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A useful module that explains how tiering can provide help learners learn better and has videos of examples. This can help improve Smart Goals for improvement in assessments, and homework and classroom performance.

I enjoyed the video on Tiering. Our teams' SMART goal is, "Students will be able to solve an on grade level math task, that will require them to respond and defend their work to explain their reasoning 3 out of 5 times by the end of the 1st marking period." I think an important concept to note, is that this activity has a high Impact on Learning because it differentiates for the particular needs of each student. This process also encourages Student Engagement, which allows for the students to work comfortably in a peer environment. By having more time to plan differentiated work to meet simultaneous goals between students, the teacher is also scaffolding. The teacher is giving support to students who need it and to also challenge those students to maintain interest or to continue the work of those who have mastered a specific skill but may need more advanced strategies to continue the upward curve of learning. EDTC 615 Fall2018

With the video, the topic of towering the lesson is shown. With my SMART goal focusing on the 11th graders in my health education classes, it I'm important for me to address all the educational needs of my students. Currently, I use DI in my classes and I found a piece of information from the video that can I can begin to implement. The teacher had her students raise their hand with chosen number of fingers in the air. The number represents the level that each student feels they are on in regards to understanding the topic. While the exact way this strategy is used is not something I think will be effective with my high school students, the number system is. I can have my students write and post their perceived number and explain why they chose that number. Then, I can see the comfortability each student has with the topic. THey would have to apply extended reasoning which is a respresentation of depth of knowledge from the planning protocol rubric. EDTC Fall2018 EL

Videos: EL Education provides a variety of educational resources for teachers across the world. This bookmarked section includes videos of teachers and students engaged in a variety of strategies for learning. One or more of these videos could be helpful as a strategy to include in your data action plan.

A great educational site with video and resources for teacher to help enhance teaching and learning across difference disciplines.

EDTC615 Fall2018 Group 6 Dimension: Student Engagement. The video EL Education- Policing in America: Using Powerful Topics and Tasks to Challenge, Engage, and Empower Students. Student Engagement. My SMART Learning goal is that "The percentage of students who will score 90% will increase by 80%. This means that 80% of the students will score 90%.". The dimension is Student Engagement. The video is appropriate for grade 9-12 and it covers social studies literacy. Moreover, the video provides strategies that educators can employ to challenge, engage and empower students. This is done by introducing students to topics that affect them every day. This is a good instructional tactics that can be employed by my team. During our review, we realized the important of student's engagement and team work to learning and understating the topics in the assessment data that we reviewed. Having students work in groups and on projects goes a long way to improve collaboration, team building and learning among students. In addition, students were given complex topics to explore and they were introduced to research paper. Educators can use the protocol to determine the level of engagements, design innovative curriculum and instructions, and increase students strategic reasoning skills. For instance, we may use some assessment tool like quizlet live to build collaborative learning and engagement among students. Student can become innovative through learning from the real-world related concepts or hands-on activities. The protocol can serve as blue print in this regard. EDTC615 Fall2018

This article appeared in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education so at first I was worried that it would not be applicable; however, I quickly found that it is a fantastic resource for teachers of all ages. My goal is to learn more instructional strategies to facilitate an increase in the frequency of higher-level questioning that I use in the classroom to support the learning gaps that I have identified with my students. This article highlights very important concepts related to my search. I have learned that questioning strategies and using various levels should be done with appropriate timing, as it relates to the depth of instruction, to avoid confusion or discouraging students. It was also emphasized that all levels of questioning should be incorporated into learning situations, but suggested questioning methods to ensure that all levels are utilized. The article provides great detail about facilitating the Socratic method, Question Circles, and Student-generated questions. All of these methods will produce higher-level questioning opportunities to increase student exposure to critical thinking tasks. I would highly recommend this article for review for all levels of educators. I am now hoping to learn more about the Socratic method to incorporate this into my own classroom.

"Science talks allow all students to do exactly what scientists do: think about, wonder about, and talk about how things work, the origins of phenomena, and the essence of things."

SMART Goal: Students will be able to solve an on-grade level math task, that will require them to respond and defend their work to explain their reasoning 3 out of 5 times by the end of the 1st marking period. Planning Protocol: Student Engagement can be a tactic that my team can use for the SMART goal because students are lacking the ability to defend their reasoning when it comes to writing the information down on paper. If we practice students defend their answers by engaging them in guided questions and discussions (orally) and letting students know what they instructors are looking for, I think it will help students be able to defend their answers when writing them down.

One of the biggest pushes in education today is letting students take control of tracking their own data and setting their own goals. To many teachers this task may be overwhelming and leave you trying to figure out the easiest way to implement this in your classroom.

