Dewey's Empowering Ideals

EDU 6120 Week 8

During the foreword of Parker Palmer’s compelling and contemplative The Courage to Teach, he bemoans the current state of American education plagued by standardized testing and false accountability measures. To illuminate his point, he offers an anecdote from education scholar and philosopher John Dewey. Dewey, who grew up on a farm, noted how curious a system his parents used to determine to value of their pigs before sale at the market. He described how his parents tied the hog to one end of a seesaw and added the corresponding number of bricks to the other side until the scale was level. Dewey criticized that standardizing assessments in education used similarly crude an inexact measures. We contend (Dewey argued), that after a prescribed and arbitrary amount of time by one standard measure we determine that student Sally knows 72 bricks worth of English and student Monee knows 83 bricks of English but quizzically neither teacher nor student alike have any real sense what one brick of anything is worth.

This was my introduction to Dewey before our deep dive into his education philosophy and contribution American education. I admired his zeal and critique immediately. As someone myself who has been swept up into new movement of individualized education or at the very least, find myself intrigued by the benefits and creativity of differentiated instruction, multi-modal assessment and more active and actual world relevance and connection in school, I needed the likes of Dewey to help me make sense of what I vehemently disagree with our current state of education. It seems that in Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed (1897) he too, was advocating for and inspired by a charge to reform education and reframe it as social and moral imperative for democratic life to thrive.

As Dr. Scheuerman forewarned us, many passages of Dewey’s prose are verbose and complex. So many paragraph-long sentences, even this short piece, demanded a re-read. Yet, there are also streaks and bursts of cogent insight and statements of purpose that undoubtedly guide educators still these 120 years hence. For example, his idea about simultaneous psychological and sociological forces acting on each individual student and teacher provide a re-packaging of the nature vs. nurture dialectic and apply in more practical terms. His idea that our psychological education begins from birth and that we are inculcated, unconsciously, with world-shaping notions that are “saturating our consciousness” provides a nice lens to appreciate the individual/social paradigm we each try to make sense of and fit into. Dewey notes that an individual begins compiling and contending with the resources that have shaped social togetherness from their birth and that bestowed unto them is the foundation for each new human to become “an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization.” Wow. These are big statements and ideas that lay the foundation for the transformative potential of education and reinforce the societal onus to provide and uplift compulsory education.

Dewey complemented Tolstoy in that he too believed in the value preparing a student for life right now and not just only education of history or just a speculative education of what might be. He wrote, “To prepare him [a student] for future life means to give him command of himself, it means to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities.” School, Dewey thought, must be a part of the actual, current, and relevant life experience of the child and if not, such things were not educative. School cannot nor should not happen in a vacuum. It should be, Dewey thought, a delicate balance of the social space and the togetherness of society ignited by the passion, intrigue and spark of the individual. Beautiful.

Dewey’s ideas about the psychological and sociological educative realms offer values about the social purposes of education that appeal to my sense of vocation as a teacher and pride I have in pubic education. I appreciated that Dewey contends that “school is primarily a social institution…and education a social process” and that if school lives up to it’s potential and philosophy that such a positive experience can help an individual student to “share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.” These are lofty and noble ideals of individual potential as well as a reminder of the democratic and civic potential and responsibilities inherent in public education.

Lastly, Dewey’s remarks about the practical application and relevance of education can be so useful to educators today as we try to successfully recoil and redefine our own relevance and purpose as we emerge from the NCLB era. Dewey advocates for vocational education and training in the skills of cooking, sewing and manual training as activities of the home and believes school can provide the obvious extension of such skill training. Moreover, Dewey’s conviction about the social, political and moral power and import of public schools serves as a charge to our shared commitment and validates the experiment of compulsory and public education. He wrote, “it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.” 

Horace Mann, Oh How Little Has Changed...

EDU 6120 Week 7

Horace Mann’s commitment and ideology to the social and economic benefits of education laid the foundation for Common Schools in Massachusetts in the late 1830s and later inspired the nation to endeavor into the social transformation made possible through public education. It is empowering to read his words that still guide our thinking about social responsibility today. His deduction that education is the essential communal lever for social transformation is revealing as we still wrestle with these questions 170 years later. He queried, “To what extent can competence displace pauperism?” That is, can education of the masses lead to the eradication of poverty? He further inquires, “How nearly can we free ourselves from the low-minded and vicious, not by their expatriation, but by their elevation?” Here he muses, might the democratic state try to educate rather than simply cast aside or literally expel the ‘dead weight’ of society?

