When I was a kid in the suburbs of Chicago, adventure meant Quetico Provincial Park, up on the border of Minnesota and Canada. The name implies that the place was small, but Quetico is a million acre nature preserve, so big you could go days and days without seeing another soul.
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Astronomy For Kids - 115 views
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This is a great child-friendly place to find out about the planets and the universe. Click on the topics to see lots of info, images and games. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science
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shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
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Occupy Your Brain - 111 views
schoolingtheworld.org/...occupy
education education reform education system schooling pedagogy indigenous indigenous pedagogies knowledge alternative education standardization state standards national standards global standards power authority intellect
shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
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Ant Heald liked it
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One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
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Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
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In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.
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We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
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And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
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by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
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We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
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A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
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The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
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Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
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If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
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The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
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the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
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This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning.
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If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
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We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
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Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
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But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
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Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.
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You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
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if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
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They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
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And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
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They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
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As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.
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They must occupy their brains.
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Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012). -
This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
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Kids Speak Out on Student Engagement | Edutopia - 35 views
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Students were asked "What engages you in school?" This article discusses the results.
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Prodigy Math Game - 91 views
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Prodigy is a free math game for Grades 1 - 8 that kids absolutely love! Learn over 300 critical math skills in our self-paced math game.
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shared by Amy Roediger on 02 Aug 12
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Reading Strategies for 'Informational Text' - NYTimes.com - 172 views
learning.blogs.nytimes.com/...ategies-for-informational-text
common core standards CCSS reading teaching education resources
shared by Amy Roediger on 02 Aug 12
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Annette Yono liked it
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Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.
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Gallery Walks:A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see.
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Graphic Organizers:
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Making Text-to-Text/Text-to-Self/Text-to-World connectionsCharting Debatable IssuesListing Facts/Questions/ResponsesIdentifying Cause and EffectSupporting Opinions With FactsTracking The Five W’s and an HIdentifying Multiple Points of ViewIdentifying a Problem and SolutionComparing With a Venn Diagram
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The One-Pager:Almost any student can find a “way in” with this strategy, which involves reacting to a text by creating one page that shows an illustration, question and quote that sum up some key aspect of what a student learned.
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“Popcorn Reads”:Invite students to choose significant words, phrases or whole sentences from a text or texts to read aloud in random fashion, without explanation. Though this may sound pointless until you try it, it is an excellent way for students to “hear” some of the high points or themes of a text emerge, and has the added benefit of being an activity any reader can participate in easily.
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Illustrations:Have students create illustrations for texts they’re reading, either in the margins as they go along, or after they’ve finished. The point of the exercise is not, of course, to create beautiful drawings, but to help them understand and retain the information they learn.
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Update | Feb. 2012: We'll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, tagged "the NYT and the CCSS." -
A good list of reading strategies for informational text from the New York Times.
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How to: Inquiry | YouthLearn - 85 views
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Before going to the kids, determine any preliminary factors or characteristics that must be true in order to achieve your larger goals or plans
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Almost any topic can become the foundation for an inquiry-based project, even something as mundane as shoes,
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Building Attention Span - The New York Times - 75 views
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ou toggle over to check your phone during even the smallest pause in real life. You feel those phantom vibrations even when no one is texting you. You have trouble concentrating for long periods.
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This is a connection for me to the technology and devices article we read today and did a quotation mingle around during our Disciplinary Literacy Institute. No kidding that we get a shot of dopamine or 'high' when our phone goes ding, or it vibrates.
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Online life is so delicious
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You live in a state of perpetual anticipation because the next social encounter is just a second way.
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xpert online gamers have a great capacity for short-term memory, to process multiple objects simultaneously, to switch flexibly between tasks and to quickly process rapidly presented information.
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Fluid intelligence
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Research at the University of Oslo and elsewhere suggests that people read a printed page differently than they read off a screen. They are more linear, more intentional, less likely to multitask or browse for keywords.
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Crystallized intelligence
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Crystallized intelligence accumulates over the years and leads ultimately to understanding and wisdom.
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So maybe this kind of intelligence, then, is the "learning is a consequence of thinking"?
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Study: RTI Practice Falls Short of Promise - Education Week - 31 views
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"We don't want to have people say that these findings say these schools aren't doing RTI right; this turns out to be what RTI looks like when it plays out in daily life."
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"Students are missing a lot of broader things that are going to make a difference in their ability to put it all together in functional reading."
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students with "mild and relatively mild learning problems" are not representative anymore of the students targeted for Tier 2 interventions. "Over time, in many places what's happened is RTI has been deliberately used as a kind of general education substitution for special education. My strong sense is that over time, more and more kids with greater and greater severity of learning problems are being served in an RTI framework."