(Week 9: Sarah, Mary and Jessica) This article is accessible through the link provided above. The main focus of this article is the importance of setting goals in the classroom. The teacher who wrote this article wanted to take her students' portfolios and turn them into a student data folder. Within the data folder there are "long term goals (the entire school year), short term goals (monthly, quarterly, weekly), goal reflections, and tracking charts (bar graphs, tables, charts, etc.)" (Harpole, 2013-2015). According to Harpole (2013-2015), "Each assessment would be based on the text we were reading that week in class. It contained four multiple choice questions with an answer justification required and a constructed response question. Students would take their weekly assessments on Friday. During the first ten minutes of class on Mondays, we would pass out data folders and students would record their scores." This allows students to set goals based on their score. Her research did show that the students were focused more on the number grade than any other grade. In turn, "My students set goals during Quarter Four that did not contain letter grades or words like "basic" and "unsatisfactory"( Harpole, 2013-2015). This implementation was very successful in her classroom. The article shows the process that Harpole took to improve her student's data folder. It took her a lot of time to perfect it in order to be able to share with other teachers. This article is a great lesson for all teachers. Every teacher wants to show data in their own way. Sometimes it's hard for teachers in different grade levels to show the data. This teacher came up with a packet that other teachers can use as a guide to help their fellow educators. I know that I would use this data folder for my students and just revamp it so that it's age appropriate for my students. The teachers in my group can use this article as a guide to help their students set goals. At the end, of t

This article is a great way to showcase the student's classroom goals and track student data. It gives the students the responsibility to track their own work and it would be a great tool to send home for their parents to view. The students have ownership of their work and their grade. Having weekly assessments on the content presented allows the students to see what they need to study and to ask the teacher for any help. I personally would keep the student's progress monitoring sheet in their own personal notebooks where they will have a copy of their progress monitoring sheet for them to fill out daily or weekly and their goals taped to the inside of their binder. This way the students can see if they have mastered their goals.

This is a game that I introduced to my A & P class. Memorizing the bones can be a difficult task to students. This game helps them learn with colorful interaction. There are 4 different types of games so this can help engage learners who struggle with reading a text book to acquire their knowledge

Implementation Meeting 3 - Chris, Noelle, Elijah, and Angela Citation: Wilson, D. & Conyers, M. (2015, February 12). Put Working Memory to Work in Learning | Edutopia. Retrieved March 21, 2018, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/put-working-memory-to-work-donna-wilson-marcus-conyers This article focuses on activating and using the "working memory" of learners. Working Memory, as defined in this context, "...is what you can do with what you know." The authors provide several instructional strategies that encourage teachers to move away rote memorization instruction and move toward active use of knowledge. The strategies range in simplicity from repeating information to researching and peer-teaching. All of the working teachers within our group are seeking to improve student performance on testing, which in general, is more problem-solving based. In some of our data discussions, we have talked about students knowing material, not being able to identify and apply the information to complete certain tasks.

My SMART Goal: "By the end of the numbers unit, 60% of students in the Special Education program in MS Spanish 1A - Period 2 will achieve 80% or higher on each formative assessment including listening, speaking and writing assessments." - This resource video on adapting curriculum to learners' needs could assist in differentiation the strategies and activities done in class for students with varying special needs to close their achievement gap since they are not currently receiving many of their needed accommodations.

This video had some great ideas especially about differentiation that could be used for me to achieve my SMART goal of 100% pass rate for standardized English Language tests amount a targeted group. The teacher's method of pre-arranged assignments to prevent students from feeling singled out is very clever, and especially important for students in that age group. I could see myself adapting these strategies for use in many different classes. From the dimension of 'teacher friendliness' I do think these tactics are not necessarily teacher friendly, but they sure seem to be worth it if it means positive student outcomes.

EDTC615 Fall2018 Group 6 Dimension: Teacher Friendliness My SMART target goal is the percentage of students who will score 90% will increase by 80%. This means that 80% of the students will score 90%. The instructional tactic I will use from this video is teacher friendliness. In the video, the teacher displays high level of support, and maintenance with the students. She showed how she provided materials to the students and go over the materials in the class. She also does some great prep work as well. She was seen going around the students table to provide supported as needed. This is very relevant tactic that can be used by my team. The data we both presented covers teaching Microsoft suite-excel, access, word and powerpoint. The instructional style boarders greatly on simulation training, grader activities, grader projects and hands-on practice. In this regard, it is important for the instructor to provide high maintenance and support the students as needed. For instance, during simulation training, the instructor needs to go around the class to assist individual student as needed. The instructor should also provide students will relevant materials and resources to help them achieve success. For instance, in meeting this goal, during our review, we realized that we should teach the topics using 2016 applications as against 2013 applications. This guide of quest was born out of our desire to promote students friendly learning environment. EDTC615 Fall2018

a posted visible support for just-in-time learning that includes only the essential information about strategies, procedures, and concepts that students can access at any time.

