Group items tagged

("Week 8" Group Members: Beth and Ruchel) The article explores a study conducted to see the patterns of within-group variability in the emergent literacy skills of preschoolers who are at risk for academic difficulties. The study can be used as a helpful resource to determine the relationships between early patterns of literacy performance and later reading achievement.

"At some schools, up to 70 percent of kids are refusing to take the exams". "Thousands of students are opting out of new standardized tests aligned to the Common Core standards, defying the latest attempt by states to improve academic performance".

This resource is the most complete guide that I was able to find in regards to developing SMART Goals as a means to pinpoint areas for professional growth. Many of the articles that I found online were short articles that just listed the definition and provided few examples of SMART Goals or anecdotal information based on the person writing the web page. I thought that this resource was a wonderful document that could be used by school systems to help teachers show growth. Currently, we have and SLO in Howard County, however, it requires us to make a student performance goal. It does not require us to develop as a professional in the process. I think that this is a complete disservice to our students. As a teacher, I believe that I am tasked with continuing to learn for all the year which I choose to stay in this profession. I should never be "comfortable" with my teaching practices and materials. I should always adapt materials to meet the needs of the students have each year and I should continuously be looking for new ways/materials to present information to students. As a math teacher and special educator, I think that Web 2.0 tools are the future of my field, however, most other professionals at my school disagree. They believe that students should learn in the classroom and not be provided with direct instruction of how to use the Web to help them learn a variety of mathematical concepts or ways to improve study methods. I hope to use this resource to develop my own practices and help others grow as well.

Most teachers believe that students have a fear of word problems, but this article will have you second guessing that. The article will have teachers thinking that word problems should be used from the start of a lesson and not at the very end of a homework assignment. Students normally perform better on word problems then algebraic solving because they have context clues to help them solve the problem.

To sum up this article you can look at the following quote from it; And he warned that the tendency to wait before using word problems could exacerbate gaps for students who struggle with algebra early on, because they may not be exposed to many word problems at all. Students have a fear of word problems because they perceive that they are too hard before they even begin working on them. This combined with the gaps in the vocabulary knowledge are making word problems more difficult for them.

This is an article that explores the strategy of introducing word problems first during math instruction. As a math teacher, I tend to introduce concepts first then build up to applying those concepts to word problems. The strategy of introducing the word problems first acts to help students solve a problem using any method they are comfortable with, without getting bogged down with the math too soon and becoming unwillingly to solve it. This could address the SMART learning goal, by helping us to rethink the way in which students approach word problems.

#EDTC615 #Spring2018

A doctoral dissertation about enhancing writing at the elementary level. Teachers used an intensive 9 week writing program and observed the effects on the students' writing performance. Learning gaps with writing is very wide and instructional changes are made in order to help students write better. Cross-curricular instruction with writing is also emphasized in this study.

This article includes example-based insights and techniques for using student performance data when talking to parents about their children.

I selected this article since I primarily work with college students and need to offer additional support to help students use their self-advocacy skills for their own learning goals. I feel that this would be a good way to address learning gaps by integrating these skills into our instruction. Abstract: Self-advocacy is the ability to communicate one's needs and wants and to make decisions about the supports needed to achieve them (Stodden, Conway, & Chang, 2003). Research shows self-advocacy skills are related to academic performance and successful adaptation to college (Adams & Proctor, 2010; Getzel & Thoma, 2008; Hadley, 2006; Murray, Lombardi, & Kosty, 2014; Thoma & Wehmeyer, 2005).

This article talks about seeing all students as part of your classroom. I personally like how it lists things to think about when instructing students. Although some will think these are no brainers, its always good to reflect on yourself as an educator. Especially when it comes to students with IEPs and 504s. I also liked how it reminds educators to reflect on the whole student and think about forces outside the school that greatly affect the students performance in the classroom.

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.

This article studies the "Detect, Practice and Repair" strategy used in a fourth grade classroom with mathematical facts of subtraction, multiplication and division. The DPR method allows teachers to identify students that are having problems with certain concepts. The teacher can then differentiation individual assignments for those students to practice, thereby repairing a deficit of learning that might exist. This form of differentiation shows a marked improvement in student performance.