Mann’s democratic ideals and the belief in individual capacity and liberty are evident. I appreciate that he uses the larger economic realities of Massachusetts to assert his argument. He states, “by its [Massachusetts] industrial condition, and its business operation, it is exposed far beyond any other State in the Union to the fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty.” By recognizing the growing dual economy and disparate “haves” and “have-nots,” Mann compels Massachusetts to consider the responsibility to its citizens and the inevitable improvements, the result of an educated populace.

And although I am indebted to Mann for his argumentation and practical work that built of foundation for public schools in America, there are a few places where his assertions may have been too extreme in the belief that education was THE answer. He writes, “nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency of domination of capital and the servility of labor.” Really? nothing? What about actually having groceries stores in urban neighborhoods to eradicate urban food deserts? What about more equitable fair housing policy? How about infrastructural developments like public parks and better roads and public transit for cities and suburbs? Maybe even ending a federally induced War on Drugs that has conflated the public health issues of addiction with felonies and buoyed the prison industrial complex by disproportionately locking up brown and black boys – instead of actually educating them. It would seem that such policy concerns today are just as pressing as education access and reform.

Mann’s ideology even supposed that education “does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor.” This is sadly not so. Although public American education has done much to level the playing fields for opportunity, where race and sex are concerned (which are not yet equal or equitable), capitalism has still won the day. We needn’t look any further than the Occupy movement to recognize that class issues and income inequality are as stark as ever in our country. Public education has failed to close this gap. What’s more, the biggest boom of America’s middle class where arguably the greatest number of average Americans made the greatest gains both in terms of owning stuff (yay consumerism) and also generational wealth (yay living wages and retirement accounts) was the result of the post-WWII economy and not thanks to public education.

I think it is important to take Mann’s ideology to task considering so many of us are still wed to it. Rampant today are the public perceptions about the democratic import of public education that delude us to see education as THE panacea or at the very least, THE ONLY setting or medium, for improving social and economic ills. This has placed an undue burden on teachers and administrators by broadening the scope and weakening the impact of public schools. Moreover, it has driven arbitrary high stakes accountability measures so the public can annually quantify and measure its return on investment.

Now, I recognize that I am not being entirely fair to Horace. And honestly, from what I have read about the man, I think he’d be shocked at the present state our nation. Many of the political issues I raised and as well as the scope of my critique are anachronistic at least as far as Mann was aware. Yet, as I look around, so little about our system has changed since his time especially Mann’s proposals about how we should value and construct public education. Both ideologically and practically, our common school system is frighteningly similar to Mann’s time. Why are we still grouping kids by age? Uniform periods each course getting the same amount of minutes? Why for that matter are we still siloing content into discrete subjects? And why have we stayed wed to the physical structures of schools? Why use one room with desks all facing the same direction where one adult manages anywhere from 20-40 children? I think that someone like Mann, who clearly believed in society and the responsibilities therein would have an easier time figuring out what a smartphone is and how to use it than he would understanding why we’ve hardly augmented his schoolhouse model. Were he here today, he’d be on the front lines with us demanding reform.

A Career Ladder: The First Step in Ed Reform

EDU 6120 Week 4

There were significant ideas that stood out from this week’s readings about the Roman cultural influences on formal education as well as some ideas for consideration from Ellis’ appraisal of the American Education reform movement(s).

I am interested to hear what detail Dr. Scheuerman will offer about Quintillion, Cicero and Plutarch. Reading through the notes it is apparent that many of the ideas and practices of these educators and thinkers remain influential in current framework for education.

For example, Quintillion’s methodology that great teachers should be choosing tasks appropriate to a student’s interests is important to me. Considering that standardized tests take us further from such opportunities, it is an important reminder that there are ideas in education that are quite old and value student agency and creativity. Moreover, the emphasis on plasticity and interdisciplinary thinking and the integration of knowledge are important ideas for the overall learning and motivation of students. By placing each content area into a separate silo, we discourage students from making broader connections about the world around them and their place in it. I am guilty of this too. We ask young people about their favorite courses, teachers, etc. and almost immediately make the incorrect “square peg round hole” inference about what kinds of jobs such juvenile and ephemeral interests may lead to.

