Cougar Communication: Reflective and Transformative Teaching

Excellence in Education: Reflective and Transformative Teaching

The expert teacher does not simply deliver a script. Like the best actors, they have the ability to improvise when things are not going well or simply to take a lesson from good to great.

How do you diagnose student confusion?

How do you make corrections before misunderstandings become engrained and learned?

Great teachers create assignments and activities that enable them to monitor student progress and provide feedback. When the students aren’t understanding the content through the careful examination of in class activities and assessments, a teacher can guide all students to succeed. Part of the in-class reflective process, involves the gathering and analysis of evidence to determine what students know and where adjustments are necessary to ensure each student masters the content.

Revising your lesson in midstream, takes courage, flexibility, expertise,

Formative assessment is a planned process in which teachers or students use assessment-based evidence to adjust what they are doing.

Reflective teachers not only constantly ask questions of themselves and their students, but they also use the answers to the questions to guide and change their instruction to become more effective.

• 1.     Are my students engaged?
• 2.     Is the success temporary or is it connected to the essential question/understandings?
• 3.     Are my students mastering the content?

Some recent examples of immediate instructional adjustments:

• 1.     Ms. Harper, recognizing her students were not understanding the more complex content, simplified and extended her lesson.
• 2.     Ms. Campbell adjusting her lesson by adding a more
• 3.     Mr. Thorpe and Mr. Patteson providing additional support to a group of students who were struggling to meet the lesson’s objectives

While reflective practices appear to occur on the fly, advanced planning by the teacher in regards to identifying potential student struggles and appropriate instructional responses makes it more possible. While judging/measuring student understanding by the looks on the students’ eyes is possible, true feedback can only be garnered by carefully crafted formative assessment strategies. Additionally, it requires the teacher to actively engage and measure all students’ level of understanding.

The greatest reward in becoming a reflective teacher is that you become aware of how capable your students are. Teaching becomes a rewarding experience from which you and your students learn every day.

Administrative Notes

Positive Referral Link: http://goo.gl/cZIXm7

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Cougar Communication: No Hands and Haiku Deck

Cougar Communication

Excellence in Education: No Hands

Did you know, that education research suggests that banning children from raising their hands in class improves classroom performance?

It can.

In a study conducted by Dylan Wiliam students were banned from raising their hands and the results were impressive:

• Shy and struggling students did better
• Strong students performed better
• Expectations were raised for all students 
• Classroom question and answer sessions were not dominated by a select few

What are some strategies you can use to avoid hand-raising?

• Cold call (randomly) on students
• Have students write their answers on individual dry erase boards, their desks or on paper
• Turn it in to a visible quiz with students either writing their answers down, displaying number of fingers to answer, ABCD cards

Do the above strategies take more planning and class time? Most certainly, but it’s time well spent.

In the classrooms where teachers take the time to develop their questions and questioning strategies before the class, student learning increases and academic expectations and rigor are higher.

Tech Idea for the Classroom: Haiku Deck

Great news!

Haiku Deck, a great ipad app, is now available as a web application as well. With Haiku Deck creating stunning slideshows and sharing the on the web  (Facebook, Twitter, email) becomes simple. The presentations also can be exported as PowerPoint files and can easily be embedded

What separates Haiku Deck from other presentation creation apps/sites? Haiku Deck’s intuitive and integrated image search and text-sizing are amazingly simple.

Haiku Deck offers a variety of themes and templates to use in your presentations. The best aspects of Haiku Deck are the integrated image search and the automatically resizing text. On each of your slides you can add images of your own or search through Haiku Deck's library of images. As you type text on each slide, the text automatically shrinks to fit in the space allotted. The shrinking text feature is great for encouraging students to minimize the use of text in their slide designs.

Check it out at www.haikudeck.com

Administrative Notes

Positive Referral Link: http://goo.gl/cZIXm7

Reminder, please invite me into your classroom to see a new, creative lesson. The lessons I’ve been invited to see so far have been inspiring. I look forward to seeing your passion-filled, student-centered lessons. You do a phenomenal job and I look forward to seeing it and then bragging about it for you!

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