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Chapter 6 of this book by Pérsida Himmele and William Himmele focuses on Total Participation Techniques that move. Of particular interest to my data team is the section of this chapter on Bounce Cards. This strategy can help all students feel confident and comfortable participating in a group discussion. I think it can be especially helpful to world language teachers looking to encourage students to discuss academic topics in the target language. (Week 9)

This is a chapter from Lois Brown Easton's Book: Protocols for Professional Learning. This chapter focuses on several protocols to help teams evaluate student work. PLCs can use any number of these protocols to examine student work more deeply and effectively as part of their data action plan.

In this first chapter of his book, Popham (2008) attempts to define what formative assessment is and what it is not. He insists on the fact that formative assessment is a process and in his opinion a classroom process. He refers to a meta-analysis conducted by Black and William (1998b) to show evidence of the benefits of formative assessment and quotes Black and William's claim that "student gains in learning triggered by formative assessment are "amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions" (p. 61). Popham also warns educators against testing companies who are now offering interim or benchmark tests as "formative assessments" and claims that there's no scientific evidence that district-developed or state-developed periodically administered assessments will improve students' achievement.

This is a great article found on ASCD that highlights the importance of word study and phonics instruction as part of Guided Reading instruction to build basic foundational skills for ELL students. This is a chapter found in the book "Research-Based Methods of Reading Instruction for English Language Learners, Grades K-4." I chose this article because it includes actual guided reading lessons for groups who are working on specific skills such as word endings, vowel combinations, blends, diagraphs etc. Linan-Thompson, S & Vaughn, S. (2007). Phonics and Word Study. Research-Based methods of reading instruction for English language learners, grades K-4. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108002/chapters/Phonics-and-Word-Study.aspx

Week 8: This book is the updated version Autodesk Inventor 2015. In chapter 3: Creating and Editing Sketched features, helps explain how to edit sketches that have already been made. I know my students are always having issues with this and end up creating a lot of extra sketches that are not needed and make the sketch messy. Reading this will help reduce the amount of unnecessary sketches and could help improve the efficiency of how a part is made.

Since standardized testing has seem to surface as a way for schools to be graded on their "performance", an increasing number of schools have embraced the data driven curriculum.

This article gives good insight on using data with our instruction. Although the idea of using data to drive instruction has always been out there, within the last 2 years, this has become more of a focus in my school. Last year we started holding monthly "data meetings" in order to look at data gathered from weekly assessments, unit assessments, county and state assessments. Based on the scores we would work to create a next steps in our instruction. As a school, we also set goals to reach across grade levels.

Good article. As I was reading this article one thing hit me. One of the first things that is mentioned is NCLB, RTTT, and CCSS. I was thinking, maybe if the government would let teachers get used to a curriculum our instruction would get better and higher level learning could go on. Just my short rant.

Week 7: This book maybe outdated for some versions of Inventor, however, Chapter 2: Sketching, Constraining, and Dimensioning, is a great read for students and teachers that are having issues with the different geometric constraints. It shows all the symbols, with descriptions of what they are, for the constrains and how to use them. It can also give teachers a better understanding on how to teach the different constraints.

This article discusses the effects of learning targets on all people in the school - students, teachers, principals and central-office administrators. It goes on to describe ways to create an effective learning target and the actions necessary order to do so. Furthermore, it outlines the process of learning targets. Effective learning targets are able to help close the achievement gap!

Week 8 - Posted by Katie, Bonnie, and Malkie. The author explains the importance of spending 25% of teaching time, teaching the specific phonics skills and the rest of the time engaging students in actually reading and phonics related activities. There are quite a few suggestions for activities.