Professional Development | Reflections 2012 and Beyond

Archive of ‘Professional Development’ category

22
Feb
2016

Putting Faces on the Data – Sharratt, Fullan

categories: Improving Student Learning, Professional Development, Professional Learning, Research

The 14 Parameters

Shared beliefs and Understandings
1. Each student can achieve high standards, given the right time and the right support.
2. Each teacher can teach to high standards, given the right assistance.
3. High expectations and early and ongoing intervention are essential.
4. Teachers and administrators need to be able to articulate what they do and why they teach the way they do.
Embedded Literacy/ Instructional Coaches
Daily, Sustained Focus on Literacy Instruction
Principal Leadership
Early and Ongoing Intervention
Case Management Approach: a) Data Walls, b) Case by Case Meetings
Professional Learning at School Staff Meetings
In-school Grade/ Subject Meetings
Centralised Resources
Commitment of District and School Budgets for Literacy Learning and Resources
Action Research/ Collaborative Inquiry
Parental and Community Involvement
Cross-Curricular Connections
Shared Responsibility and Accountablility

30
Mar
2015

Maths PD

categories: Maths, Professional Development

Needs to focus on efficient planning and programming strategies
Clear indicators of learning progression
Identifiable evidence of learning – depth of understanding
Meet needs of learners and teachers

4 key principles of Maths PD
1. Identify what is the mathematics that needs to be improved
– the number skills
– strategies
– relationship between concepts – How can I use strategies?

2. Broad range of teaching strategies and learning activities – social constructivist framework to ensure positive disposition toward mathematics
3. Assessment informs practice
4. Teacher Reflection – what worked, what does student learning highlight, misconceptions evident, successful strategies, what needs to be changed

Baseline data determined by prior knowledge activities. Be clear about what you want to find out. Clear purpose for the learner too. For example to find out a student’s understanding of fractions, proportional reasoning use different number lines. “Put 5 numbers along the following number lines, without using decimals.”

0-10
10-1000
20-50
0-1
1-2

Decide what it is we want to improve.
– fluency – Quicksmart, intervention program,
Skoolbo, practice for all
Multiplication facts
‘Secret Code’ strategies for efficient mental computation
– more students in higher bands
Develop problem solving skills
Depth of understanding
Recognises patterns and makes generalisations
To develop Proficiencies (refer to verbs) as well as conceptual understanding choose a chunk of mathematics eg. Fractions

Fractions
Collection model
Partition model
Comparative model

Symbols
Relationship to decimals

Steps forward
1. Identify needs through analysis of PAT maths and NAPLAN data. Aspects of mathematics.
2. Prior knowledge activities to establish where understandings are, and identify misconceptions. (Place value, fractions, decimals in years 3-7. Number skills and strategies Secret Code in R-2, as well as practical problem solving in areas of measurement, data collection, and student initiated investigations.)
3. Explore concept, identify how conceptual understanding develops.
4. Provide a range of teaching strategies and learning opportunities for teachers to implement at different levels.
5. Analyse work samples, processes used, observations and reflect on successes and aspects that need to be changed. “How do these inform future teaching/ learning?”

17
Dec
2014

Rich District, Poor District: Common Sense Practices to Maximise Resources and Improve Student Outcomes – Howie Knoff

categories: Improving Student Learning, Professional Development, Professional Learning, School development Planning

http://arstateimprovementgrant.com/

Common Sense Practice #1 (Leadership)
7 C’s of success:
formal and informal processes that facilitate:
Communication
Caring
Collaboration
Commitment
Consultation
Celebration
Consistency
among school staff and district staff

Committees – reflect the research-based components of effective schools and schooling

Recommended:
The School Leadership Team (all committee co-chairs are members)
The Curriculum and Instruction Committee
The School Climate/ School Discipline Committee
The Professional Development/ Teacher Mentoring and Support Committee
The Family and Community Outreach Committee
The Student Assistance/ Multi-tiered/ Early Intervention Committee (made up of the best academic/ behavioural assessment/ intervention specialists in or available to the school)

All professionals regardless of their department or administrative assignment, are organised in cross-collaborative teams that focus on the following outcomes:

Students’ academic learning, mastery, and application
Students’ social, emotional and behavioural self-management and interpersonal success
Teachers’ effective instruction relative to student academics and self-management outcomes
Meaningful professional development and staff support to facilitate effective instruction and multi-tiered intervention resulting in successful student outcomes
Community and family outreach to maximise their support, collaboration, and involvement in educational processes/ activities at the district, school, and student levels

Common Sense #2 (Instruction)

Differentiated Instruction will not work when there are too many different skill groups in a classroom, or when teachers do not know the functional skills levels of their students.