When I read “plasticity” the pop-up in my brain reminded me of work I did with a professional development group of teachers a few years back. We considered the language we were using with students to help re-enforce a “growth mindset” with our students. In other words, by language we chose for praise, critique and redirection, how were we contributing to our students’ beliefs that their brains were plastic and they could continually improve? We felt this work was especially important considering our students of lower academic performance who did not experience teacher or academic praise with the same frequency as their higher performing peers. Consider the differences how a student might internalize the two different examples of teacher returning a successful test and offering whole-group praise to a student. Firstly, there is: “Great job on the test Billy! An A+ Wow. You are so smart.” versus: “Great job on the best Billy! An A+ Wow. Congratulations on your hard work.” Each of these can produce a different internal response for a student regarding something intentional they did that contributed to their success versus an innate characteristic (i.e. “smartness”) of which they have no control. Language is powerful.

These ideas brought me to Dr. Ellis’ review of the Porter and Brophy research that yielded the 11 descriptions of effective teachers. I thought this list was illuminating both as a benchmark for my own self-critique and as aspirations and tenets for the field. The two in particular that stood out to me were 7 & 8. Considering my informal training during my first 8 years in the classroom coupled with the unconventional and non-standardized subjects I taught (Computer Applications and Media Literacy) I think I have developed habits and strengths in these regards. Number seven describes a teacher who does not rely on one almighty source (namely a textbook) from which to create the breadth of a curriculum. Teaching two courses that I designed from the ground up, without textbooks, forced me to be creative and continually discerning about the sources of information I curated for my students. I often shared this process with them, which created a meta-lesson about source selection in life and informing yourself with myriad opinions and options – not just letting inertia and convention inform you.

Number eight revisited metacognitive strategies, which I have mentioned here before, but I thought were interesting considering Ellis’ inclusion of the phrase “problem-solving.” One of the major standards or takeaways from my computer applications course was to empower 9^th-grade students to be patient troubleshooters. Some many of the “problems” we, as end users, encounter with our computers can be mitigated if not entirely solved by a deep breath, reading the dialogue box that has popped up and a willingness to troubleshoot through trial and error. These three steps are essentially what I relied on to teach myself the basics of personal computing as a student and are absolutely skills that I challenge myself to employ as an adult. This is a disposition more than a technical skill set. And coupling this strategy with a framework for learning styles and reflective metacognitive practices can be essential for student success in our digitally academic, professional and social spheres.

I appreciated Ellis’ illustration of “the Answers” to education reform. I am a proponent of the proposals for more rigorous teacher pre-service training programs. In the cases of some of the other countries that often out-perform the US like Finland, there is a much greater social status, financial compensation and prestige in becoming a public school teacher. And yes, simply paying teachers more could incentivize a shift in the initial applicant pool, but I think the lack of an actual career ladder is the logical first place to improve and reform the teaching profession.

Ellis writes, “the beginning teacher holds essentially the same rank as the veteran of many years.” This is not only true with regard to rank but ostensibly job duties and responsibilities as well. This is absurd. Think of any other profession where this is the case. Teaching is missing the adequate steps of apprenticeship by graduating up to the status, pay and responsibilities of a veteran in the field. A brain surgeon for example, has a residency that is seven years long, according to UCLA neurosurgery residency website. It is not expected that a first year would have the same knowledge or expertise as a fifth-year resident, let alone a surgeon with 20 years experience.

The education career ladder should be deconstructed and reworked entirely. Instead, we over-burden our under-experienced teachers with not only a full-load (which likely shouldn’t be the case) and often place them with the most challenging students and courses. It is not a wonder then that, according to The Atlantic in 2013 anywhere between 40-50% of new American teachers were burning out and quitting before being in the field for five years (source).

I am not sure that merit-based pay (especially problematic when based solely on standardized test scores/gains) works considering the art of teaching and dynamics involved in teaching students of various abilities and backgrounds. But Ellis’ logic is sound when he criticizes the status quo metrics for teacher raises, which are mostly limited to years of service or additional credentials earned. Neither of these guarantees or in anyway measures the improvement of a teacher’s skill or their students’ outcomes.

Church v. Theatre: Elevating the Human Experience

EDU 6120 Week 3

The juxtaposition of our two readings for week three could not have been starker: the history of Judeo-Christian cultural and religious values on learning versus the practical and legal issues American educator face. It was a reminder to me the vast expanses of history, moments big and small, that good educators must consider.