Anchor charts are always helpful to students throughout the day that helps them visualize their learning throughout the unit. Because of this, I believe this can be helpful in guiding our students to be successful in our SMART goal. The goal in our group is students will be able to not only answer a real-life mathematics question, but they will also be able to defend their thinking/reasoning accurately and precisely 75% of the time. They way that we can use the anchor chart is to show students how to create an appropriate response, and what makes an appropriate response.

EDTC615 FALL2018 (Week 8 Ericka, Michele, Spencer) The article and video is via diigo library SMART GOAL: By the end of 1st quarter 75% of the LSN Government students will be able to analyze political cartoons and historical content with 75% accuracy for historical content and meaning for the LSN FAST I test. The video states it is for grades 3 - 8 but I find that it can be appropriate for high school students also. Anchor charts can be used for any subject matter, really any grade level for many different purposes as a visual aid for individual learning and for groups activities. Anchor charts can be used as warm up activities, classroom assessments, exit tickets, and classroom activities. Anchor reports can be used within the members of our group to make key vocabulary points especially for ESOL students. They are used to access what the students have learned on an independent level. These anchor chart can be used to fortify information needed in small groups for the overall whole class. The use of color, large fonts, and well organized and easy to read anchor chart are much more viable for students. Anchor chart when used with practice the students can use them to guide their own learning. These are important for all students because at some point we want the students to take charge of their own learning and be self-sufficient within the classroom setting. There is some prep work completed by the teacher and the teacher facilitates the learning but the overall learning is done by the students. For my students I would like to use anchor charts as a class survey, assessing the knowledge learned by a particular lesson or as an exit ticket forum.

I am a special educator at RHHS in Howard County. As a special educator, I have been tasked with teaching Tutorial classes that were created to help students with disabilities receive service hours in various goal areas. Last year, was the first year that I attempted to implement SMART Goals into my classroom. Most students struggle to determine their personal SMART Goal and use it to help them focus on improving specific skills. This year, one of my midyear assignments required students to develop a SMART Goal for the following quarter. Students were asked to read and annotate an article, then discuss what they learned with their peers through a classroom discussion. We are now in Quarter 3 and some students have already achieved their SMART Goals from Q2. I found it interesting that part of this week's assignment was to find articles to help support our data analyzing from Venables by developing SMART Goals based on our macro and micro data. I have never thought of using a SMART Goal to improve my professional practices. I think that this could be a wonderful idea, however, I am nervous to develop a SMART Goal because I do not have control over many of the aspects in the classrooms that I support. For the purpose of this class, I will be creating a SMART Goal that I believe would benefit my students. I will share it with my co-teachers and see what they think. The resource that I provided gives examples of professional and student SMART Goals. I found that no only did students struggle to determine what a SMART Goal should measure, but I am facing that same difficulty. I wanted to provide my peers a reference of some achievable and specific SMART Goals that they could use as a model when creating their own.

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.

SMART Goal: Given 1 month of guided reading instruction, students in below grade-level reading groups will increase their reading level by at least one level. This article explains how implementing consistent guided reading in the classroom can improve reading levels. This directly relates to my SMART Goal because it gives suggestions on how to organize and implement the difficult task of guided reading groups.

Dimension: Student Engagement Rate: 4 My SMART Target Learning Goal is that 80 % of my Pre-kindergarten class will master their reading foundation skills by the 3rd trimester. This EL Education video introduces the concept of interactive writing. This concept allows students to use spelling patterns and high frequency words. The video demonstrated how all of the students participate in tapping out the letter sounds. The students were engaged in the video and used different techniques were utilized to display how various students were engaged in learning. They used different learning tools including: sky writing, full body movements, body writing, sharing the pens and white boards. This relates to my SMART goal because my students need to be able to master reading foundation skills. This is a key component to reading foundation skills. I practice some of these techniques already but I want to try all of them to see if that will improve my students reading foundation skills.