Organisational suggestion for setting up classes – not too much of a range in abilities (skills based learning clusters)??? Possible?

Knowing the Zone of Proximal Development level of all students

* Use PAT-R, PAT-M, Running Records, etc.

* Data management system to pass on information from teacher to teacher essential.

Refer to: http://arstateimprovementgrant.com/

Common Sense Practice #3 (Assessment):
Every year level (or course) needs developmentally-appropriate curricular maps, that identify the knowledge, content and skills needed by students, along with the criteria for student mastery: and for every teacher to have the skills, materials, and opportunity needed to effectively differentiate and teach, assess, and monitor students’ learning and mastery.

Yes!! I feel that the most success we have had this year in terms of Professional Development has been developing a clear understanding of the skills and understandings needed by students in terms of reading comprehension. Analysing the PAT-R descriptive continuum helped to understand what students needed to be taught. Using this assessment tool helped teachers to identify the Zone of Proximal Development of each student from Year 2-7. From here clear goals were established for student learning, and instructional opportunities were planned to scaffold students’ learning.

Question: How closely are the PAT-R tests aligned with the Australian Curriculum?
This process need to be done in relation to the Australian Curriculum year level expectations.

Common Sense Practice #4 (Services and Support):
Share Resources
SWOT Analysis
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

Interdependent Audits:

Strategic Planning, Organisational Stability and Data-driven Decision Making Audits
Academic and Health/ Mental Health/ Wellness Curriculum, Curricular Alignment, and Curriculum Selection Audits
Technological Hardware and Software Curriculum, Instruction, and Intervention Support Audits
Professional Development, Supervision and Staff Evaluation Audits

Completing and sharing these audits allows everyone to know the resources available (and not available) and how they can be utilised.

Resources must be used to support needs of students. Communicating what resources are available, and sharing these across the school are important.

Blog: http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Rich-District–Poor-District–Common-Sense-Practices-to-Maximize-Resources-and-Improve-Student-Outcomes.html?soid=1102564327552&aid=g4Ebne95rHY

10
Jan
2014

Effective Supervision by R Marzano

categories: Improving Student Learning, Professional Development, Professional Learning, School development Planning

5 conditions that must be met to systematically develop teacher expertise: 1) a well-articulated knowledge base for teaching, 2) focused feedback and practice, 3) opportunities to observe and discuss expertise, 4) clear criteria and a plan for success, and 5) recognition of expertise. These will in turn translate into enhanced student achievement.

A Well Articulated Knowledge Base for Teaching
Domain 1: classroom strategies and behaviours
Domain 2: planning and preparing
Domain 3: reflecting on teaching
Domain 4: collegiality and professionalism

Focused Feedback and Practice
For feedback to be instrumental in developing teacher expertise, it must focus on specific classroom strategies and behaviours during a set interval of time.

Opportunities to Observe and Discuss Expertise
Opportunities to observe and discuss effective teaching are an important part of developing expertise among classroom teachers. If teachers do not have opportunities to observe and interact with other teachers, their method of generating new knowledge about teaching is limited to personal trial and error.

Clear Criteria and a Plan for Success
The ultimate criterion for successful teaching must be student learning.

Recognition of Expertise

24
Nov
2013

Making Thinking Visible

categories: Improving Student Learning, Professional Development, Professional Learning

When we place the learner at the heart of everything we do, our focus as teachers shifts in a most fundamental way.
* from the delivery of information to fostering students’ engagement with ideas
Instead of covering the curriculum and judging our success by how much content we get through, we must learn to identify the key ideas and concepts with which we want our students to engage, struggle, question, explore, and ultimately build understanding. Our goal must be to make the big ideas of the curriculum accessible and engaging while honoring their complexity, beauty, and power in the process. When there is something important and worthwhile to think about and a reason to think deeply, our students experience the kind of learning that has a lasting impact and powerful influence not only in the short term but also in the long haul. They not only learn; they learn how to learn.

We have two chief goals:
* creating opportunities for thinking
* making students’ thinking visible

David Perkins “learning is a consequence of thinking. Retention, understanding, and the active use of knowledge can be brought about only by learning experiences in which learners think about and think with what they are learning…Far from thinking coming after knowledge, knowledge comes on the coat tails of thinking. As we think about and with the content that we are learning, we truly learn it.”
When we reduce the amount of thinking eg ask of our students, we reduce the amount of learning as well. We need to remember that thinking may still be invisible to us. To make sure thinking isn’t left to chance and to provide us with the information we needin order to respond to students’ learning needs, we must also make their thinking invisible.

Enabling students to show thinking gives the teacher insight into understanding and misconceptions.

Good “essential questions”:
What’s the story?
What’s the other story?
How do you know the story?
Why know/ tell the story?
Where’s the power in the story?