The notes and scriptural passages about Judeo-Christian values and knowledge coupled with the highlights of Confucian beliefs and Lao Tzu’s contributions to inner-life and the role that education plays in personal awakening were particularly resonant with me. I was disappointed however, that despite alluding to Buddha early in the notes, there was actually no mention of Buddhism. The path to personal enlightenment – knowing myself as prerequisite to offering valuable care, service or help to another – was introduced through Jesus and my Christian upbringing and was more satisfyingly and cerebrally explored in my exploration of Buddhism. I believe it was the American spiritual teacher Ram Dass who said that we must go outside of the traditions in which we were raised to find meaning and critical appreciation of religion and its value in our life. The inner-work of Buddhism and the familial and traditional elements of Judaism have been those remarkable steps outside my upbringing for me. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha was my introduction to Buddhism as a sophomore in high school. And yes, now looking back I appreciate the irony that it took a white German author’s interpretation of an Indian’s self-awakening and the Eastern philosophical tradition of one-ness with all beings to expand my horizon.

It was also valuable to see the Hebrew values of memorization, monuments, festivals and temple worship all laid out. All four of these remain integral parts of our culture today and are undoubtedly cornerstones of knowledge, sharing, storytelling and community that influence the majority of Christian traditions that followed. Growing up, I found religious traditions and rituals corny. I think it was likely because simultaneously, I grew up in and around community theater, which in truth, I found more compelling.

This is likely because there was transparency about the suspended disbelief of theater so it was ostensibly more honest to me. I found truth and wisdom in the dramatic experiences of Williams or Miller’s characters on stage, struggling through their slice of Americana, much more so than the struggle of Moses or Jacob. I found profound humor in Neil Simon or Noel Coward’s farces that I was seeing at 8 and 9 years old. Hell, at 10 or 11, I knew every word to the Rent cast album recording mere months after it was released. Theatre was my church. It elevated the human experience for me, allowed me to see other people’s struggles in comparison to my own and taught me how and why to be compassionate.

In contrast, I saw the strings of the performance and performers at church each Sunday. It seemed unrehearsed and disjointed. It seemed sloppy. It is also significant and worth noting that the local community playhouse, Driftwood, was separated by only a parking lot from Our Saviors Lutheran Church. The intimacy of geography plays such an important role in the framing of young person’s experience. My grade school was three blocks west and my high school was across the street from the church and theatre. I digress. The presentation of ritual, tradition and performance I witnessed at church was not only of lower quality than that of the theatre performers next door, but it was disingenuous because it seemed to honor the Divine (i.e. the belief in something bigger than our one self) less. People seemed eerily sycophantic to the pastors as well as other church leaders. All they had done in my estimation was read out of the Bible and in the case of the pastor have an exceedingly boring and often-overwrought monologue. This worship of the clergy not only seems to counter what Marty was objecting against with his 95 Theses (Happy 500^th anniversary btw!) but contrasted to the actors next door whose egos were not center stage but in fact it was the plays and stories that they were elevating.

Cut to 20 years later. I have since had positive church-going experiences – mostly at Unitarian churches, which don’t aim to create community by first labeling the “other.” I studied religion (Christian theology in particular) in college and find ruminations on the big existential questions of life to be some of my inner-world’s deepest satisfactions. Thinking back on my experiences in church as a child, in contrast to the community theatre, I am reminded of a problem that exists in education as well. When the lectern becomes a pulpit, when a teacher demands obedience and cultivates disciples rather than critical thinkers, I believe education fails to reach it higher purpose. A great teacher needs to have self-satisfaction in the work they do and believe in rather than seeking out external validation through the affirmation of their followers, I mean students.

None of us – pastors or teachers, educators both – can perfectly suspend our egos for the sakes of others’ learning. However, we must continue to grow ourselves and reflect on our own life and joy of learning so that the knowledge and wisdom that we impart is meant to motivate others to do the same and not intimidate others through our own self-congratulation.

To step out of the philosophical and reflect on the practical elements of our readings for a moment, I was fascinated by both the case studies involving the precipitating case that lead to FERPA and also the corporal punishment case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

The FERPA case seems so obvious to me that I had trouble imagining a time when teacher and school records about students would have ever been legitimately closed off to parents. I can’t quite imagine what the pedagogical or practical rationale was behind closing those files. Despite the laws distinctions regarding a teacher’s role in a student’s life, it is my understanding that the best outcomes for students arise when parents and teachers operate from the same understanding and data. The more secrecy, the more discrepancy and how does that best serve a student exactly?

