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Ron King

Test Your Public Ed Savvy - The Progressive - 0 views

www.progressive.org/test-your-public-ed-savvy

shared by Ron King on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 20 Mar 13
     
    By Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen, 1. Who said "Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans. That education system was a disaster." a) Rush Limbaugh b) Pat Robinson c) Editor at The Onion d) Bill O'Reilly e) U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
Ron King

Grades that mean something - 4 views

kyp20nxgla.wikispaces.com/...Grades+That+Mean+Something.pdf

shared by Ron King on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 04 Apr 13
     
    KENTUCKY DEVELOPS STANDARDS-BASED REPORT CARDS A group of teachers, school leaders, and education researchers create report cards that link course grades to student progress on mastering state standards. By Thomas R. Guskey, Gerry M. Swan, and Lee Ann Jung
Troy Patterson

Students 'Self-Assess' Their Way to Learning - Education Week - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...ess-their-way-to-learning.html

msm316 studentinvolvement

shared by Troy Patterson on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Tacyana will be asked to determine how her own work stacks up to a model.
  • Gust is one of a growing number of schools across the country where student self-assessment is one type of formative assessment that is woven into the school day.
  • 'Hey, wait a minute, kids have to be involved, too.'"
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Learning is much deeper if the student is thinking, 'I am doing this because it will help me learn this.'
  • actively judging their work and progress toward a goal, and determining what steps to take to reach it.
  • "The expectation is that not only are teachers using data, students are owning data,"
  • Padilla said it takes time to teach students how to read rubrics or use systems to track their progress. But, she said, the shift is worth it. "I think students tracking their own data is key to getting students invested in their education," she said. "If they don't see the direct results in that moment, it's hard for them to know where to go."
Troy Patterson

Principal: Why our new educator evaluation system is unethical - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...evaluation-system-is-unethical

msm245

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 May 13 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, a student at my high school was having a terrible time passing one of the exams needed to earn a Regents Diploma.
  • Mary has a learning disability that truly impacts her retention and analytical thinking.
  • Because she was a special education student, at the time there was an easier exam available, the RCT, which she could take and then use to earn a local high school diploma instead of the Regents Diploma.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Regents Diploma serves as a motivator for our students while providing an objective (though imperfect) measure of accomplishment.
  • If they do not pass a test the first time, it is not awful if they take it again—we use it as a diagnostic, help them fill the learning gaps, and only the passing score goes on the transcript
  • in Mary’s case, to ask her to take that test yet once again would have been tantamount to child abuse.
  • Mary’s story, therefore, points to a key reason why evaluating teachers and principals by test scores is wrong.
  • It illustrates how the problems with value-added measures of performance go well beyond the technicalities of validity and reliability.
  • The basic rule is this: No measure of performance used for high-stakes purposes should put the best interests of students in conflict with the best interests of the adults who serve them.
  • I will just point out that under that system I may be penalized if future students like Mary do not achieve a 65 on the Regents exam.
  • Mary and I can still make the choice to say “enough”, but it may cost me a “point”, if a majority of students who had the same middle school scores on math and English tests that she did years before, pass the test.
  • But I can also be less concerned about the VAM-based evaluation system because it’s very likely to be biased in favor of those like me who lead schools that have only one or two students like Mary every year.
  • When we have an ELL (English language learner) student with interrupted education arrive at our school, we often consider a plan that includes an extra year of high school.
  • last few years “four year graduation rates” are of high importance
  • four-year graduation rate as a high-stakes measure has resulted in the proliferation of “credit recovery” programs of dubious quality, along with teacher complaints of being pressured to pass students with poor attendance and grades, especially in schools under threat of closure.
  • On the one hand, they had a clear incentive to “test prep” for the recent Common Core exams, but they also knew that test prep was not the instruction that their students needed and deserved.
  • in New York and in many other Race to the Top states, continue to favor “form over substance” and allow the unintended consequences of a rushed models to be put in place.
  • Creating bell curves of relative educator performance may look like progress and science, but these are measures without meaning, and they do not help schools improve.
  • We can raise every bar and continue to add high-stakes measures. Or we can acknowledge and respond to the reality that school improvement takes time, capacity building, professional development, and financial support at the district, state and national levels.
Troy Patterson

