Formative assessment Formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides explicit feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students’ achievement of intended instructional outcomes. Formative assessment is a method of continually evaluating students’ academic needs and development within the classroom and precedes local benchmark assessments and state-mandated summative assessments. Teachers who engage in formative assessments give continual, explicit feedback to students and assist them in answering the following questions: Where am I going? Where am I now? How can I close the gap between the two? In order to show students how to close the gap between where they are academically and where they want to be, teachers must help students evaluate their progress in the learning process and give them explicit, descriptive feedback specific to the learning task. History of formative assessments Learning Progressions Learning Goals and Criteria for Success
Research: How SEL Classroom Management Techniques Build Academic Achievement Respect, responsibility, and a community-based learning atmosphere promote success at Mount Desert Elementary School, a K-8 public school in Northeast Harbor, Maine. An important aspect of the culture at Mount Desert is allowing students and teachers autonomy to determine what works best in their classrooms for promoting students' learning. Credit: Alyssa Fedele Mount Desert Elementary School is a small, K-8 public school in Northeast Harbor, Maine, that has successfully created a strong learning community that is the basis of the school's academic success. Responsive Classroom An Approach That Helps Build Positive Relationships The foundation for a community-based learning atmosphere at Mount Desert begins in the earliest grades, where a Responsive Classroom approach is used in all K-3 classrooms. Every morning, the entire class comes together as a community to greet one another, share news, and warm up for the day ahead. Using Discipline Challenges as Learning Opportunities Galantino, M.
3 Instructional Learning Strategies for Problem Readers As educators, we are always looking for new techniques to help our struggling readers. Our job is to find learning strategies that will not only help our students succeed, but that will make it easier for them to learn, and develop a love for reading. While on your quest to present the best learning strategies that will be optimally learnable for all students, try a few of the following activities in your classroom. Directed Listening-Thinking Activity The Directed Listening-Thinking Activity (DLTA) is an instructional technique that was developed for students who have not yet mastered independent reading. Procedure Before Reading More than 100 nations have prohibited the practice of corporeal punishment.... Here are a few ideas to help you prepare and get the most out of an educational... The teacher tote is mandatory for being a teacher. Here are 22 strategies to use next year that will make your teaching life... Here is some encouragement for stressed-out teachers. During Reading
Formative vs Summative Assessment-Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation Formative assessment The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments: help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need workhelp faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately Formative assessments are generally low stakes, which means that they have low or no point value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to: draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topicsubmit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lectureturn in a research proposal for early feedback Summative assessment The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. a midterm exama final projecta papera senior recital
Make Your Students “Poetry Geniuses”! by Abi Frost I recently discovered a web resource called “rap genius”. This Brooklyn-based startup allows users to explore and understand the meaning behind song lyrics, poetry and literature. The long term vision is to annotate all text, including news stories and long-form works like War and Peace. Teachers have started using the platform to teach students critical reading skills, so I decided to try it out in my small seventh grade reading class for struggling readers. RL.7.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of rhymes and other repetitions of sounds (e.g., alliteration) on a specific verse or stanza of a poem or section of a story or drama. I designed a review lesson for my poetry analysis unit using the Poetry Genius tab on the Rap Genius website. I was very happy with how the lesson turned out because the students were actually engaged in deep text analysis! Like this:
Helping Students Understand What a Test Is and Is Not We are facing a problem with tests in education. Students are strongly influenced by the implied messages they deduce from what is being tested, especially when the test is emphasized as high stakes in terms of their grades. Further, they can draw dangerous conclusions about their own role in the learning process by what is done with the assessment results. Putting the Assessment in Context We've all taken tests, and we've felt either proud or ashamed of the results, often following a tense waiting period. We can mitigate against students' acquiring this damaging mindset by helping them understand that any one test on a subject does not demonstrate all of the understanding and knowledge they have developed -- and then adapting our grading, scoring and performance reporting accordingly. We can also communicate -- both before we give the tests and when we return the scores -- the scale, purpose and limitations of this particular assessment. Preventing Assessment-Related Damage to Learning
OK zeszyt Pierwszy rozdział: Jak to się zaczęło? Szczere mówiąc, to nie wiem jak zacząć. Mogłabym zacząć od SPLO (Studia Podyplomowe Liderów Oświaty programu SUS), ale też dobry początek stanowi Facebook. No cóż, SPLO było pierwsze w tej sprawie, zacznę z tej strony. Profesor Jan Potworowski poprosił dyrektorów - słuchaczy SPLO (prowadzonego przez CEO, PAFW, OSKKO i Collegium Civitas) o przywiezienie na zjazd zeszytów uczniów. Nie jakichś specjalnych, tylko przypadkowe. Webb's Depth of Knowledge Rigor. Text Complexity. Difficulty. What do these words all mean in the world of thinking? Teaching? I learned about Webb’s Depth of Knowledge just last year when I was at a Larry Ainsworth Professional Development workshop about unwrapping Common Core State Standards and aligning our instructional sequences to those standards. So, what is Webb’s Depth of Knowledge and what’s the big deal? Branching off of a “flipped classroom approach” and because I don’t pretend to be an expert on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, click here to review (or learn about) the four levels of Webb’s Depth of Knowledge continuum: DoK1. DoK3. DoK4. I believe that each unit needs a mixture, or a balance, of all of the levels above. How do we apply Webb's Depth of Knowledge into our classrooms? If we are asking students to research, for example, here are some ways that we might be able to integrate DoK into a research unit sequentially: DoK1. DoK2. DoK3. DoK4. How does that look in Writing Workshop? DoK1. DoK2.
