Educational Resources & Tech Tools 04/21/2016

• The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues

  • “Improvement [in writing] starts with volume. Volume suffers if I have to grade everything. Grading doesn’t make kids better. Volume, choice, and conferring makes kids better.”
  • “Give students daily opportunities to leave tracks of their thinking, use those tracks to notice patterns, and adjust instruction on the basis of what kids know and what they need. Repeat cycle.”

  • “Pre-assessment without associated action is like eating without digestion.”

     

  • So far, says Sternberg, all the ways we’ve tried to measure raw intelligence haven’t worked.
  • No existing IQ or other test can separate past opportunities from test performance.
  • “If you understand the child’s knowledge and cognitive skills in a domain that is really meaningful to the child,” says Sternberg, “you will learn what the student is capable of doing in other domains, if only motivated to pursue those other domains.”
  • you cannot cleanly separate out measurement of intelligence from measurement of reading (obviously, a verbal skill). The same holds for other content domains.”

  • There are plenty of reasons for resistance to being “helped” by an instructional coach, she says, often manifested in shallow acquiescence, avoidance, or overt hostility:

     

    <!-- [if !supportLists]-->-   <!--[endif]-->Teachers believing (not without reason) that they’ve been singled out as deficient;

     

    <!-- [if !supportLists]-->-   <!--[endif]-->Fear of being judged and exposed as ineffective with students;

     

    <!-- [if !supportLists]-->-   <!--[endif]-->Fear that deficiencies unrelated to the presenting issue will be revealed;

     

    <!-- [if !supportLists]-->-   <!--[endif]-->A belief that the instructional coach may report on them to the principal;

     

    <!-- [if !supportLists]-->-   <!--[endif]-->Worries about being admonished by the principal;

     

    <!-- [if !supportLists]-->-   <!--[endif]-->Discomfort examining their own practice;

     

    <!-- [if !supportLists]-->-   <!--[endif]-->Anxiety about having to change.

  • Let the teacher “drive” the process.
  • the coach’s job in goal-setting is to search for points of agreement with the teacher and to direct her in ways likely to produce positive results.”
  • “The coach also needs to respect the teacher’s autonomy by offering feedback only on agreed-upon goals,” adds Finkelstein. “As tempting as it can be for coaches to identify areas for improvement, unsolicited suggestions can arouse defensiveness.”
  • The coach’s role, she says, “is not to fix lessons or teachers but to support teachers’ abilities to meet students’ needs.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.