studies, one based on a K-8th grade scenario and the other a 9th-12th grade setting. Data Wise grounds its discussion in examples from those contexts, keeping the material accessible and focused on realistic problems and solutions. Data Wise's process depends on collaboration and full faculty participation. With a sympathetic understanding of the inevitable limits on staff time, the authors discuss the best ways to structure collaborative faculty time and include three protocols to involve faculty and staff in gaining insight from data.
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    Demystify that data! A powerful asset to data driven inquiry and improvement, Data Wise comes out of a work group of Boston Public School leaders and Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty and doctoral students and is informed by the development of a data system now used by all Boston Public Schools. Data Wise guides schools and school systems through the growth of comprehensive data systems that encompass classroom work samples as well as standardized tests.
Anne Bubnic

Looking Collaboratively at Student Work: An Essential Toolkit - 0 views

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    Looking closely together at student work can unveil a treasure trove of insights to guide school communities as they reflect on their purpose, assess their progress, and plan strategies for reaching all children better. It's scary work, though, and respectful protocols can help.
Anne Bubnic

STAR 2008 Test Results (CA Dept of Education) - 0 views

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    The 2008 California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Program test results for schools, counties, districts, and the state are available at this site. Test results are reported for the six components of the STAR Program:
Anne Bubnic

Welcome to the STAR Web Site - 0 views

shared by Anne Bubnic on 26 Aug 08 - Cached
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    This site is for district STAR coordinators. The site was developed and is maintained by Educational Testing Service (ETS) under contract with the California Department of Education (CDE). The CDE has contracted with ETS for the development, administration, scoring, and reporting of the California Standards Tests, the California Modified Assessment, the California Alternate Performance Assessment, and the Standards-based Tests in Spanish.
Anne Bubnic

Understanding the STAR: Overview - 0 views

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    The California Standards Tests (CSTs) are designed to match the state's rigorous academic content standards for each grade. Grades 2 through 8 tests cover mathematics and English/language arts (which includes writing in grades 4 and 7). Grades 9 through 11 cover English/language arts, mathematics, and science. History-social science tests are added for grades 8, 10 and 11 as well as science for grade 5. Except for writing, the questions are multiple-choice.
Anne Bubnic

State's schools improve, achievement gap persists - 0 views

  • But the good news came paired with bad as state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell declared that the education of African American students has reached a crisis stage. Scores of that group remained well below those of white and Asian American students, he said, while black students' English skills generally match those of Latino students - many of whom are just learning the language.
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    The state's public school students improved in reading, writing and mathematics this year, marking five years of near-steady growth on the tough California Standards Test, results released Thursday show.
Anne Bubnic

Continuous Improvement: It Takes More Than Test Scores [Bernhardt] - 0 views

  • Schools in our country hear that data makes the difference in improving student achievement. Not all schools, however, have felt the positive impact from what they believe is data-driven decision making. The most common reason: Most school districts in this country believe they are being data-driven when they have analyzed the dickens out of their state assessment results.
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    Continuous Improvement: It takes more than test scores. Analyzing state assessment results is only the beginning of effective data-driven decision making. There is no question that the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001 has impacted schools in at least two ways: First and foremost, NCLB has made the use of data to improve student achievement imperative; and second, NCLB has increased the need for continuous improvement processes within schools. Summative data just the beginning
Anne Bubnic

Early algebra-takers can make standardized test scores misleading - 0 views

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    Seventh-graders who take algebra are ahead of the game but can throw off attempts to use state test results to judge their schools' performance. Most students don't take Algebra 1 until eighth or ninth grade, but a few school districts offer it to a significant number of seventh-graders. So the results released earlier this month on state math tests can be misleading, districts such as Murrieta Unified point out.
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