Students’ questions all the more important: “I judge my students not by the answers they give, but by the questions they ask” Paul Cripps Wyoming

“What makes you say that?” – a non-threatening way of eliciting thinking process.

We make students’ thinking visible through our questioning, listening and documenting so that we can build on and extend that thinking on the way to deeper and richer understanding.

The section ‘As patterns of behaviour’ gets to the crux of an idea that has been milling around in my head recently. The notion that it is the routine, daily things that teachers set up in their classroom that create habits and effect learning powerfully. That is why I have been developing a Daily Planning tool, which tries to highlight and synthesise the key aspects that we are focusing on as a school, and place them front and centre in all of our teachers’ minds. I realise though that the aspects I have highlighted so far are the ‘what’ of the curriculum, and the routines set out in this book address the ‘how’. I will need to come back to explore this section in more detail.

23
Nov
2013

Maths – Victorian – Big Ideas in Number

categories: Maths, Professional Development, Professional Learning

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/maths/continuum/Pages/fracdecideas.aspx
Five-Minute-Diagnostic-Tasks
Misconceptions in Maths _ Teacher’s Portal _ Back-to-Front Maths _ Kennedy Press
ACARA_Preparation_Pack_2.5

21
Nov
2013

Differentiation and Explicit Teaching

categories: Australian Curriculum, English, Improving Student Learning, Literacy Block, Professional Development, Professional Learning

http://www.teachingacenglish.edu.au/

This one looks great for providing clear explanation of explicit teaching and differentiation in the areas of Spelling, Reading, and Punctuation and Grammar. We have identified the need at our school for more focus on explicit teaching in terms of sentence structure, and differentiation is continually an important factor in meeting the wide ranging needs of individuals and cohorts within any class.

25
Aug
2013

Making Thinking Visible by Ritchart, Church and Morrison

categories: Improving Student Learning, Professional Development, Professional Learning, Reflection

This paragraph strikes a chord with me:
“In most school settings, educators have focused more on the completion of work and assignments than on a true development of understanding. Although this work can, if designed well, help foster understanding, more often than not its focus is on the replication of skills and knowledge, some new and some old. Classroom are too often places of “tell and practice.” The teacher tells the students what is important to know or do and then has them practice that skill or knowledge. In such classrooms, little thinking is happening. Teachers in such classrooms are rightly stumped when asked to identify the kinds of thinking they want to do because there is ‘t any to be found in much of the work they give students. Retention of information through rote practice isn’t learning; it is training.”

The opposite is also a problem, that is when the class is full of activity, but the students don’t really understand the point of the activities.

In order to understand thinking requires:
1. Observing closely and describing what’s there
2. Building explanations and interpretations
3. Reasoning with evidence
4. Making connections
5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives
6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions
And two additional thinking moves;
7. Wondering and asking questions
8. Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things.

Additional types of thinking that are useful in the areas of problem solving, decision making, and forming judgments include:
1. Identifying patterns and making generalisations
2. Generating possibilities and alternatives
3. Evaluating evidence, arguments, and actions
4. Formulating plans and monitoring actions
5. Identifying claims, assumptions, and bias
6. Clarifying priorities, conditions, and what is known

11
Jul
2013

Providing Feedback that Moves Learning on

categories: Improving Student Learning, Professional Development, Professional Learning

Interesting that through his research Wiliam has found that students respond more positively to feedback when comments are given rather than grades or grades and comments.

Teacher praise is far more effective if it is infrequent, credible,contingent, specific and genuine (Brophy, 1981).

“…feedback is rather like the scene in the rear view mirror rather than through the windshield.” Feedback functions formatively only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in improving performance.

Comparison with sports coaching is illuminating and something I relate strongly with. Feedback on the “how” is important.

“The secret of effective feedback is that saying what’s wrong isn’t enough; to be effective, feedback must provide a recipe for future action.”

“The skill of being able to break down a long learning journey – from where the student is rit now to where she needs to be – into a series of small steps takes years for even the most capable coaches to develop.”

Alfie Kohn (1994): “Never grade students while they are still learning”. As soon as students get a grade the learning stops.

“We need classroom assessment systems that are designed primarily to support learning and deal in data that are recorded at a level that is useful for teachers, students, and parents in determining where students are in their learning. Such fine-scale evidence can always be aggregated for summative reporting. It is not possible to go the other way: from aggregate reports of achievement to learning needs.”

“Feedback should cause thinking.”
…don’t provide feedback unless you allow time, in class, to work on using the feedback to improve their work.
… Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.

Needs to cause thinking rather than an emotional response.
Should relate to learning goals that have been shared with the students .
Should increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning.

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