Group items tagged

This article discusses the importance or non-importance of homework. Ideas addressed are homework policy, homework as formative assessment, and emphasis on homework versus achievement. Ultimately, it is suggested that feedback is what is most important.

This article focuses on how post-licensure education can help improve the teacher gap, which will, in effect, make teachers that are better prepared to close the achievement gap. The article highlights a few strategies that are essential to helping improve professional development for teachers already in the classroom. Some areas they mention specifically are better content mastery, a better way to assess students, improving the classroom environment, and better instructional strategies (or best practices).

In this article, the authors describe why it is important to develop number sense rather than rote memorization with math facts. The article lists why number sense, reasoning, and deep understanding of numbers leads to more efficient problem solvers and higher achieving math mathematicians. A few engaging activities are listed to replace rote memorization of addition and multiplication math facts. A heavy emphasis on speed leads to anxiety and a distaste of mathematics in many young learners. Educators should be focusing on teaching students how to be flexible thinkers when faced with unknown math facts.

This article details how Open Educational Resources (OERs) have helped certain districts close the achievement gap, and it provides a list of "how-to's" for implementing OERs into the school system.

This article is about alphabet knowledge in Pre-kindergarten and Kindergarten classroom. It went over different assessments to use to assess the proper way to demonstrate alphabet knowledge. This a great article to read. It talks about instructional approaches and how to shift to alphabet instruction that aligned with emphasis on assessments and differentiated instruction. I believe that would be good resources to help teach my students' letter sounds. This might also help me achieve my SMART target goal.

At the New Mexico School for the Arts, they tried a variety of approaches for using data to improve student achievement, and didn't get it right at first. This article shares what they learned.

This article discusses how teachers can help every student move forward and experience success by anticipating possible gaps in knowledge and building scaffolds into each lesson to address these gaps. The author, Pepper Rollins (2016), describes a variety of tools to provide such support.

This article is very timely it talks about the NCLB law and how it isn't working. Threats to teachers firing, closing schools and students still continue to decline. Standardized testing isn't working. This is a great article, must read.