Teachers are Learning Designers Late in 2012, I wrote a blog for the Huffington Post that articulated what I really feel should be and is a role of great teachers. Great teachers are "learning designers" who seek to create a space where all students are empowered to learn. I was further inspired to rearticulate this idea when I saw this video from Sir Ken Robinson: What really struck me is that great teachers create the conditions for success, just as gardeners do. You can't make a flower grow, but you can design and improve the condition for that flow of naturally occurring events. Empower Yourself For so long, teachers have been disempowered to design. Stop Blaming Kids There is one pitfall in Sir Ken Robinson's metaphor of teachers as gardeners and students as fruit. Revise and Reflect As I mentioned earlier, if students are struggling, it's a great opportunity to revise and reflect on the learning design. Are more voice and choice or self-directed learning needed?
Books That Tweak (Not Twerk!) Great Classics Originally posted on Kirkus Writers are always borrowing from one another, across centuries and continents. It’s the writers who aren’t just borrowing but building on what previous writers have created who we’re interested in. Ronald Frame’s novel "Havisham," for example, puts the jilted malefactor from "Great Expectations" on center stage, imagining the life of a woman Charles Dickens left a mystery. "Havisham" is newly released in the United States but check out the other enticing sequels of a sort in this week’s list. For more from Kirkus, click here! "Havisham" by Ronald Frame "An intelligently imagined Dickens prequel." "Hardly a false note in an extraordinary carrying on of a true greatness that doubted itself."
Promoting a Culture of Learning Learning is a culture. It starts as a culture with the students as human beings needing to understand their environment. And it ends as a culture with students taking what we give them and using it in those physical and digital environments they call home. Even the practices that promote or undermine the learning process itself are first and foremost human and cultural artifacts. Literacy, curiosity, self-efficacy, ambition and other important agents of learning are born in the native environments of students' homes. Further, learning is ongoing, perishable and alive -- just like culture. Creating Culture But what about your classroom? The short answer is that a culture of learning is a collection of thinking habits, beliefs about self, and collaborative workflows that result in sustained critical learning. Or that's how I think of it, anyway. Can you cause this to happen? "Intentionally letting" may seem like an oxymoron. Use the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model 1. 2. 3. Sustainability
Grammar and Comprehension: Scaffolding Student Interpretation of Complex Sentences I'm a fourth grade special education teacher in NYC. Our school has acquired a new reading/writing program and has discontinued a grammar program we've used for several years. In the new program the grammar component is virtually non-existent. On a gut level I feel that students are struggling with test questions, even math ones, due to lack of practice/knowledge of grammar. Great question. Also, readability measures are able to predict how well students will comprehend particular texts on the basis of only two variables: vocabulary sophistication and grammatical complexity. There are also experimental studies that show that there are ways that grammar can be taught formally that improve reading comprehension. That doesn’t necessarily justify a lot of grammar worksheets and the like, but it does argue for teaching students about sentences as they meet them. It is a long sentence (44 words), and it has lots of embedding (witness the author’s use of 2 commas and an em-dash).
A Guidebook for Social Media in the Classroom Is Social Media Relevant? Take the Quiz Before we talk social media, let's talk about the relevance of social media by taking a quiz. Which of the following is most likely to be true? ☐ Should we teach letter-writing in the classroom? The Social Media Answer ☑ There's one form of writing that can arguably get someone fired, hired or forced to retire faster than any other form of writing. One form of writing is that powerful. If you guessed social media, you're right. The Social Media Myth The myth about social media in the classroom is that if you use it, kids will be Tweeting, Facebooking and Snapchatting while you're trying to teach. You don't even have to bring the most popular social media sites into your classroom. 12 Ways Teachers are Using Social Media in the Classroom Right Now Tweet or post status updates as a class. It's in the Standards Social media is here.