MEd Program Diigo Group

This is an article from the NY Times about how a school in Wisconsin is utilizing data in every area of the school building. It was very eyeopening how a school embraced the data movement and did not shy away from it. Great read.

This article analyzes how closing the Education gap will lead to a dramatic increase in America's GDP. It was very intriguing to see actual data to support investing in education and the positive economic impact it has.

Week 9: The article gives the top 10 evidence based teaching strategies research by Shaun Killian. These 10 strategies gives teachers steps to fine tune lesson plans and SMART goals for your DAP process. Shaun list these practices and gives a brief explanation for each practices. Most teachers care about their students' results, and if you are reading this article, you are undoubtedly one of them. There is no doubt that teachers make a difference to how well their kids do at school. For teaching strategies to be included on this list, they had to: Be supported by hard research, instead of anecdotal case studies or untested theories Have a substantially higher effect on student results than other teaching strategies Be able to be used on a wide range of subjects and in every year level

Response to Intervention's great promise is often undercut by the potential difficulty of implementation. However, evidence based teaching strategies are useful tools for the educator in a system that constantly changes as new theories and standards arise. This article gives an overview of the most effective teaching strategies, of which most can be fairly easily integrated into lessons. Some of the most intriguing strategies, are the ones that do not involve actions to take but an adjustment in teacher focus, such as nurturing metacognition and allowing flexible learning time.This serves as an effective reference and perhaps, reminder of good teaching methods, though a few specific examples would be all the more helpful. In the comments, the author offers a little more clarification about the strategies and their rankings.

This article presents a Texas district's plan on closing the science instructional gap in ethnically diverse students in 2 low socioeconomic elementary schools. Teachers set up a multisensory interactive word walls to teach vocabulary, and designed inquiry science lessons that were aligned with standards and the Texas school district's curriculum framework and pacing guides for science instruction. Purposeful planning gave teachers a chance to become familiar with the progression of instructional goals, and provided time to create activities that fit within the framework and that addressed essential vocabulary. The inquiry science lessons incorporated 5-E: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaboate, and Evaluate, where Engagement is meant to activate prior knowledge, Exploration is hands on inquiry, Explanation involves teacher-guided questions, Elaboration gives students the chance to "solidify" understandin, and Evaluation involves formative and summative assessments. Vocabulary development was achieved with the use of word walls and visuals, sometimes provided by the student to develop familiarity and fluency. Studies showed significant improvement in student achievement. Students reported recognizing science concepts in everyday life, a good sign of true learning. It even benefited the teachers, who reported having "refined" and strengthened science knowledge and teaching strategies as a result of professional development. A balance of focused district standards and teacher-designed interactive lessons using effective research based strategies, seems to have a powerful effect on closing learning and instructional gaps.

This article argues that we, as a society, are misguided in our approach to teaching to the test, when it comes to critical reading. The author argues that it is not simply enough to teach reading strategies to students because research has demonstrated that there is an absolute necessity to teach context and content for essential background knowledge. This seems to stand in the face of the common tagline in education that it is not What we teach, but how we teach. To tackle this issue, it is recommended that teachers take a more curriculum based approach in reading tests. That is to say, that teachers don't simply choose texts arbitrarily, but rather, in order to teach to these high-stakes tests and core standards, that teachers very mindfully construct a curriculum which builds student exposure and study of key informational texts.

This research paper examines a strategy of using concordance lines to assist L2 students in identifying patterns in the written language to help inform a student's overall writing. The research included one control and one experimental group. Each group was taught by the same instructor, given the same amount of time and writing prompts. Students in both groups were given a set of (5) new vocabulary terms. They were each given a writing prompt prior to learning the words, just after learning the words, and a delayed post-test. The only difference between the (2) groups of students was that the control group was permitted to use a dictionary to assist them in understanding the words, and the experimental group was required to engage in a series of condordance learning activities. These activities presented the experimental group with multiple, short statements from real text, which each modeled use of one of the (5) vocab terms. Students engaged in an analysis of how those terms were used. They studied grammatical aspects of the statement directly related to the key term. Research results indicated that there was significant improvement in the experimental grouping of students in their ability to correctly use each of the (5) new vocabulary terms. Data from the pre, immediate post, and delayed post-writing assessments showed a vast improvement by the students in the experimental group. Those students were able to construct much more well-developed, descriptive statements using the key terms. There was a marked difference in their language control and the level of their writing.

