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Instructional gap between black and white students and suggestions to reduce the achievement gap.

I have a problem with these comparisons, because what are we comparing? Suburban White children with Inner City Black children? I would rather see what differences occur within the same socio-economic range. Then we can discuss what the differences are and how to decrease the gap. Otherwise it's apples to oranges.

From a series of publications by the National Association of Elementary School Principals: "This white paper outlines five recommendations to help principals put student achievement data to the best possible use: 1) Make data part of the ongoing cycle of instructional improvement; 2) Teach students to examine their own data and set learning goals; 3) Establish a clear vision for school-wide data use; 4) Provide supports that foster a data-driven culture within the school; and 5) Develop and maintain a district-wide data system." Suggestions for how to implement these recommendations, along with links to video interviews and supporting documents, are given.

This article identifies the Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol (CRIOP). It highlights the gap that middle class white students have with black, poor, or Hispanic students and introduces teaching strategies to incorporate cultural knowledge.

This is an amazing classroom management system to promote positive behavior. Each student in the class is given an avatar. Simply click on the student's name and give/take dojo points for the behaviors you've programmed in. All of the data is logged into the site and saved for the duration of the year. Use the class feature daily or weekly to identify classroom strengths and areas for improvement. Individual student reports are also available and serve as a powerful tool for parent conferences and grade level meetings. Teachers can choose to reward students based on their positive behaviors by points or percentage. I have used the site extensively in my classroom (5th grade) and have found it to be the most effective positive behavior strategy I've ever tried.

A great free online tool for tracking student behavior. This site allows teachers to instantly record student behavior and participation in class. It also graphs students weekly behaviors and allows students to set goals. Teachers can link class dojo up to parents' email and cell phones so parents can recieve daily updates on their childs behaviors and choices in school.

I have a few teachers who have used this tool in their own classrooms and absolutely love this technology. In order to stay organized, Class Dojo allows teachers to keep track of students behavior. Then, teachers could have a simple way of tracking data in order to allow for positive incentives. Displaying data for the class shows how behavior is effecting classroom lessons and keeps students accountable for their actions. Behavior reports are also good printouts to bring to parent-teacher conferences.

A new study from Stanford shows that a simple teaching tactic may help close the achievement gap between Latino American students and their white peers. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of education and psychology at Stanford, and David Sherman of the University of California-Santa Barbara, and their fellow researchers explored the negative effects of "stereotype threat,"...

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.