Brain Farming
Tips on growing the best student brains ever!
Living/Breathing Documents
- We say that our curriculum should live and breathe but what does that mean? In short, pull it out of the file and make adjustments.
- Today's challenge: use KV's Intranet to pull up the unit you are teaching and see what needs to be changed.
- If the unthinkable happened and someone else had to run your classroom even for a week, would they know what to do? Would your curriculum show all the things you've learned since you wrote it?
- Click on the link below, sign in with Google and have a look at the new house our documents have.
Schoology Tidbits - One item per week you might want to use
DID YOU KNOW...
You can put questions in a bank to pull from for review or retesting? These can be pulled randomly or individually, allowing you to make sure students STILL remember something, create a new version of an assessment for retest or practice, share with other teachers in your place.
See directions linked below for instructions (Credit to Tim Adams!) or ask me to come show you.
How to use them
In short, a FORMative assessment is used to FORM what a teacher does next.
A SUMmative assessment is used to assess the SUM of learning a child gained.
What they are
Formative is like a doctor's check up. You can still improve.
Summative is like an autopsy. It's over. What happened?
When and why
The difference matters!
Grades?!
Formative is more for teachers to know what to do next and therefore minimal or non-existent in terms of grades. The purpose is to FORM the next step of instruction, not catch students not "getting" it.
How can we fix this?
One struggle with teaching upper levels is the ease with which we can close our doors. Then, when we are able to get together with other teachers, we tend to talk more about problems than solutions. I am hoping this can be a gathering place for those solutions. Here are some of the things I have been able to gather from your coworkers. They are things that work at KV, not just in a research study. Click on the title above to see a growing list of ideas to try.
Send me an email to add your thoughts to the mix!
Send me an email to add your thoughts to the mix!