I am sure most us remember hearing stories from our grandparents or great-grandparents about the one-room school house, where students sat in wooden desks, the teacher was almost always female, and a shiny red apple stayed on the teacher’s desk. Students of varying ages sat and watched as the teacher reviewed how to write cursive letters, or they worked on perfecting their penmanship skills. Students usually were taught to be respectful and quiet, and to mind their manners. I certainly did not grow up in this era, but I do remember getting in trouble if I asked my neighbor to help me solve a problem because that was considered cheating, at least in my experience. Gone are the days of reading, writing and arithmetic. You may ask yourself, “What?! Students aren’t learning the most fundamental subjects needed to be a functioning citizen?” Well, that is not quite the case. We have come a long way since those days. With a vast educational reform movement underway, we are no longer expecting the typical bell-shaped curve, where the average student will rank at the top of the curve, with lower-performing students on the left-hand side (indicating possible learning disabilities) and higher-performing students on the right-hand side (indicating possible high potential). There are three big concepts behind this: rigor, relevance, and relationships.
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During my teacher preparation program, I first heard the statistic from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future that half of all new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. My professor followed up that sobering piece of data with, “Teaching is a profession that eats its young.” Five years later, I’m officially part of that statistic. After four years as a high school English teacher, I left to join The BERC Group. It was a good move for me to come here. Of all the professional development I had during my teaching career (and in my district, we had a lot of PD!), my STAR training stands out as the piece that impacted my instruction the most. As a teacher, nothing helped me more than going into a colleague’s classroom for half an hour. I never failed to glean something from these observations that would later enhance my own practice. I admired the work The BERC Group was doing around Powerful Teaching and Learning, and I wanted to be a part of it.
But I was not prepared for the twin sensations of guilt and relief that overwhelmed me when I left teaching. Guilt because I’d given in. I’d become part of the 50% my professors warned me about. And relief because, during those four years of teaching, my life had turned into a juggling act. I had dozens of balls that needed to stay in the air. Lessons to plan. Students to tutor. Papers to grade. Phone calls to make. Paperwork to finish. Grades to enter. All of these tasks were absolutely necessary – and all of them took place outside of the school day. I was much better at keeping these balls in the air after four years of practice, but they still crashed around my feet more often than I would like to admit. When I left behind my classroom, I also left the constant dread of waiting for that crash to happen. A year later, and I am still processing both of these emotions. We just added three new clips to the Classroom Clips playlist on our Powerful Teaching and Learning YouTube channel. 1st Grade English - Malia Sakamoto: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 Do you want to see more videos like this, including teacher interviews and commentary?
To get a different perspective on the STAR Framework (v2012), we decided to take a look at it in the form of word cloud. In this cloud, the bigger the word is in the cloud, the more times it showed up in the content of the framework. An a fun exercise, we loosely strung words of similar size, starting with the largest, to see if they would communicate anything useful. We thought the results were pretty interesting. Take a look: students demonstrate learning Do you see any interesting connections? Interested in learning more about the STAR Framework?
Student achievement is higher when the Essential Components of Powerful Teaching and Learning are evident in classroom practices. These components include Skills, Knowledge, Thinking, Application, and Relationships. In observations I have conducted, Application has usually been the lowest scoring component. This means that students are often not given the opportunity to make relevant and meaningful personal connections to their learning. Teachers can quite easily provide opportunities for students to make these connections by incorporating student culture into the classroom.
We just added seven new clips to our Classroom Clips playlist on our Powerful Teaching and Learning YouTube channel.
Did you know we have classroom lessons like the sample clips above - real teachers in real classrooms - available for purchase? You can use them as virtual classrooms for observation, reflection, and improvement.
One of the main services provided by our research team is program evaluations. Clients who have never engaged in a program evaluation often contact us and report that they have just received a grant for which a program evaluation is required and they are unfamiliar with what a program evaluation is and why they would want to do one. I will address these questions first and leave you with five tips for planning a successful program evaluation. What is a Program Evaluation?When we perform a program evaluation, we are critically investigating a program’s activities, characteristics, and outcomes. Evaluations typically require us to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data to inform program implementation, to improve program effectiveness, and to monitor program outcomes (Patton, 1987).We conduct different types of program evaluations, including formative and summative evaluations.
In a recent post about Project Based Learning, an animation video project was mentioned. Researchers gained direct insight about their project from Animation group students during a site visit to one of the elementary schools. Students were busy writing a student-created script based on a true story, as relayed by a grandmother of one of the student’s. The story revolved around the grandmother whom, as a child, was hiding in a closet with her siblings during a military invasion. An opposing soldier found the young children hiding and allowed them to live. Students relayed the story with enthusiasm and a sense of seriousness that seemed beyond their elementary years. Some students diligently worked on creating a “set” made out of construction paper and shoeboxes, while other students tweaked the storyline or created “people” out of Popsicle sticks and clay. Other students sat at computers to design and adjust the animated sections. Their work was not only thoughtful, intricate, and elaborate, but was meaningful because it came from a true experience and was interesting. It became obvious to researchers during the course of the visit that the students were not only engaged in their project, but were motivated to make the necessary adjustments to the scripts, thereby practicing their reading, editing, and critical thinking skills over the course of the program. Kay Fukuda and the other folks over at Student Equity Excellence and Diversity (SEED) provided us with copies of the actual student-created videos. One video is the animation itself and the other one shows the project process. Pretty neat! We have updated that post with the videos. Check out the PALS (After-school) PBL section and the Want to Learn More? sections to see them.
Fans of the sitcom hit, Seinfeld, will remember the episode where George decides his instincts are always wrong and he makes the pledge to "do the opposite" of his instincts. Consequently, he gets a girlfriend, a job with the Yankees, and moves out of his parent’s house. In George’s case, doing the opposite led to a host of positive outcomes, could this same concept be applied to some common strategies used by educators to improve teaching and learning?
Over the last eight years, we have provided professional development around teaching and learning to educators around the country. Essential premises of the training include simple, but often counter-intuitive strategies that often fly in the face of methods typically used by educators. The following brief identifies and describes five effective strategies for improving teaching and learning as identified by our research and consulting teams. In today’s fast-paced world, it is crucial to outfit students with the tools needed to succeed in a competitive global economy. Teachers, administrators, and caregivers play an essential role in preparing students to be knowledgeable life-long learners and responsible, contributing citizens. While educators are under an insurmountable amount of pressure to educate students, we beg the question, “Why not have a little bit of fun while you’re at it?” The Project Based Learning (PBL) approach helps teachers and students to expand their skills, supports standards-based curricula, aligns with school and district goals, and promotes an atmosphere of exploration, relevance and, wait for it. . . fun, in the classroom!
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