This article discusses the importance or non-importance of homework. Ideas addressed are homework policy, homework as formative assessment, and emphasis on homework versus achievement. Ultimately, it is suggested that feedback is what is most important.

This article by Sunday Cummins focuses on teaching students how to self-monitor while reading difficult texts. It suggests teaching students the coding method to help them learn how to self-monitor. Using meaningful symbols to mark up a text students learn how to evaluate what they understand and what they still need to comprehend as well how to go about achieving that deeper comprehension. (Week 7)

This article addresses aspects of my groups exploration of student reading level ability and achievement on state tests on critical reading. In this article, the author suggests the implementation of a coding method while reading in order to teach students how to self-inform their reading in order to improve upon the student's ability to conduct close readings of informational text. This is just the sort of strategy that could assist IEP and ESOL students (2 subset groups of struggling readers) to improve the learning gap when it comes to reading for meaning.

WEEK 8 - (Chris Baugher, Patricia Bankis and A. Burns) Assessment is the key to good instruction. It shows us what students know and allows us to adjust our instruction. Assessment is tied to learning goals and standards, but students must own the assessment process as well, as they must be able to articulate what and how they are being assessed -- and its value.

This article provides five useful strategies to help students improve and to improve assessments. There are two key factors in this article which ring true for me. The first is "formative assessment and feedback along the way" (Miller 2015) where students are given specific feedback on their assessment on how to improve and continue forward (Miller 2015). "Formative assessment allowed students to experiment and, yes, sometimes fail. However, they were given the tools, both through feedback and instruction, to improve and move forward to success." (Miller 2015). What this entails if differentiated instruction; something my district and school are pushing for. The second is "student ownership of assessment process" (Miller 2015). Giving students choice, options, and freedom allows students to take ownership and responsibility for doing something all while doing their best on it. In addition, students will know more about what is being asked of them or what they're supposed to do in order to earn a higher grade or preform the task more effectively. "These methods mean that assessment is no longer done to students, but with them, putting the focus on the student and learning" (Miller 2015). Hopefully with these implementations and integration, students can feel the focus from assessment scores to learning content and gaining understanding.

This article is useful when considering big picture assessment objectives. In my own experiences, I have touched upon each of these strategies when conducting an assessment, but I've never built each of them into one assessment. The (5) strategies mentioned in this article include: Aligning Essential questions at the beginning of a unit to standars, building in written assessment components for students to describe/explain in writing, creating performance and project-based assessments to demonstrate understanding and application of concepts taught, regular and on-going formative assessments and feeback to help teachers to better tailor instruction to meet each learner's needs, and involving students in the decision-making process when choosing activities and when determining diagnostic measurement tools. As a World Language teacher, I think that these tasks which are challenging in themselves to build into curriculum, become extremely difficult in the L2 setting. I'm wondering how L2 instructors find themselves doing each of these things on a regular basis. Do they conduct all of it in L2, as it is suggested that L2 teachers do, or does some of this end up being done in English?

This is a detailed information sheet describing all accommodations that are available in the classroom as well as on the HSA exam (or any state assessments) for ESOL students. This is extremely helpful to decide what kind of accommodations will be useful to provide the students as they practice for the English HSA Exam.

This article focuses on a special education teacher and the methods she uses to teach her students reading comprehension. It is a resource for instructional strategies that may help close the instructional gap.

This article is very informative about what is expected of ELL students, and how little accommodations are given to the students when taking tests. The students are required to take benchmarks and state tests without being able to speak english at a specific level.

The road trip structure with stops to explore various Web 2.0 tools is an excellent example of a web-based activity design. Although this road trip is an online professional development example, I can see the structure being adapted for K-12 student explorations.

Beneficial list of resources to inform solutions to instructional and/or learning gaps.

This blog post discusses the advantages of doing a search in Diigo using the 'community' search function as opposed to doing a search in Google. This can be used to demonstrate to colleagues as well as students the benefits of doing educational searches via curated social bookmarking sites such as Diigo.

I first read about this in an excerpt from a book by Greg Toppo. http://hechingerreport.org/video-games-that-work-better-than-school/ This app teaches concepts related to solving algebraic equations in a fun, game environment. Learners are drawn into the game and don't realize they are learning algebra until level 12 when animal cards used in the game begin to be replaced by algebraic symbols. This app does cost $5 but I could see it used in learning stations and for enrichment activities. Appropriate for ages 5 and up.

"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".