I’ve been facilitating inquiry team meetings and helping teachers make meaning from standardized assessment data in New York State schools for well over a decade now. Experience has uncovered the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to understanding and responding to the information we’re provided. I know that certain protocols inspire the development of far better hunches than others, and establishing clarity about the purpose of the assessments and the limitations of…
I’m the founder of the WNY Young Writer’s Studio, a community of writers and teachers of writing just outside of Buffalo, New York. Over the last seven years, I’ve watched children and adults make writing in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes. Studio was born from my desire to create a kind of lab classroom for those that I support as a literacy specialist. For the last eleven years, I’ve spent…
It depends on your perspective, I guess. We can treat Race to the Top as a mandate. We can make it our holy grail. We can bend dramatically under the weight of an agenda we don’t understand and break ourselves and the vision that we had of the teacher we would be–of the difference we would make—against this invisible wall. We can qualify the steps we take in pursuit of this vision with hot-headed criticisms…
Lately, quite a few of the teachers and administrators that I work with have been chatting about different ways to maximize classroom wall space. This might seem like a trivial topic, but I don’t think it is. In fact, I know that when teachers are purposeful about using classroom wall space, kids can benefit tremendously. I also know that glancing around a classroom provides a bit of perspective about what teachers may value and how…