Group items tagged

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.

This blog addresses professional practices and critical learning issues of our day. Members of PLCs can select a blog post for text-based discussions to deepen professional practice.

In this video Rick Wormeli describes the difference between formative and summative assessment and how and when they are used for student learning. This could be a great PLC discussion starter prior to work on developing assessments for a data action plan.

This page provides a set of descriptions that detail the characteristics of quality student work regardless of content area. Teachers could use this in the PLCs as a gauge to evaluate student work. For students in middle school, high school and college, teachers could share these with students to help them achieve high quality work.

This is a blog post by Stephen Downes in which he provides a succinct counterargument to Daniel Willingham's thesis that learning styles do not exist. This post and the link to the source with additional reader comments could serve as a reading selection for a PLC.

These three videos from Expeditionary Learning show how we can model for students how they can critique their own and each other's work and provide descriptive feedback. Teachers can apply these strategies with their own students. Teachers can also work together with their PLC to implement these strategies with their students.

This is a post by Grant Wiggins in which he provides a synopsis of 15 year's worth of reading strategies research-what works and what doesn't work-and then his key take-aways are. This is a very interesting and 'meaty' read. This article as well as the preceding and final post could serve as the foundation for a PLC text-based seminar discussion on reading strategies with the goal to improve our students transfer of these skills to novel texts.

This site provided an article that looked into what the organization, Partners in School Innovations is doing to "not just close the achievement gap, but the teaching gap." Results from a survey are shared regarding average class sizes and the time spent teaching versus the time spent planning. The article provides a case study of a school that focused on instructional gaps and its results. This is a great read for administrators, policymakers and other stakeholders.

I realize this has more to do with achievement gaps than specific gaps within a single classroom, but it has been my experience that targeted instruction to support a few helps every learner in the room.

In this quick article it identifies a formulaic way to create good thesis statements. I love giving students a map or tool to help them remember how to structure a solid thesis statement that anchors a good essay. These four steps are dead on but we will have to adapt it to the 6th grade level for my PLC practice.

This resource provides a 5 minute video that explains the importance of understanding the structure of writing so that students can recognize it in their readings and they can model it in their own writing. I think that this is imperative to our PLC SMART Goal.

(Week 7 Jason Caputo and Ericka Posey- Group 8) This article is available through the UMUC library through the permalink above. This article examines a teacher directed model for closing achievement gaps. It explains why administrator driven directives and extensive scripting of curriculum are not always successful in closing achievement gaps. It explains the "risk is that prescriptive, bureaucratic approaches will drive talented and thoughtful teachers out of specific schools or the entire profession"(Levine and Marcus, 2007) However, it also points out potential flaws in systems without some oversight of teachers. In the case study presented, teachers avoid asking tough questions about instructional challenges, methods, and expectations/standards. Despite their good intentions and implementation of some effective strategies, during their team meeting/PLC time, "requests for help occurred around specific students or parents; teachers did not use this particular forum as a site for seeking help with core instructional challenges" (Levine and Marcus, 2007). While they are able to reduce some of the achievement gap, there is significant room for growth in their professional practice. The protocols discussed in our course address this, as they provide a professional and polite way to ask challenging questions about professional practice. References Levine, T. H., & Marcus, A. S. (2007). Closing the Achievement Gap through Teacher Collaboration: Facilitating Multiple Trajectories of Teacher Learning. Journal Of Advanced Academics, 19(1), 116-138.

In this blog post, contributors Libby Woodfin, Tony Frontier, Laura Cabrera and Alice Mercer provide examples of the power of formative assessment to improve student learning. I was especially intrigued with first grader Austin and how his classmates used concrete, descriptive feedback to help him improve his scientific drawing of a butterfly. Check out the link! This would be a great article to assign for a PLC text-based discussion using any of the protocols described by Venables on pp. 85-87 in his book, Turning Data into Action.

This KQED blog post provides information on current and past research that indicates how important movement and the use of our bodies are to learning. This research is called "embodied learning". The discussion on highly decorated classrooms is worth further exploration. This would be another great article for a text-based discussion in a PLC. The math and physics examples can be adapted for other content areas for use as instructional strategies.

(Week 9: Benjamin, Cheney, and Gretchen) This article is accessible through the link provided above. The main focus of this article is to inform educators of the positive effects movement can have on student learning. This article provides a series of studies where students were presented with different problems, mostly math, and encouraged to represent the problems with movement. Students who used physical movement to represent and solve mathematical problems demonstrated higher levels of success than their age-related peers who simply solved by reading a problem to themselves or aloud. This article is useful for all members of my team as it suggests methods for adapting physical movement to all content areas. Within this article it is suggested ""When students use their bodies in the learning process, it can have a big effect, even if it seems silly or unconnected to the learning goal at hand" (Schwartz, 2015). I think most teachers can find reassurance from this research-based article knowing that the implementation of movement doesn't have to fit directly with curriculum unit. The teachers within my specific team can use the practice of movement as an alternative method for instructing desired skills such as decoding strategies for reading or identifying/constructing numbers in base ten. Reference Schwartz, K. (2015, March 26). Why kids need to move, touch, and experience to learn. Retrieved from https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39684/why-kids-need-to-move-touch-and-experience-to-learn

Group 3: Erika Eason, Margarita Lugo, Frances Parker Week 8: This journal article is accessible through the link given above by accessing the UMUC library. Description: Students with learning disabilities commonly either avoided or have been discouraged from taking World Language classes. This article describes "multi-sensory approaches" and the kind of instructional strategies, informed by brain-based research, that can help students with learning disabilities succeed in learning Spanish or another second language. The article focuses on how to create meaningful inclusion and skill building in Spanish courses through general accommodations, existing resources, and learning strategies. The article also references the relative lack of scholarly research on this topic and how that negatively impacts wider knowledge of ways to help students with learning disabilities learn a foreign language. This article was of interest to our group because the SMART goal is directly tied to improving the performance of special education students in Spanish class. The goal of the world languages department is for every student to learn one of the languages taught, yet that is not always possible since special education students who are not meeting the reading goals are frequently pulled from language classes to get reading support. Implementing strategies and other instructional moves that might keep the students in language class, are of interest to the teachers. While several of the multisensory strategies discussed were already known, there were a couple that reinforced practices that have already been implemented as a result of our group's data action plan and at least one new idea that our practicing teacher would like to try. This article would be particularly useful for Spanish teachers who are learning to differentiate their instruction and assessment for the first time and who need ideas about how to involve more Citation: Tolbert, J. B.,