Lastly, I think it is significant as a high school social studies and history teacher to have students consider the Ingraham v. Wright Supreme Court case where the Court decided that the 8^th amendment clause against cruel and unusual punishment was only meant to be applied to criminals and was an inadequate argument in the case of the plaintiff James Ingraham. Corporal punishment seems today both cruel and outmoded. It will be interesting to have students consider that the Supreme Court’s constructionist interpretation of the Constitution that did not protect the individual rights of students in the case of their own physical well-being and liberty.   

Reflecting on Reflection

EDU 6120 Week 1

Metacognition plays a necessary role in the education process. As a contemplative and critical thinker a student can unlock their own continued curiosity, self-fulfillment and self-discovery, all of which are core aims of education. 

Students however, need to be given both structured time and strategies in the classroom to explore “thinking after.” It takes continued practice before it can become natural. I remember as a high school student finding it such “busy work” and completely boring when teachers would ask me to “reflect on my work.” My reaction was likely the result of my teachers only giving me the space and opportunity for reflection but not offering the most important components of reflection – the strategies HOW to reflect and also the WHY I was reflecting in the first place. Ultimately, a big hook for many students (especially I’d argue the higher performers in a class) is to let them in on the WHY of their work.

Students value intentionality and transparency especially when that deliberateness is what you are asking of them. As we discussed night one, the teacher plays a diversity of roles in the classroom and I have found that openness around ‘teacher as learner’ and what I am trying to learning from and about my students is simultaneously a way to gain their trust and also a way to model contemplative and meta-cognitive thinking as I investigate how my students are learning and what I can do to improve my practice.

Nowhere have I found the Latin adage “repetitio est mater studiorum” (repetition is the mother of study/learning) to be most true. The consistency required to get reflection exercises to stick can seem excruciatingly dull – not to mention the sacrifice to content time that reflection eats into. However, as Ellis notes, there are numerous academic studies that demonstrate the value of reflection and its benefits for the learning of knowledge. Thinking about how and what a student learned is of much greater value than simply getting students to recall key vocabulary words in a rote fill-in the blank exit ticket. 

I appreciated the tangible strategies that Ellis and Scheuerman lay out in their piece as a toolbox for daily self-reflections with my students. I must admit that I was a little worried that my first masters’ grad class about education history and philosophy might be too theoretical, but this list is already incredibly useful. I especially am interested in trying out the “Clear and Unclear.” This not only will provide me with critical feedback about what students took out of the lesson and how they organized it and will also provide a higher-order thinking task for my students (per Bloom or Marzano). This will challenge students to integrate and evaluate new information they’ve just learned and also provide me with crucial feedback about the day’s lesson.

I am also interested in using “This week in Review” to challenge students to make cross-curricular connections. Too often, especially in high school, students’ course work is so siloed that teachers and especially students are not making the useful connections between content and strategies in each of their classes. Whitehead agrees noting, “There is only one subject for education, and this is Life in all it manifestations.” Students noticing those parallels and zooming out to appreciate how their education is a unified process will help them to grow.

One of the easier ways I have found to introduce a metacognitive framework to my students is to begin the term with a learning styles inventory at the beginning of the term. This would ask survey-styled questions to get students thinking about their propensity toward visual, auditory or tactile types of learning.

Informally, I would poll them for moments or types of activities or even strategies (if they could frame it as such) that they had not enjoyed in previous classes. This probe served two functions. It demonstrated that I valued their opinion and wanted to learn from them. Moreover, it introduced the most basic form of metacognition – thinking about teaching strategies or environments that had not been effective for them.

This survey data gave me a starting point to gauge my different sections and could help me to create different small groups based upon different learning techniques and offer a diversity of media when it came to introducing and/or practicing content.

Program Standards & Elements of a Model Entry

Program Standards

Expected outcomes are expressed as program standards, which are aligned with State-designated teacher preparation approval criteria shown in WAC 181-78A-270. Program standards include criteria (e.g. 1.), elements (e.g. 1.1), and examples. Any level of the program standard is appropriate for reflection, feedback, or evaluation.

1. Expectations – The teacher communicates high expectations for student learning.

1.1 Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy

E.g. Teacher recognizes the value of understanding students’ interests and cultural heritage and displays this knowledge for groups of students.

1.2 Communicating with Students

Teacher’s explanation of content is appropriate and connects with students’ knowledge and experience.

1.3 Engaging Students in Learning

The lesson has a clearly defined structure around which the activities are organized. Pacing of the lesson is generally appropriate.

2. Instruction – The teacher uses research-based instructional practices to meet the needs of all students.

2.1 Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques

Most of the teacher’s questions are of high quality. Adequate time is provided for students to respond.

