There is a whole lot of practice testing going on this month in New York State. Teachers with the best of intentions have put aside the work that they love best so that they may, in their minds, serve kids well by preparing them to take a standardized test of one kind or another. I understand their concerns. We would all feel a bit irresponsible asking students to do battle without arming them properly. But…
Several weeks ago, I posted a reflection of a demo lesson that I had recently completed. This lesson coached students in their ability to identify main idea and supporting details, and one of my professional goals was to model the process of formative assessment that I am encouraging the teachers that I am working with to adopt. I used this process myself in my work with the students, and it guided my instruction along the…
Two days ago, I had the opportunity to reteach the concepts introduced in this lesson in Barbette DeMarco’s sixth grade class. I made use of the suggestions that readers gave me in order to improve my instruction and the assessment that drove it. Providing students even more time to talk and giving them the chance to discuss how THEY identified main idea seemed to enhance engagement and student understanding. It also helped me better identify their confusions…
The feedback that I received yesterday and the reflection I’ve been doing in response to that have inspired the following question: we spend so much time planning as educators, but how often do we attend to reflective practice and how often do we formally assess our own work? There has been so much talk about formative assessment lately that I guess it’s only natural for me to wonder how often any of us ask our…
Thoughts?
Several years ago, I was invited to lead a regional deep curriculum alignment initiative that brought teachers from across Western New York together to define what was understood and what was not about the New York State English Language Arts standards and assessments. Charged with the task of creating a topologically aligned regional curriculum, our group worked collaboratively to accomplish much more than this, and in the end, it was evident that the product that we created…
Bob Mayberry calls for sound, student-centered feedback strategies in his article, New Books on Handling the Paperload: When Research Contradicts Practice. As I dug into this piece, I found myself nodding in several places. We all understand the importance of feedback and how it influences student growth, but aligning our curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices in ways that allow us to manage the process without overwhelming ourselves continues to mystify most teachers that I know. Revisiting our…
Jamie McKenzie touches upon what they aren’t in his text Learning to Question, Learning to Wonder (FNO Press, 2005): “Unfortunately, the term is often bandied about with little rigor, definition or clarity so that many pedestrian and insignificant questions slip in under the term simply because they are large, sweeping and grand in some respects. Essential questions are not simply BIG questions covering lots of ground.” This distinction caught my attention for several reasons, but I’m…
I have a deep appreciation for the sort of struggle that sometimes ensues when teachers are asked to construct essential questions. In fact, I still remember my first experience with this. I was fresh out of college and grappling with the uncertainty that arrived upon discovering that the really cool Hamlet “unit” I strung together for my student teaching experience wasn’t going to see me through the next thirty or forty years of practice. My…
It’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed in this field that we’ve chosen. There is tremendous work to be done, and whether we’re standing in front of a classroom or leading a professional development initiative, the fact remains: it’s difficult to define all that must be accomplished, let alone find the resources to pull it off. But some people manage to do exactly that, and sometimes, the solutions are incredibly simple. When Niagara Academy took the…