Student Achievement

This was New Teacher Orientation week.  It’s an amazing event.  I don’t know of any other district that extends the contract of its new teachers a whole week to given them a solid grounding in the organization they are joining.  It represents a significant investment by the organization in its most important asset, its people.

Of course, trying to fit the reach of a school district into one week makes for a pretty intense experience.  I feel for the participants, because there is so much to try and absorb.

My task was to describe and explain the 27J instructional model, and of course that in itself is a big topic.  I try to keep the message as simple as possible, but that’s hard.  Here’s the bulleted version:

• Our goal is that all students will reach Essential Learning Targets
• In order to accomplish this, some students will need to make up a lot of ground, and they need increased time, focus, and intensity of instruction
• We will endeavor to provide students with the instruction that they need, regardless of what services they happen to qualify for
• 27J embraces a district-wide approach to instruction, and at Tier 1 of the instructional model, that approach is classroom formative assessment
• Classroom formative assessment was chosen for many reasons, including its research base, its strong relationship to other successful programs in 27J particularly AVID, and its tie to motivation

I love getting to talk about the instructional model and formative assessment.  I think they are so important, and have so much potential for increasing student achievement.

Also this week, I got to spend two half days at Brighton High School with some of their teachers and administrators.  They started off taking the classroom formative assessment training, but that wasn’t remotely meeting their needs, so we offered them a different venue and I’ve spent quite a bit of time with them.  That’s been great; very thoughtful and thought-provoking conversations with people who are very dedicated to their school.  The teachers are experienced in the classroom and in leadership positions within the school, so they bring layers and layers of tacit knowledge to their discussions.  They seem very committed to incorporating more classroom formative assessment into their practice, and I can’t wait to see how they decide to do that.  I hope they know how much I want to support them, so they’ll bring me along for the ride.

And I’ve been asked for the powerpoint I used for new teacher orientation, so here it is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Student Achievement and tagged classroom formative assessment, instructional model. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.