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 [...]
A question came up during-or as a result of-the first day of the Classroom Formative Assessment training about the relationship between classroom formative assessment and the 27J Instructional Model. This question made me think – not about what that relationship is, because I’m very clear on that, but about whether I’ve been clear [...]
I should give credit to Marcus Buckingham for this very useful construct of The One Thing (and to Will Pierce for introducing me to Marcus Buckingham). It must be annoying to authors when their books are summarized in a sentence; nevertheless, the idea is that the single most important thing that leaders can provide is [...]
I had a great revelation at the principals meeting this morning. As I hope you know, we are working towards a district-wide approach to instruction, because we know that high performing districts are very tightly organized around a research-based instructional system. (Bob Marzano and Tim Waters have a book on the subject coming out any [...]
We have known for a long time that we want to have district common assessments so that teachers can use the information. As it says in the Instructional Model, which is more idealistic than descriptive sometimes, “Teachers work in teams to review student data on achievement. They use this information to make decisions [...]
I am very aware that we are coming up on the first anniversary of our ELTs. They had been in process for several years, and we finally decided that it was time to get them out the door. So on three intense Saturdays, plus a few extra meetings here and there, we churned them out. [...]
