LCS Innovation

Larry Ferlazzo is a veteran teacher of English and Social Studies at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He has written seven books on education - including a few on student motivation, and writes extensively on education issues, including authoring a teacher advice blog for Education Week Teacher, and maintaining a popular resource-sharing blog.

In the past few years, parents, teachers, and policy makers have furiously debated whether standardized tests should be used to promote or hold back children, fire teachers, and withhold funds from schools. The debate has focused for the most part on whether the tests are being used in unfair ways.

In the spring of 1991, I returned to teaching after more than five years as a Benedictine monk. The monastery had been founded in China in the 1920s, and when exiled after the Chinese Revolution, the community had relocated to the Mojave Desert in California.

Some questions to help evaluate lessons/projects for rich learning with technology. One more interesting way to self-reflect.

Amazing. I have been trying really hard to write my reports carefully and focussed on fostering a growth mindset. Not easy because I so many "go to" phrases that fix the mindset.

Grades are just a math game. This is what I told students many years ago. "If you know how to work the numbers, you can get a good grade."

I have been following Mark Barnes and Starr Sackstein this year, they are doing really amazing things in their classrooms and moving away from grades. They co-moderate a group on Facebook called "Teachers Throwing out Grades" and have a Twitter Chat Monday nights at 7 #TTOG - it is worth checking out!

Since elementary school, I knew that grades mattered - a lot. I was a keen student who spent most of my schooling chasing after the highest marks and beating myself up for anything less than an "A". Looking back, I was more concerned with playing the "grading game" than actually learning.

I couldn't agree more!!

Now that we're back to school, what are some ways you can shake things up in the new year? Here are 10 ideas to try out in your classroom, no matter how big or small your learners may be. Have some ideas of your own?

A choppy video with a decent PDF resource about teacher professional development for the 21st century teacher

I need to delve into more MOOC's. You should check out EDPuzzle. It's an awesome program to 'flip' the classroom but it could be used in a MOOC based program as well.

These tips will come in handy while we're making our training video for LS.

Super Quiz is an add-on for Google sheets/forms - give quick feedback to students from a quiz (in a form). This is tutorial to get started.

This is great. Could be powerful for organizing formative evaluations and making the information easier to access