Coach's Corner

Audio PD

1/8/2015

Two recent stories heard on NPR Morning Edition caught the ear of Aaron Meacham and Catherine Trinkle. The first is about the performance aspect of teaching: Click here - Channeling Springsteen: Teachers As Performers.

The second features cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, whose book, Why Our Students Don’t Like School and What We Can Do About It, is being read by one of our PD Cohorts, is about the need for students to have to struggle on their own in order to learn: Click here - Common Core Reading: The Struggle Over Struggle

Each audio is 6 minutes long.

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Literacy Strategies

12/8/2014

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The Literacy Strategies PD Cohort bundle has 29 before, during, and after reading strategies that are ready to be used right now in your classroom the next time you assign a text for in-class reading or homework.

These strategies are designed to help your students access prior knowledge, work through challenging texts, acquire new vocabulary words, and comprehend their reading.

Click here for the bundle:http://www.mybigcampus.com/bundles/literacy-strategies---343171?g_id=1843435

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Student Goals

11/11/2014

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Difficult Goals Lead to Higher Achievement

A simple and quick strategy that demonstrates a high effect size on student achievement is to ask students to set a challenging goal for themselves. Consider passing out an index card to each of your students and asking them to state a difficult or challenging goal they want to reach on their final exam. Or begin next semester with goal-setting and periodically ask students to revisit their goals.

The key words here are challenging and difficult. Asking students to set a goal to “do their best does” not show a positive effect on achievement.

John Hattie’s analysis of multiple research studies reveals an effect size of .56 (anything above .20 begins to show a positive effect. Anything .80 or above is extremely effective and rare). Hattie states, “The performances of the students who have the most challenging goals are over 250% higher than the performances of the subjects with the easiest goals” (Visible Learning, p. 164).

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Highly Effective Reading/Collaboration Strategy

10/13/2014

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Reciprocal Teaching is a reading/content learning strategy with a large, positive effect on student achievement. After initial teacher modeling, the students will be doing the work, reading and taking on one of four leadership roles: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. Reciprocal Teaching works for shorter and longer readings, both fiction and nonfiction.

Because the impact on student is so great (.77 effect size. Anything above .40 contributes to more than a year of growth in student learning), teachers may want to use Reciprocal Teaching throughout the year as one of their primary reading strategy tools. As an added benefit, minimal planning is involved, and it will be the students who go home tired at the end of the day - not you; teachers spend class time listening to student discussions, providing guidance as needed. Click here for ready-to-implement resources.

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How to Email Parents from PowerSchool

8/13/2014

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Teachers can email one parent, all parents in one class, or all of their parents from PowerSchool. Click here for directions. Thanks go to Aron Bright, Jeff Osterman, and Rick Wagoner for their help to ensure that the directions are clear and this feature in PowerSchool is working correctly.

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Audio PD

Literacy Strategies

Student Goals

Highly Effective Reading/Collaboration Strategy

How to Email Parents from PowerSchool

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