Formative Classroom Walkthroughs by Moss and Brookhart

Hot Topic!
A favorite for 2015 from the ASCD, the Formative Classroom Walkthroughs: How Principals and Teachers Collaborate to Raise Student Achievement book was the source of a day long workshop from the Delaware Literacy Institute. Here's the gist. 

About This Book

Revolutionize the walkthrough to focus on the endgame of teaching: student learning.

Authors Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart present the proven practice of formative walkthroughs that ask and answer questions that are specific to what the student is learning and doing.

Learn the value of having the observer examine the lesson from the student’s point of view and seek evidence of seven key learning components:

• a worthwhile lesson
• a learning target
• a performance of understanding
• look-fors, or success criteria
• formative feedback
• student self-assessment
• effective questioning

Drawing upon their research and extensive work with K–12 teachers and administrators, Moss and Brookhart delve into the learning target theory of action that debuted in Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson and show you how to develop a schoolwide collaborative culture that enhances the learning of teachers, administrators, coaches, and students. 

They present detailed examples of how formative walkthroughs work across grade levels and subject areas, and provide useful templates that administrators and coaches can use to get started—now.

Grounded in the beliefs that schools improve when educators improve and that the best evidence of improvement comes from what we see students doing to learn in every lesson, every day,Formative Classroom Walkthroughs offers a path to improvement that makes sense—and makes a difference.

The DOE English Language Arts Standards

The Department of Education ELA Standards for Writing 

Hot off the press! 

Here they are - well some of them!

The opinion/argument writing rubrics. See for yourself!

American Education Week Comments

This week has been dedicated to people who work with children in schools but my most memorable moment centers around something that I saw on the way to school. I was waiting opposite a bus that was stopped to pick up a student. 

Something on the bus must have rolled to the floor and a student came forward to pick it up from the front of the bus. Just then, the driver reached over and gave the child a big hug.  How good that must have felt for that child! Sometimes a hug is all you need to see you through!

Here's to all my colleagues who support children every day! 

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Learning Look Fors

The Delaware Literacy Fall Conference featured Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart, authors of Formative Classroom Walkthroughs.  As I listened and participated in the workshop on Tuesday, I kept thinking, this is what I've seen in classrooms across the Cape Henlopen School District. Talking to other teachers, we agreed that this work fits well into what we already use from our LFS training.  

Here's my short list of what we as teachers need to know:

1. Good lesson plans with objectives including "what they will learn..."
2. Students' essential knowledge, skills, reasoning through the lessons
3. A strong performance understanding that links to a formative assessment
4. Learning Targets - what it is? and how will I know?
5. Look-Fors - the learning the students are asked to demonstrate

Nov 16-20 Let's Celebrate!

American Education Week
THANKS TO ALL TEACHERS AND EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT!

Click here to learn what good things are planned across the country and in your backyard!

Literacy Standards for History/SS in Grades 9-10

Taken from the Delaware Department of Education website
Common Core State Standard Initiative

Today’s students are preparing to enter a world in which colleges and businesses are demanding more than ever before. To ensure all students are ready for success after high school, the Common Core State Standards establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do. The Common Core focuses on developing the critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills students will need to be successful. The standards establish guidelines for literacy in history and social studies. Because students must learn to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively in a variety of content areas, the standards promote the literacy skills and concepts required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines. Beginning in grade 6, the literacy standards allow teachers of ELA, history/social studies, science, and technical subjects to use their content area expertise to help students meet the particular challenges of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language in their respective fields. It is important to note that the grade 6–12 literacy standards in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects are meant to supplement content standards in those areas, not replace them.


Key Ideas and Details:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.1 Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.2 Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary of how key events or ideas develop over the course of the text. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.3 Analyze in detail a series of events described in a text; determine whether earlier events caused later ones or simply preceded them.

Craft and Structure: 
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary describing political, social, or economic aspects of history/social science. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.5 Analyze how a text uses structure to emphasize key points or advance an explanation or analysis.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.6 Compare the point of view of two or more authors for how they treat the same or similar topics, including which details they include and emphasize in their respective accounts.

Literacy Standards for History/Social Studies in grades 9-10 

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.7 Integrate quantitative or technical analysis (e.g., charts, research data) with qualitative analysis in print or digital text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.8 Assess the extent to which the reasoning and evidence in a text support the author's claims.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.9 Compare and contrast treatments of the same topic in several primary and secondary sources.

Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.9-10.10 By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend history/social studies texts in the grades 9-10 text complexity band independently and proficiently.

The Great Thanksgiving Listen

This Thanksgiving weekend, StoryCorps will work with teachers and high school students across the country to preserve the voices and stories of an entire generation of Americans over a single holiday weekend.

Open to everyone, The Great Thanksgiving Listen is a national assignment to engage people of all ages in the act of listening. The pilot project is specially designed for students ages 13 and over and as part of a social studies, history, civics, government, journalism, or political science class, or as an extracurricular activity. All that is needed to participate is a smartphone and the StoryCorps mobile app.

Not a teacher or a school? You can still participate! Click here to learn more.

Talk with Dr. Wayne Hartschuh, Technology King for Delaware!

I recently had a small chat with Dr. Wayne Hartschuh, the Executive Director of the Delaware Center for Educational Technology that is housed under the Delaware Department of Education's umbrella. 

Me: So what will be the next big trend in education Wayne?
Wayne: Two things, personalized learning which our technology will make possible and also blended learning which is also known as hybrid learning. 
Me: What are the perils here?
Wayne: Getting it all to work correctly.
Me: Yes, but we've come a long way!

CHHS Workshop on Text Based Evidenence

PLC Workshop on Text Based Evidence

CHHS on Wednesday, Nov 4, 2015

AGENDA

1.     Define Text Based Evidence (Cartoon LINK)

2.     CSET - Writing: Organizing an Argument

3.     Textual Evidence: Implicit or Explicit? plus a reading strategy.  Oh SNAP! Text evidence sentence starters.

4.     Respect to Depth of Knowledge + Bloom's Taxonomy + Oh Snap! DOK Deeper

5.     CSET- Cornell Notes example from Beacon Middle School teachers

6.     Guide to Creating Text-Dependent Questions. Read. Discuss. Collaborate. How to make a lesson better/deeper?

7.     Sample Lesson: "Two Days with No Phone" from Scholastic article. What’s wrong here? Creating Questions for Close Analytic Reading Exemplars: A Brief Guide

8.     Teachers bring and share a relevant piece of text/article from their current curriculum. Create deep, evidential questions to use with the text.

9.     Exit Evaluation – Feedback to leave with me please!

Creating Questions for Close Analytic Reading Exemplars: A Brief Guide

1. Think about what you think is the most important learning to be drawn from the text. Note this as raw material for the culminating assignment and the focus point for other activities to build toward.

2. Determine the key ideas of the text.  Create a series of questions structured to bring the reader to an understanding of these.

3. Locate the most powerful academic words in the text and integrate questions and discussions that explore their role into the set of questions above.

  

4. Take stock of what standards are being addressed in the series of questions above. Then decide if any other standards are suited to being a focus for this text. If so, form questions that exercise those standards.   

5.  Consider if there are any other academic words that students would profit from focusing on. Build discussion planning or additional questions to focus attention on them.  

6.  Find the sections of the text that will present the greatest difficulty and craft questions that support students in mastering these sections. These could be sections with difficult syntax, particularly dense information, and tricky transitions or places that offer a variety of possible inferences.

7. Develop a culminating activity around the idea or learning identified in #1. A good task should reflect mastery of one or more of the standards, involve writing, and be structured to be done by students independently.