2.2 Engaging Students in Learning

Most activities and assignments are appropriate to students, and almost all students are cognitively engaged in exploring content.

2.3 Reflecting on Teaching

Teacher makes an accurate assessment of a lesson’s effectiveness and the extent to which it achieved its instructional outcomes and can cite general references to support the judgment.

3. Differentiation – The teacher acquires and uses specific knowledge about students’ cultural, individual intellectual and social development and uses that knowledge to adjust their practice by employing strategies that advance student learning.

3.1 Demonstrating Knowledge of Students

Teacher recognizes the value of understanding students’ skills, knowledge, and language proficiency and displays this knowledge for groups of – students.

3.2 Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness in Lesson Adjustments

Teacher makes a minor adjustment to a lesson, and the adjustment occurs smoothly.

3.3 Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness in Persisting to Support Students

Teacher persists in seeking approaches for students who have difficulty learning, drawing on a broad repertoire of strategies.

4. Content Knowledge – The teacher uses content area knowledge, learning standards, appropriate pedagogy and resources to design and deliver curricula and instruction to impact student learning.

4.1 Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy

Teacher’s plans and practice reflect familiarity with a wide range of effective pedagogical approaches in the discipline.

4.2 Setting Instructional Outcomes

All the instructional outcomes are clear, written in the form of student learning. Most suggest viable methods of assessment.

4.3 Designing Coherent Instruction in the area of Learning Activities

All of the learning activities are suitable to students or to the instructional outcomes, and most represent significant cognitive challenge, with some differentiation for different groups of students.

4.4 Designing Coherent Instruction in the area of Lesson and Unit Structure

The lesson or unit has a clearly defined structure around which activities are organized. Progression of activities is even, with reasonable time allocations.

5. Learning Environment – The teacher fosters and manages a safe and inclusive learning environment that takes into account: physical, emotional and intellectual well-being.

5.1 Creating an Environment of Respect and Rapport

Teacher-student interactions are friendly and demonstrate general caring and respect. Such interactions are appropriate to the age and cultures of the students. Students exhibit respect for the teacher.

5.2 Managing Classroom Procedures through Transitions

Transitions occur smoothly, with little loss of instructional time.

5.3 Managing Classroom Procedures through Performance of Non-instructional Duties

Efficient systems for performing non-instructional duties are in place, resulting in minimal loss of instructional time.

5.4 Managing Student Behavior by Establishing Expectations

Standards of conduct are clear to all students.

5.5 Managing Student Behavior by Monitoring

Teacher is alert to student behavior at all times.

6. Assessment – The teacher uses multiple data elements (both formative and summative) to plan, inform and adjust instruction and evaluate student learning.

6.1 Designing Student Assessments around Criteria and Standards

Assessment criteria and standards are clear.

6.2 Designing Student Assessments with an Emphasis on Formative Assessment

Teacher has a well-developed strategy to using formative assessment and has designed particular approaches to be used.

6.3 Designing Student Assessments to Inform Planning

Teacher plans to use assessment results to plan for future instruction for groups of students.

6.4 Using Assessment to Provide Feedback to Students

Teacher’s feedback to students is timely and of consistently high quality.

7. Families and Community – The teacher communicates and collaborates with students, families and all educational stakeholders in an ethical and professional manner to promote student learning.

7.1 Communicating with Families

Teacher communicates with families about students’ progress on a regular basis, respecting cultural norms, and is available as needed to respond to family concerns.

8. Professional Practice – The teacher participates collaboratively in the educational community to improve instruction, advance the knowledge and practice of teaching as a profession, and ultimately impact student learning.

8.1 Participating in a Professional Community

Relationships with colleagues are characterized by mutual support and cooperation.

8.2 Growing and Developing Professionally

Teacher welcomes feedback from colleagues when made by supervisors or when opportunities arise through professional collaboration.

Elements of a Model Entry

There are different formats for writing portfolio entries. However, responding to writing prompts 1-6 helps to address desired performance on professional knowledge and skills, along with identifying steps for having a greater impact on K-12 student learning.

1. Citation of the program standard (either criteria, element, or example) along with an interpretation of what the standard means.

2. Presentation of evidence with description. The description includes context and related research or theory associated with the creation of the evidence.

3. Justification of how the evidence demonstrates competence, or emerging competence, on the program standard.

4. Summary of what was learned as a result of creating the evidence or having the experience.

5. Comment on the implications for student learning.

6. Propose specific changes or next steps to increase effectiveness in the area under examination.