Are you differentiating? Spiraling? Are the “Essential Elements of Instruction” imbued in your teaching? Is learning “transparent” in your classroom? Do formative assessments inform your instruction? Has the “enhanced rigor of the Quality Review for 2009-10” been made transparent to you?
If you know what these, or any of the other countless obfuscating terms being tossed around, often to make teachers feel unsettled, mean, let us know. If nothing else, we can use the list to create Buzzword Bingo game cards for upcoming faculty meetings.
Welcome.
We launched our blog in 2008 initially in response to a serious of troubling events that included budget cuts, human resources issues, excessing of teachers and others. It is now April 2010, and these same issues remain, with few solutions in sight: supplies are scarce; there are insufficient educational materials in some departments; safety issues remain; class sizes have not been reduced; technology is not available to those who need it the most; we have students with specialized needs that are not being met – the list goes on. We also have a community of professionals who manage to get the job done anyway – people who have great ideas, strength, compassion and resilience.
We invite all who are part of the CBHS community to make your ideas, experiences and perceptions known here. This is a humble attempt to provide a channel for open communications – a forum for the exchange of ideas and best practices. We encourage you to participate often and invite your colleagues to do so as well.
If you have an issue that you would like us to handle offline, or a post that you would like us to make for you, send email to clarascircle@gmail.com.
We will post series of topical questions to get the conversation started. Scroll through the topics below, as well as the Blog Archive. You are free to post responses under your name, a screen name or anonymously. We do not want to censor any submissions, but unless you are writing about yourself, we ask that you refrain from using full names in your posts. We welcome all suggestions of ways that we can improve this site. Make sure to click on "Comments" at the bottom of each topic, so you can read and respond to your colleagues' entries.
What do you think?
Thursday, October 9, 2008
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4 comments:
Spiral - this is adding a Regents Exam component to all of your lessons. It's a way of "teaching to the test" without saying that you are "teaching to the test."
Here is an interesting article from Education Week on formative assessments:
Test Industry Split Over 'Formative' Assessment
September 17, 2008 by Scott J. Cech
There’s a war of sorts going on within the normally staid assessment industry, and it’s a war over the definition of a type of assessment that many educators understand in only the sketchiest fashion.
http://lnk.edweek.org/edweek/index.html?url=/ew/articles/2008/09/17/04formative_ep.h28.html&tkn=Eer3uFbWsQF%2BPivO9vjuxSTD3RZbJuAb
"a plan for communicating findings with staff to inform instructional practice" -- How does "a plan for communicating findings" inform anything?
dictionary results for: inform
–verb (used with object) 1. to give or impart knowledge of a fact or circumstance to: He informed them of his arrival.
2. to supply (oneself) with knowledge of a matter or subject: She informed herself of all the pertinent facts.
3. to give evident substance, character, or distinction to; pervade or permeate with manifest effect: A love of nature informed his writing.
4. to animate or inspire.
5. Obsolete.
a. to train or instruct.
b. to make known; disclose.
c. to give or impart form to.
Source: inform. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved October 14, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/inform
Turnkey - when a teacher or administrator goes to a professional development event, and then returns to school and teaches other staff what was presented is known as turnkeying. In the private (and business) sector this is called intellectual property/capital theft.
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