this is one of the most important reasons for data and using the data to help guide instruction
the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.
Why wouldn't we want a coach? Our supervisor or administrator often serves as an evaluator but might not have the time due to time constraints to serve as an effective and dedicated coach. Yet, a coach doesn't have to be an expert. Couldn't the coach just be a colleague with a different skill set?
They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
Please tell me what profession isn't always evolving? It something isn't evolving, it is dying! So, why doesn't everyone on the face of the earth - regardless of his/her profession or station in life - need coaching periodically to help them continue to grow and evolve?
We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
outside ears, and eyes, are important
For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
So, instead of having students take test after test after test, why don't we just have coaches who observe and sit and discuss and offer suggestions and divide the number of tests we give students in half and do away with half? Are we concerned about student knowledge? student performance? student ability? student growth or capacity for growth? What we really need to identify is what we value!
California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
Of course they are more effective! They have a trusted individual to guide them, mentor them, help sustain them. The coach can cheer and affirm what the teacher is already doing well and offer suggestions that are desired and sought in order to improve their 'game' and become more effective.
they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science.
Knowledge of the content is one thing and expertise is yet another. Sometimes what makes us better teachers is simply strategies and techniques - not expertise in the content. Sometimes what makes us better teachers could simply be using a different tool or offering options for students to choose.
The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.
The conversation with the coach and the coach listening and learning what the teacher would like to expand, improve, and grow is probably the most vital part! If the teacher doesn't have a clue, the coach could start anywhere and that might not be what the teacher adopts and owns. So, the teacher must have ownership and direction.
teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.
This could provide specific categories to offer teachers a choice in what direction they want to go toward improving - especially important for those who want broad improvement or are clueless at where to start.
must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at.
most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
The coach also makes you aware of where you are excelling!
So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.
These questions are quite similar to what we ask little children when they are learning something new. How did that go? What else could you do? What could you do differently? What more is needed? What would help?
I always hate seeing a video of me teaching but I did learn so much about myself, my teaching, and my students that I could not learn in any other way!
I know that I’m learning again.
It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.
Summary is pretty comprehensive. WhiteBoard and ThinkFree are decent options. GoogleDocs would be my top choice, but I hate that with all of these students need an account. I would rather use the district Wiki for students to collaborate.
I also asked myself the question: "What can I do with these devices that would be impossible to do without them?" In other words, I was hoping to create new teaching methods rather than just replacing old ones.
I redesigned my classroom practice around the goals, with iPads as the infrastructure.
Redefine with a goal in mind
Get more app for your money.
student-creation apps
Embrace failure
By creating a safe, open environment and by being clear that this endeavor is as foreign to you as it is to them, you encourage risk taking—and greater achievements.
Enjoy the results, reflect towards the future. A
I saw students become active agents in their own learning—because they now had choices about the methods that worked best for them. Kids who’d professed to hate school were now eager to engage in the classroom. One student wrote in her daily reflection, "[iPads] make me want to come to school every day because I know that Ms. Magiera has a lesson just for me."
Very clear imagery. He opens the essay with his personal anecdote to set the scene for this discussion. It also lets the reader know right away that he is a gun owner.
What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.
I felt uneasy
He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.
There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.
We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
Rarely do we mention what we carry
I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
Guns were often a bridge between father and son.
or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
had a gun put to my head
I can remember that
steel
I can remember
In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.
I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.
I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.
I stood there trembling while they apologized.
Jackson County
I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.
Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.
A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night
the .308 blew apart the morning.
There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
Life is sustained by death
the killing is not easy, nor should it be.
would feed me for a year
I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”
As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,
situation was re
All I could think about was how things might have been different if the
versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.
This guy knows his guns. Even though his essay doesn't cite research, you can see his ethos through his personal experience and his use of precise jargon.
There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.
firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.
I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.
as they wait for the end of the world.
they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
Where is the fault in this logic? It just doesn't add up.
They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
I understand what’s at stake
I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
an unrelenting fear of what could be lost
a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.
I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban
question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.
Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier
there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.
The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.
I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.
I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
How does fear drive so many of us to distrust and hate our fellow Americans? How does the Gun Lobby and the NRA use this fear to their advantage? What role does fear play in racial prejudice? How do we combat and address this fear?