Innovation, not achievement The focus of instructional coaching is to improve teaching practice and student achievement. The focus of innovation coaching is to foster the types of dispositions needed by teachers in today’s classrooms in order to prepare learners for an unpredictable future. The focus is on learning and growing rather than academic achievement and […]
Every day, I hear teachers and kids alike, complaining about the meaningfulness of school. Teachers complain that kids are not engaged. Kids complain that they are not engaged because their learning is not relevant. We can fight this tension. We can continue to argue that kids don’t know what they don’t know. We can argue […]
Back off… During the last day of class before Thanksgiving break, I handed out written feedback to my Entrepreneurship 1 students. The feedback specifically identified next steps based on a reflection they had written. I watched as several discussed their formal dance plans for the coming Friday. One played a game on his phone. Two […]
One major difference between school today and schools of the past is that learning can happen anywhere and anytime. In fact, that is a major feature of learning now and for the future no matter what happens. It is also a major feature of work in general but especially for teachers. Blurring the lines between […]
One quality of a teacher now and for the future is that we must be extremely avid learners. Because the pace of change is so great, we must expect to constantly be learning new information, new technologies, new ideas, and new methods. This is a difficult shift. Teachers spend an exorbitant amount of time trying […]
It is human nature to avoid change. We must be very motivated, both invested emotionally and with a solid reason, in order to make a change. The skills needed to meet the needs of learners graduating into the current global economy are substantially different than the skills that many teachers were introduced to in their […]
The second misconception that caught my eye in the opinion piece entitled Proficiency-based Overreach by Curtis Hier (the same one I referenced in this previous post) from The Burlington Free Press is that students will no longer be motivated in a proficiency-based system because there won’t be traditional grading. The first assumption that is problematic […]
I recently read an opinion piece in The Burlington Free Press that was fraught with misconceptions and inaccuracies about proficiency-based (competency-based) education. I think I’ll take them one at a time over several blog posts. In the first sentence of the opinion piece, Curtis Hier states “The Vermont Agency of Education is pushing a practice […]
As we started this year, our leadership team acknowledged that doing something that nobody had ever done before could be pretty scary. We also acknowledged our strengths as we tried to start out in a proactive and positive note. Recognition In order to recognize the hard work that people had already done and the work […]
One of my colleagues asked a question that inspired this post. Based on what she is seeing as her own school makes the shift, her question was, “Is having a student take the same test over and over again until they pass it, really proficiency based learning”? In Vermont we use the term proficiency which […]