16 Modern Realities Schools (and Parents) Need to Accept. Now. - Modern Learning - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...eed-to-accept-now-64b98710e4e9

msm332

shared by Troy Patterson on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”
  • The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.
  • In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The middleman is vanishing as peer to peer interactions flourish. Teachers no longer stand between the content and the student. This will change the nature of the profession.
  • Technology is no longer an option when it comes to learning at mastery levels.
  • Curriculum is just a guess, and now that we have access to so much information and knowledge, the current school curriculum bucket represents (as Seymour Papert suggests) “one-billionth of one percent” of all there is to know. Our odds of choosing the “right” mix for all of our kids’ futures are infinitesimal.
  • The skills, literacies, and dispositions required to navigate this increasingly complex and change filled world are much different from those stressed in the current school curriculum.
  • In fact, instead of being delivered by an institution, curriculum is now constructed and negotiated in real time by learner and the contributions of those engaged in the learning process, whether in the classroom our out.
  • “High stakes” learning is now about doing real work for real audiences, not taking a standardized subject matter test.
  • While important, the 4Cs of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication are no longer enough. Being able to connect to other learners worldwide and to use computing applications to solve problems are the two additional “Cs” required in the modern world.
  • Our children will live and work in a much more transparent world as tools to publish pictures, video, and texts become more accessible and more ubiquitous. Their online reputations must be built and managed.
  • Workers in the future will not “find employment;” Employment will find them. Or they will create their own.
  • Embracing and adapting to change must be in the modern skill set.
Troy Patterson

Experts Say Measuring Non-Cognitive Skills Won't Work, But Districts Still Try | MindSh... - 0 views

ww2.kqed.org/...t-work-but-districts-still-try

studentinvolvement msm324

shared by Troy Patterson on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Federal education law now requires one non-academic measure of school progress, which has led some districts to consider including students’ social and emotional growth as a performance measure.
  • She writes that even the researchers who popularized terms like “grit” think using it to measure school effectiveness is a bad idea:
Troy Patterson

Trouble with Rubrics - 0 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...rubrics.htm

blog.me rubrics msm290 assessment education rubric

shared by Troy Patterson on 07 Dec 14 - Cached
  • She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]
  • This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician, in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.
  • The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • it’s shortsighted to assume that an assessment technique is valuable in direct proportion to how much information it provides.
  • Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.
  • As one sixth grader put it, “The whole time I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying or how I’m saying it.  I’m worried about what grade the teacher will give me, even if she’s handed out a rubric.  I’m more focused on being correct than on being honest in my writing.”[8]
  • she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.”
  • High scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts.
  • Wilson also makes the devastating observation that a relatively recent “shift in writing pedagogy has not translated into a shift in writing assessment.”
  • Teachers are given much more sophisticated and progressive guidance nowadays about how to teach writing but are still told to pigeonhole the results, to quantify what can’t really be quantified.
  • Consistent and uniform standards are admirable, and maybe even workable, when we’re talking about, say, the manufacture of DVD players.  The process of trying to gauge children’s understanding of ideas is a very different matter, however.
  • Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective. 
  • The appeal of rubrics is supposed to be their high interrater reliability, finally delivered to language arts.
  • Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating. 
  • Once we check our judgment at the door, we can all learn to give a 4 to exactly the same things.
Troy Patterson

Diagnostic Teaching: Pinpointing Why Your Students Struggle - 2 views

www.teachthought.com/...teaching-why-students-struggle

msm322 teaching

shared by Troy Patterson on 27 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • 1. Fundamental curricular & unit design
  • 2. Complete all missing or incomplete assignments
  • 3. Differentiate assessments on non-mastered standards
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 4. Isolate and prioritize standards for mastery
  • 5. Choose new materials/resources that feature more transparent illustration of standard
  • 6. Daily use of student exit chart
  • 7. Student goal-setting & progress monitoring
  • 8. Beyond-the-classroom support systems
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