Dimension: Rigor and Relevance Rate: 4 - students think and work My SMART goal is that students will be able to solve an on grade level math task, that will require them to respond and defend their work to explain their reasoning 3 out of 5 times by the end of the 1st marking period. This EL Education video shows a great model of how to use interactive writing with younger students. The reason I gave this a score of 4 is because although students are in a whole group setting they still were required to think and work. Students had to think and act out words or spellings. They worked as a class to write the sentence. It required students to think and help! While I think this is a great video, I don't really think it is something that could work for my SMART goal. Yes it relates to writing but I think that my students would need something a little more advanced for 4th graders. I think if students had this lesson taught to them at a younger age it would help them achieve this goal. I don't think this instructional tactic is something that would teach students how to defend and support their answer.

This is a collection of instructional strategies that can be used to improve student writing and cooperation and encourage critical thinking. Links to strategies are sorted by teachers' needs: Monitor Progress, Compare and Contrast Ideas, Form Groups, Get Moving!, Work Together, Adapt Content, Share Ideas & Opinions, and Take Notes. Within these categories are several links to various strategies to meet these needs. Each of the links leads to a clear description of how the strategy can be used and multiple examples and clickable resources that can be utilized by teachers immediately. This site has a plethora of interesting activities and tasks for students to encourage better collaboration and thinking. An instructional gap our team recognized that is quite prolific among middle school-aged students is the lack of elaboration or explanation of details in their expository writing pieces. Students can organized paragraphs and essays write clear topic sentences and conclusions, but they struggle supporting their claims with specific details and then explaining how their details relate to the topic.

This article provides detailed background information regarding explicit writing instruction, especially regarding students with special needs such as ADHD, but the strategies discussed can be adapted and used with all learners regardless of ability or grade level. The article begins with a focus on strategies for providing students with motivational contexts for their writing as well as making writing a routine that they enjoy. The rest of the article is divided into sections based on students' ability/age level (basic skills, revising and editing, and motivation). This article discusses strategies that can help address teachers address students' learning gaps in elaboration and explaining their ideas fully in expository writing tasks. Be sure to click "Single Page" at the bottom right of the article so you can see the entire article on one screen, and explore the links to the left of the article for more information about writing instruction for different populations!

Khan Academy is a free site that includes videos and practice questions on many subjects. This link, in particular, focuses on fourth grade mathematics, multiplication and division. There are videos that explain each concept and then practice questions to check for comprehension. Students can work and complete this tasks at their own pace.

This article suggests different ways to incorporate student choice into the tasks, assignments, and assessments that we give as teachers. The article mentions that while the idea of there being actual student learning "styles" that teachers should attempt to teach to has been essentially debunked, there is research showing that incorporating choice for students does have a higher impact on their engagement and learning. There are suggestions given in this article about ways to incorporate more student choice, as well as links to other sites with more resources.

Dimension: Impact on learning Rating: 4 I think that including student choice and student agency lets students complete activities that fit their personal interests and learning styles.

(Week 7: Adiatu, Julie, and Heather) This journal article was found by Adiatu on the UMUC Library, and is accessible through the link given above by accessing ERIC. The journal article is based on a study of 132 fourth-graders, and focused on examining the relationship(s) that exists among sustainable attention, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. According to authors Yildiz & Çetinkaya, "Sustainable attention is the type of attention that provides the ability to focus on a task for a long time. It is required to analyze the sentences in reading material and to utilize them actively at different times" ( 2017). The study results showed that students that lacked sustainable attention had poorer reading speed, comprehension, and word recognition. This journal article is useful to teachers because it provides information on useful activities teachers can arrange to increase the attention levels of students. For example, the authors of the journal suggest that teachers record their students' oral readings and play it back for them. This journal article is useful to our group because the teachers' artifacts are based on the reading comprehension and vocabulary gaps of their students, and the authors stress that teachers should strictly monitor the oral reading skills of students that are having reading comprehension difficulties. Reference: Mustafa Yildiz , Ezgi Çetinkaya (2017). The relationship between good readers' attention, reading fluency and reading comprehension. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 5, 366 - 371. doi: 10.13189/ujer.2017.050309., Universal Journal of Educational Research, 2017. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1134476

This article makes a very good argument for incorporating e-mail into the classroom to improve student writing. The author explains how students are often bored with traditional writing assignments and editing/revising sessions using Microsoft Word (even though this is technology, it is less interactive). The author explains how having a second party on the other end of the email who will be reading their work encourages students to carefully proofread and make edits/revisions as necessary on their own before sending the e-mails. Students were also more interesting in the authentic writing tasks that e-mail communication allowed (such as writing to professionals in their fields of study/interest and receiving real responses). The author gives a plethora of ideas for utilizing e-mail to improve student writing in various content classes, including Language Arts, Math, Foreign Language, and Social Studies. Kristine and I found this article and are hoping to work in this strategy/component into our Data Action Plan (although we previously did not list it as a strategy to help with our SMART goals). WEEK 7