Three years ago Ross School set off on a mission to ensure every student (or as we call them learners) developed their assessment capabilities. Put simply, the school wanted all learners to independently answer three fundamental questions: Where am I going in my learning? Where
What ripple effect do you want to pass on to students and adults in your school building? Our impact as educational leaders can vary, but our core business as educators is to serve students by influencing substantive academic, socio-emotional, and civil improvement, at least one
How can formative assessment bring clarity to teaching? Here’s one teacher’s answer: “We can use the information [from formative assessment] to see that not all kids are struggling in the same area. We can see specifically which kids are struggling in which areas, then we can intervene
Teachers encounter many challenging responsibilities in their role: Learn and understand your state or provincial standards. Create a classroom that encourages reasoning and sense making. Teach each and every study in an equitable learning environment. Sift through the many different research based methodologies to learn
What IS Teacher Clarity? Simply put, teacher clarity means an educator has absolute clarity about what students are to learn, know, and be able to do for an upcoming instructional focus before they plan any instruction and assessments. The Clarity Problem Today there’s a lot of fuzziness around
Analogies require us to identify similarities between two or more items that may appear very different on the surface. Let’s look at two examples. Consider the following two analogies from Miller Analogies Practice Test (www.majortests.com): ____________ is to PLANETARY ORBITS as RATIOS are to BAKING. GEOMETRY
We’re big fans of teacher clarity. In fact, “Clarity” is the theme for this school year at the middle and high school where we both work. During Welcome Week, as the first days of school are known, the word clarity populated many of the activities
All that is necessary for curriculum chaos in a school district is to rely on everybody doing their best. There are ample examples of everybody doing their best in every academic subject, but for the purpose of this blog I am selecting editing (often called