I had an amazing day yesterday. We hosted a workshop for 54 people from all schools in the district and the Achievement Team (if you have a problem, if no one else can help, maybe you should call…). It’s very challenging to plan a meaningful day for these folks, because they represent our best and [...]
Thank you, Liann, for posting a link to this blog from EdWeek on yammer. It’s a little dry, I admit, and not as charming as my own humble offerings. However, it does reinforce points that I think we’ve been talking about, but compiling them in a handy-dandy list of pointers to follow in order to [...]
At the October AP meeting at Stuart, I asked those present to pair up and visit classrooms, and come back and talk about what they were looking for. Here’s a sampling of what was said:
Objective on the board
Clarity of Target
Student engagement
Time-on-task
Student interaction with other students
Student interaction with the teacher
Supports for L2 and struggling students
SERVE – [...]
OK, I hate to be a name-dropper BUT… I had a little e-mail exchange with Rick Stiggins the other day. I wrote to ask him about what he says in his presentations with regard to the role of experiencing success in building successful, motivated students. He is particularly eloquent on that topic. He pointed me [...]
Motivation occupies much of my thoughts. I mean motivation as a topic, not my own personal motivation, which is boundless, in case you were wondering.
I find this topic fascinating, because motivation is powerfully linked to classroom formative assessment. And yet, many teachers’ beliefs about motivation are contrary to the relationship as I understand it to work. [...]
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 [...]
As promised, here are my answers to the questions asked at the latest round of classroom formative assessment training. Don’t like the answer? Have more to add? Please comment!
This was fun. What other questions do you have for me?
Where are we in the implementation of this model? What tools are available to promote this to [...]
As regular readers of this blog already know, we offered four days of classroom formative assessment training to teams from 27J schools last spring. We offered each session twice, and trained something like 140 people. I want to keep you up to date on what has happened since then, and what will happen next.
Professional Development [...]
OK, here’s a good story for you. Well, it made me happy.
Last year, we started working with the principals on a vision for good instruction, as described in the book Change Leadership. I talked about that in this post, which is mostly about learning walks. But that’s not all there was to it. The first [...]
Such a long time since I’ve written anything, and so much has happened in the last few weeks. Partly I’ve been snowed under, and partly I wanted the announcement about the blog party to be the first thing people saw when they visited the blog. Hope you’re coming…
We had the fourth day of classroom formative [...]