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"The most common implementation of RTI is fairly rigid,"
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she said, with schools often using a single test to identify students for Tier 2 and a standard set of interventions once they get there. For example, she noted that the study found that small group instruction and interventions in RTI schools were more likely to focus on phonics for students below grade level than at grade level. "Right there you have a clue that the interventions are focused on these foundational skills and not as much on comprehension," she sai
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iPads in Education - Exploring the use of iPads and mobile devices in education. - 187 views
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How does the releaseof iOS 5 impact you? Multitouch gestures, Notification Center, an upgraded Safari browser, Newstand and more. iOS 5 comes with over 200 new features. Which ones will you use most - both personally and professionally? Share your opinions... News & Views Videos Using an iPad as a Document Camera Added by Sam Gliksman0 Comments 0 Likes First Look: Apple's iOS 5 Added by Sam Gliksman0 Comments 0 Likes Impromptu Field Trip Added by Skip Via0 Comments 0 Likes Add Videos View All xg.addOnRequire(function () { x$('.module_video').mouseover(function () { x$(this).find('.video-facebook-share').show(); }) .mouseout(function () { x$(this).find('.video-facebook-share').hide(); }); }); #iPadEd on Twitter Use the hashtag #iPadEd to tweet with network members // iPads in Education Tweets SamGliksman RT @kcalderw: Last call for participants for an iPad in Edu survey for Masters class. Looking for teachers who use them. #ipadchat #ipaded4 hours ago · reply · retweet · favorite buddyxo Coding on the iPad: http://t.co/J55XxcXl. Looki
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Finally, the goal of this community is to promote innovation in education through the use of technology. The site is not sponsored by Apple nor does it endorse the use of any specific technology or product.
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Finally, the goal of this community is to promote innovation in education through the use of technology. The site is not sponsored by Apple nor does it endorse the use of any specific technology or product.
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Tablet computing and mobile devices promise to have a dramatic impact on education. This Ning network was created to explore ways iPads and other portable devices could be used to re-structure and re-imagine the processes of education.
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Education World: Assistive Technology for Challenged Kids - 40 views
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It is important to understand that there are a variety of students with different learning needs. While we can utilize different teaching strategies for students who have learning disabilities, it is important to remember that there are students with physical disabilities who need a different kind of help. This article really shows us the different types available, gives examples of different students and their experiences, and provides various resources for the parent and teacher to utilize in order to find out what assistive technology may be best for their child or student. less than a minute ago
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It is important for us to remember that there are various resources we can go to in order to help our students. We just have to know where to go to find them.
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This article reminds us that just getting an assistive technology is not what the student needs. We need to make sure that we have the proper training in order to help the student utilize it so he or she can get the most out of the assistive device.
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How (and When) to Limit Kids' Tech Use - 14 views
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Cool Cat Teacher Blog - 4 views
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What a great post. I remember reading something about "Zero the Hero". Think about how many of our kids think they are nothing because others have labeled them weird. In reality, they are the ones who will make a difference!
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How to Develop Positive Classroom Management | Edutopia - 87 views
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nly by building positive relationships within the school
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while 80 percent said that classroom-management training, conflict resolution, guidance counseling, and mediation are effective for improving discipline.
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Agree on Classroom Rules at the Beginning of the Year
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engaging students actively in the process of determining a set of class rules
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"What do you want to get out of class today?"
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"Have each kid give a short answer. It's a way to communicate with them.
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Be Consistent About Expectations
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school staff should work together as much as possible to foster consistency in expectations, and discipline methods, throughout the school
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Reinforce Appropriate Behavior
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"It's not about 'Gotcha
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correcting students is the weakest way of teaching rules
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Maintain Student Dignity
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"A school in which students and teachers don't feel safe creates a fearful environment
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Be Neutral, Not Accusatory
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ask what happened, opening the way for students to tell their story.
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Look for the Cause
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Establish a Fairness Committe
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teachers let them tell their side of the story to the committee and, hopefully, make amends
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"What happened?" and "Who else has been affected?" to "What do you need to do now to repair the harm?"
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It's Not the Assessment - It's How You Use It | Assessment in Perspective - 78 views
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We acknowledge that there is so much that is out of our control right now when it comes to assessment, but we believe we need to also remember what we can control.
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These assessments can help a teacher determine the type of small group and whole class instruction that needs to be done to support her readers in using strategies effectively and flexibly. This type of analysis is typically not required — only the list of levels needs to be turned in.
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When we simply look at these students based on the numerical score they achieve on these assessments, we lose so much data. Knowing a student or group of students did not reach a benchmark helps us determine that these kids need support, but it does not tell us the type of support they need.
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Assessing students counts as a conference!
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Another way to translate assessments into day-to-day teaching is to use your conferring notebook while you are doing your required assessments.
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It is so helpful to take a little the extra time after each assessment to think about what you learned, and how you can use that data tomorrow to lift the quality of your instruction.
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we believe that what is most important is that you can assess the full profile of a reader and you use the assessment data to inform your teaching
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Sometimes it is better to stay the course with the tools we have and understand it is the best decision for our district at this point in time.
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This work is messy and rarely precise.
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Stop teaching kids how to be happy, says education expert - 9 views
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"A leading educational psychologist is urging schools to stop thinking of wellbeing as another subject to be taught. Instead, she is urging them to create healthier schools where students naturally develop wellbeing and a love of learning. Dr. Helen Street, an Honorary Research Fellow with The University of Western Australia's Graduate School of Education, has released a new book, Contextual Wellbeing: creating positive schools from the inside out, which offers a practical framework for building a healthy, equitable social context in schools."
My Sharebar by Post Planner - 29 views
Discover Map | Kids Discover - 32 views