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high schools every day, close to 1.5 million a year.

According to one estimate, if the numbers of young people leaving school early could be cut by 50 percent, the net gain to the U.S. economy from savings in social programs and gains in additional tax revenues could be around $90 billion a year - that's almost $1 trillion in just over ten years.

One of the themes of TEDTalks Education is that current policies are based on a tragic misdiagnosis of the problem. They treat education as an industrial process rather than as a human one. They are driven by a culture of testing and standardization that has narrowed the curriculum and sees students as data points and teachers as functionaries rather than as living breathing people.

To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system.

The key to personalizing education is to invest properly in the professional development of educators. As Bill Gates argues, teachers need mentors too.

7,000

Teaching is an art form. Great teachers know they have to cultivate curiosity, passion and creativity in their students.

achievement soars when teachers fire the imaginations of their students with a true spirit of inquiry.

All students have their own stories, motivations and circumstances and teachers have to connect with them personally.

"Everyone has a story," she says. "Everyone has a struggle and everyone needs help along the way."

We have millions of young people walking away from education, he says. But "right now, we could save them all," if we're prepared to innovate fundamentally and not just do more of the same.

"Every child," she says, "deserves a champion who will never give up on them... and insists they become the best they can possibly be."

give them the creative freedom to innovate and do their jobs within a proper framework of public accountability.

There are those who say that we can't afford to personalize education to every student. The fact is that we can't afford not to.

Effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and receives goal-related information about his or her actions.

Information becomes feedback if, and only if, I am trying to cause something and the information tells me whether I am on track or need to change course.

Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal.

in addition to feedback from coaches or other able observers, video or audio recordings can help us perceive things that we may not perceive as we perform; and by extension, such recordings help us learn to look for difficult-to-perceive but vital information. I recommend that all teachers videotape their own classes at least once a month. It was a transformative experience for me when I did it as a beginning teacher. Concepts that had been crystal clear to me when I was teaching seemed opaque and downright confusing on tape—captured also in the many quizzical looks of my students, which I had missed in the moment.

Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information

To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. In education, that means teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is. Teachers need to look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained to be consistent the same way we train teachers, using the same exemplars and rubrics

Even if feedback is specific and accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders, it is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it.

helpful feedback is goal-referenced; tangible and transparent; actionable; user-friendly (specific and personalized); timely; ongoing; and consistent.

A great problem in education, however, is untimely feedback. Vital feedback on key performances often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance—think of writing and handing in papers or getting back results on standardized tests. As educators, we should work overtime to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds.

Adjusting our performance depends on not only receiving feedback but also having opportunities to use it.

What makes any assessment in education formative is not merely that it precedes summative assessments, but that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal. In summative assessment, the feedback comes too late; the performance is over.

performers are often judged on their ability to adjust in light of feedback. The ability to quickly adapt one's performance is a mark of all great achievers and problem solvers in a wide array of fields. Or, as many little league coaches say, "The problem is not making errors; you will all miss many balls in the field, and that's part of learning. The problem is when you don't learn from the errors."

In most cases, the sooner I get feedback, the better.

The ability to improve one's result depends on the ability to adjust one's pace in light of ongoing feedback that measures performance against a concrete, long-term goal. But this isn't what most school district "pacing guides" and grades on "formative" tests tell you. They yield a grade against recent objectives taught, not useful feedback against the final performance standards. Instead of informing teachers and students at an interim date whether they are on track to achieve a desired level of student performance by the end of the school year, the guide and the test grade just provide a schedule for the teacher to follow in delivering content and a grade on that content. It's as if at the end of the first lap of the mile race, My daughter's coach simply yelled out, "B+ on that lap!"

Score student work in the fall and winter against spring standards, use more pre-and post-assessments to measure progress toward these standards, and do the item analysis to note what each student needs to work on for better future performance.

"no time to give and use feedback" actually means "no time to cause learning."

research shows that less teaching plus more feedback is the key to achieving greater learning. And there are numerous ways—through technology, peers, and other teachers—that students can get the feedback they need.

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Exhibit Assertive Behavior

Appropriate Levels of Cooperation

Provide Flexible Learning Goals

Take a Personal Interest in Students

Use Equitable and Positive Classroom Behaviors

Awareness of High-Needs Students

Don't Leave Relationships to Chance