Austin's Butterfly-The Power of Feedback

The video about Austin's Butterfly made us wonder about each student's potential when given feedback. What can a kid actually do if we don't accept his first try?

Consider using these questions to reflect on how you might use feedback in your classroom:

• How do we know, and when do we decide, what is a student's best work? 
• What role does feedback play in offering students the opportunity to achieve mastery?
• How can we use feedback to push students beyond their perceived ability level? 
• What role do peers offer in providing quality feedback?
• Are we born talented or do we develop our talents?

Guilty as Charged. Can you relate?

 (c) Jessica Hagy

All teachers make mistakes. The trick is to forgive yourself and use them as opportunities to grow. We teacher-coaches have made many, many mistakes over the years. Together, it didn't take us long to compile these 26 common gaffes but, to be honest, it took us quite a while to really learn these lessons. Can you relate?

1. Not taking care of myself: coming to work tired, sick, or hungry only made me more tired, more sick, and more hungry.
2. Poor Aim: not ensuring students know the learning target.
3. I’ll do it later: not getting my materials ready ahead of time usually turned into a classroom management nightmare.
4. Keep a Copy: By not keeping the plan, next year becomes a teaching guessing game including that awesome lesson with that neat video clip.
5. Rush-Rush-Rush: not recognizing the importance of wait-time, think-time, time to reflect, time to process.
6. Tossing it over my Shoulder: using a new strategy only ONCE because it didn’t work perfectly the first time.
7. Kids These Days: after a lesson went poorly, I often blamed the kids as opposed to applying a different instructional strategy. 
8. Stern-face: forgetting to smile and greet kids (even when it starts to feel creepy) because this truly models respect.
9. It’s Easy or You're so Smart: saying these words does not make something easy, nor does it help a struggling student suddenly figure it out.
10. Who's Working Here? working harder than the students.
11. Chin Up!: focusing more on my insecurities than on modeling confidence.
12. They’ll Figure it Out: putting questions on a test that don’t have answers or are worded so poorly even I didn’t know what they meant.
13. Why do we need to learn this stuff? Forgetting to make learning relevant to students' lives.
14. But they’re Quiet: thinking students were engaged just because they were sitting nicely looking forward.
15. The Quick Kick-Out: not giving students a chance to explain the situation before jumping to conclusions and kicking them out of the class.  
16. Shutting my Door: avoiding collaboration because...what if someone finds out I feel like a fraud sometimes? 
17. Not Being Myself: even if my colleagues give advice, keep my philosophy in mind when making decisions.
18. Squirrel: getting easily distracted from the lesson through my own doing or through barely disguised student manipulation.  
19. Jumping on the Negative Pity-Party Bandwagon to Nowhere: self-explanatory.
20. Seeing ALL the Kids in the Pool: not preparing for the kids who need a lifeguard because they don't get it.
21. They're almost Adults: assuming that somehow a 16 year old would not have the mentality of a 16 year old. 
22. The Kids Don't Like Me: Trying to be every student's friend instead of being a role model/leader.
23. Lesson Plan B: not being prepared when the lesson ends too early or when the technology craters. 
24. The Anything & Everything Volunteer: the school will be okay if I'm not on every committee they offer but instead focus on one that I'm passionate about.
25. I TOLD THEM: not understanding the difference between students who were taught and students who learned. 
26. Get-em-out-the-Door: slow down, take a breath, pause, pay attention. 

David, Spencer, Valerie, Fran & Anna

5 Ways to Make Stuff Stick?

At our ATA PD day last week, Rick Smith shared strategies from his presentation 50 Ways to Leave a Lecture.

We appreciated this slide for its use of differentiation and its potential for tiering. It highlights some of those strategies and the five modalities teachers can use to pause the lecture and have students interact with the material presented. In other words, five ways to make stuff stick.