Group items tagged

"Casey Life Skills (CLS) is a free tool that assesses the behaviors and competencies youth need to achieve their long term goals. It aims to set youth on their way toward developing healthy, productive lives. Examples of the life skills CLS helps youth self-evaluate include: Maintaining healthy relationships Work and study habits Planning and goal-setting Using community resources Daily living activities Budgeting and paying bills Computer literacy Their permanent connections to caring adults"

"The report, Accountability for College and Career Readiness: Developing a New Paradigm, draws on research, actual practice of states and nations, and input from leading policymakers, researchers, administrators, and practitioners (see list of advisors, below) to develop a vision of this new accountability, which is portrayed in an imagined "51st state." The report was released jointly by the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University and the National Center for Innovation in Education (NCIE) at the University of Kentucky. It was authored by Darling-Hammond, NCIE Executive Director Gene Wilhoit, and NCIE staff member, Linda Pittenger."

"What is the CCRS Organizer? The Organizer is a graphic that displays a consolidated overview of the many elements that impact a student's ability to succeed in college and careers at both the institutional and individual levels. It is intended to be a comprehensive and visual representation of the complexities of college and career readiness and success."

"An In-Class Flip works like this. Just like with a traditional flip, the teacher pre-records direct instruction, say, in a video lecture. But instead of having students view the content at home, that video becomes a station in class that small groups rotate through. The rest of their time is spent on other activities -- independent work and group work, with some activities related to the lesson and others focusing on different course content. As with a traditional flip, the direct instruction runs on its own, which frees the teacher for more one-on-one time with students."

"The ability to READ, WRITE, and COMMUNICATE connects people and empowers them to achieve things they never thought possible. It truly is the basis of who we are and how we interact with the world."

"When writing communication goals and objectives for learners with complex communication needs one place to start is the research.  What does it say about the skills needed to be a competent communicator?"

"Recently, ACT disaggregated its 2014 test results and college retention rates in order to get a closer look at the college aspirations and preparation levels of ACT-takers who reported a family income of less than $36,000 (the poorest 24 percent of test-takers). An astonishing 96 percent of these students reported plans to enroll in college. Despite their aspirations, however, only 11 percent met all four of ACT's college readiness benchmarks, which include English, reading, math, and science. Even more troubling, a whopping 50 percent of low-income students failed to meet a single benchmark."

"Graphite is a free platform from Common Sense Education that saves you time by making it easy to discover the best apps, games, and websites for your classroom. With thousands of reviews of tools such as Edmodo, Kahoot, ClassDojo, and LightSail, our community of educators take the guesswork out of finding innovative ways to transform your teaching practice."

How it works 1. You enter a problem. 2. You enter ideas that could solve the problem. 3. Some ideas lead to new (hopefully smaller) problems. 4. When a problem is solved, the tree gets green. A problem is considered solved, when you found an idea that does not lead to a new problem.

"The best kind of teacher evaluation The Los Angeles Times on Sunday published a massive story that rocked the education world by using student test scores to evaluate more than 6,000 teachers and then to declare which teachers are effective and who should be shown the door. Any regular reader of my blog will know that I take a dim view of any teacher evaluation scheme that uses test scores as a sole measure. Here is a piece on real teacher evaluation by Larry Ferlazzo, who teaches English at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. Ferlazzo writes a popular blog for teachers and is the author of two books, Building Parent Engagement In Schools and English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work. He is also a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, a network of teacher leaders dedicated to student success and the transformation of teaching into a true profession. It is a national initiative of the Center for Teaching Quality."

Column from a CH-UH teacher "I knew my class was the most challenging of my teaching career, and our success would be evident by growth, not a minimum score. "You've never let us down," my principal said. But I did. Only half of my students made the "proficient" score of 400 on the spring reading Ohio Achievement Assessment (OAA). In math, only 69 percent made it. These scores, used in this month's state report card, represent the lowest passage rates I've ever had. That they occurred during the year I was chosen Ohio Teacher of the Year is a sobering irony. "

The NUA's mission is to substantiate an irrefutable belief in the capacity of all public school children to achieve the high intellectual performances demanded by our ever changing global community. Our focus is teacher and administrator quality through professional development which incorporates current research from cognitive neuroscience on learning, teaching, and leading. We partner with school districts to support the building of their capacity to advocate community-wide responsibility for realizing the learning potential of its children.

Eugene Sanders Whatever it Takes Transformation Plan address 1/5/10

"Aragonese Portal of Augmentative and Alternative Communication gathers in a unique site all the materials, software, pictures and pictograms that facilitate communication of those of our pupils who have educative needs of communication. It also intends to become a useful resource for every teacher, providing sets of tools that ease preparation of their own materials. With that objective in mind, all the materials and tools are presented in a free way under Creative Commons licens"

"It is this intersection of collaboration and technology that has now allowed us to create and leverage a new form of boundary crossing Professional Learning Community. It's called a Professional Networked Learning Collaborative."

This report is the culmination of a yearlong effort to study the efficiency of the nation's public education system and includes the first-ever attempt to evaluate the productivity of almost every major school district in the country. In the business world, the notion of productivity describes the benefit received in exchange for effort or money expended. Our project measures the academic achievement a school district produces relative to its educational spending, while controlling for factors outside a district's control, such as cost of living and students in poverty.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants "The United States' education system is neither coherent nor likely to see great improvements based on its current attempts at reform, a reportRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader released this week by the National Center on Education and the Economy concludes. "

read this just before you posted. thanks! There is a lot to think about...................and change is always inevitable!

Bridging the gap between teacher evaluation and student achievement After nearly five decades of study around effective teaching and learning practices, Dr. Robert Marzano expands his acclaimed work by releasing the Art and Science of Teaching Causal Teacher Evaluation Model. The first of its kind, this teacher evaluation model identifies the direct cause and effect relationship between teaching practices and student achievement to help teachers and leaders make the most informed decisions that yield the greatest benefits for their students. With the Marzano Model, districts can transform your teacher evaluation system from an exercise in compliance into an effective engine of incremental growth, one that reflects parallel gains between teacher assessment and student performance.

iObservation is an instructional and leadership improvement system. It collects, manages and reports longitudinal data from classroom walkthroughs, teacher evaluations and teacher observations. Teacher growth and leadership practices inform professional development differentiated to individual learning needs for every teacher and leader to increase his/her classroom effectiveness each year.

"My favorite vocabulary assessment involved discussion. This is one of the reasons it was different but another is that the discussion was one on one -the student and I had a 3-5 minute uninterrupted conversation"