It's All About the Kids!

As trite as it might sound, I became a middle school teacher to make a difference in kids' lives. You know - prepare them to be successful citizens. I did not sign up to make them efficient test takers, though there are days when it feels like that has become the focus.
Yesterday I participated in curriculum work for the RSU. We started by reading an excerpt from The Data Coach's Guide to Improving Learning for All Students. It seems like we are using the pyramid as a visual for a lot of things (I'm picturing the RTI pyramid...) This one was a recommended Data Pyramid with the largest part being daily-weekly assessment (formative classroom assessments) the next layer was 1-4 times a month (formative common assessments), followed by quarterly or end of unit (benchmark common assessments). The last two, which are the smallest part of the pyramid are 2-4 times a year (data about people, practices, perceptions) followed by the smallest--annually (summative district and state assessments). We should be focusing on the lower 3/5 of the pyramid, but in reality the top 2/5--which really include NWEA and NECAP testing-- are driving our instruction. It was refreshing to hear the curriculum coordinator say that we need to shift our focus back down toward the bottom of the pyramid.

I was thinking about all of this as I was reading the article, Centering on Students in the Middle Grades Curriculum by Gayle Andrews. There seems to be a disconnect between what research supports, what we know to be best practice, and what the reality is.

In this article she did a really nice job supporting the need for "Student-Centered, Integrated Curriculum." (Humor me for a moment while I

Teach Like a Champion - Strategy 2 - Right is Right

The key idea for this strategy is to "set and defend a high standard of correctness in your classroom." They gave an example of a student giving an answer and the teacher telling the student he/she is correct, but adding information to make the answer correct. I do this by repeating the answer and adding something to the answer. This is called "rounding up" and the book states this is how we set a low standard for correctness. Ouch! Once I tell the student he/she is correct, he/she doesn't  differentiate that it's only completely correct with the added information. This is a habit I'm going to break! Instead of rounding up, I can tell the student he/she is on the right track and see if they can finish answering it with some prompting or have somebody else in the class help them.