Last year, my daughter explained how appreciative she was of her white college professor who, as she began facilitating a face-to-face discussion in her Black history class, opened varied channels for discussion. All students were expected to “participate in class” but they were also expected to be thoughtful about how and when and where they added their own perspectives to the discussions that began there. This was important, my daughter explained, because as a white…
This post is the fourth in a series on organizational story writing: The first post defined why organizational story writing matters. The second included the interest survey and listening session protocol that I use with new clients during the pre-writing phase of the work. My third post framed story writing as a learning opportunity that can inspire improved leadership and organizational growth. Each of these posts includes links out to other helpful resources and tools…
Jackie James Creedon shares a map of future soil testing sites in western New York State. Jackie James Creedon is the founder of Citizens Science Community Resources, an organization that is committed to promoting science-based activism and empowering grass-roots environmental justice and health campaigns. In 2014, Jackie received an award from the Environmental Protection Agency for her courageous efforts to lead an investigation in our community that took down Tonawanda Coke, a local factory…
Interviews provide some of the best data we can gather about learners and learning, but planning and executing a high quality interview is often challenging. Whether interviews happen during writing conferences, at the end of unit of mathematics study, or on the heels of a lab experience, I find it important to consider four different elements: Structure, purpose, those questions that elicit helpful responses, and those questions that can deepen the respondent’s thinking. I recently shared…
Over the last several years, I’ve spent a good deal of time facilitating performance based assessment design with quite a few teachers in quite a few different places. This is challenging but very rewarding work, particularly when we’re able to replace tests with assessments that inspire kids to do things that matter for audiences that value their efforts and the products that emerge from them. I typically begin these sessions by asking teachers to reflect…
Standards based grading entered my little corner of the world on the winds of a perfect storm: teachers were acquainting themselves with a new set of challenging standards, they were eager to create a culture of learning after witnessing how our historic fixation on performance was influencing their kids, they recognized inconsistencies in their assessment and grading practices, and their report cards did not align well with their curricula. In short, their grades were meaningless at best and…
During lesson study debriefs over the last several years, the teachers that I support shared their observations relevant to a variety of focal points. Often, they lingered over what they noticed about active participation, questioning, and the facilitation of large group discussion. As a pre-service teacher, I was fortunate enough to learn a great deal about active participation from my cooperating teacher, Janell Lindstrom. She coached me to question in ways that engaged learners and…
Today’s post is the second in a series relevant to the learning that has transpired in Lockport teacher Heather Bitka’s kindergarten classroom this spring. I introduced Heather in this post. The prologue to this learning experience, which explains our work as co-learners with greater depth, can be found here. This post speaks to the common questions that began provoking us right from the start and what the adults involved hoped the kindergarteners would know and…