What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? I found an interest in education in the early 1980s. Traveling with my dad (who was a school superintendent at the time), we often visited an old Northern California mining community that had no municipal electric or phone service -- but they had a vibrant one room school house. From those interactions, I developed a curiosity about the role of education in our daily lives. I found out about CPET by luck! I came to TC in 2008 to teach full-time and begin my doctoral work. A few years later, I joined a social studies coaching project in the Bronx, and I have been involved ever since. What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? I always loved school and learning, but I also always struggled with math. In college, something clicked, and I realized how awesome mathematics was. I wanted to help other struggling students see the beauty in math and experience success in it as well. I heard about CPET through my friend, who told me how rewarding her experiences were working with CPET as a mathematics coach. What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? I have always wanted to teach for as long as I can remember. What truly sparked my interest was when I was in elementary school, I taught English to my cousins in Bangladesh when I would visit them during my summer vacations. I love the notion of education as empowerment. I began working with CPET when I was in the doctoral program at TC and had the pleasure of studying with Ruth Vinz. She told me about CPET and brought me on board. How did you end up working with CPET? Having worked in education for 4+ years nothing is more satisfying than watching students achieve that "ahhhha" moment. My role at CPET is to assist teachers to maximize their students' potential and create the right conditions/atmosphere for true learning to happen in order to achieve a magnitude of "a-ha" moments. What are your current research interests and current projects? My current research involves investigating new platforms or vehicles to progress Math education during the 21st century. I’m currently working on 2 projects:
What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? After being a high school classroom teacher for 15 years in my native South Africa and then coming to the USA, I was struck by the similar struggles teachers experienced. I started working at a non-profit as the Youth Coordinator; which took me back into the public schools. I watched as teachers were challenged by a host of scenarios, not the least including classroom management and adequate curriculum and lesson planning. I decided to go back to school to pursue a PhD. I stayed in my discipline of teaching English and as my degree progressed I was offered opportunities through my program to do professional development with CPET. It's the proverbial match made in Heaven for me, which is an ability to grow as an educator, to help teachers grow in their own practices and together to tackle challenges that is faced by the teaching corps with the parameters set out by local and national government. What sparked your interest in education? How did you end up working with CPET? I was dissatisfied with my stint in the corporate world. I wanted to do something more meaningful and impactful. Fortunately, I found the NYC Teaching Fellows, an alternative certification program, which allowed me to pursue a teaching career while getting my masters. It was in my 5th year of teaching when I was introduced to the Student Press Initiative. With their support, my class of third grade students published a book of personal narratives. The people whom I met, and the idea of pursuing another degree, particularly in literacy, sparked my desire to attend Teachers College, where I was fortunate enough to get involved with CPET as a professional development coach. As we're nearing the end of the school year, negotiating the assessments are on everyone's mind. Adding the MOSL Assessments to the mix makes a busy time of year even more complicated.
CPET has been working behind the scenes with the NYC DOE to develop instructionally relevant and transparent scoring guides for the MOSL - New York City Performance Assessments in English, Social Studies and Science. Our MOSL team worked hard to identify anchor papers that not only show the spectrum of performance on the the NYC Performance Assessments, but explain in multiple ways how the NYC DOE rubrics can be interpreted. Norming using the anchor papers and rubrics is an important task in any assessment system, but especially because these high stakes assessments have implications on teachers' ratings, it seems even more important for norming and scoring to be responsible, thoughtful, and aligned by shared interpretations. Because we feel so strongly that teachers are able to use every tool available to navigate these new mandates, we're offering an opportunity for free professional development in norming the assessments with our experienced coaches. Teachers, coaches, and school leaders are welcome to join us as we facilitate norming sessions for NYC Performance Assessments in Social Studies, Science, and English Language Arts grades K-12. Participants will work in grade/subject area groups to review the tasks, analyze the rubric, and use the anchor papers to norm their scoring practices. We welcome individual teachers, teacher teams, school/organizational coaches, and school leaders/administrators. Materials will be made available for turnkey PD at the school level. To RSVP, click here. We hope to see you there! This weekend, CPET team members Marcelle Mentor, Brice Particelli, Cristina Romeo and Alexandra Thomas successfully presented their work on Project-Based Pedagogies: Ethnographies of Classroom Publishing, as part of the Ethnography and Education Conference at UPenn. Their presentation included a discussion of multi-modal work & the intersection of art, writing and culture currently taking place at The Young Women's Leadership School, as well as a touching piece on the topic of self-inquiry, based on work with the GED+ program in New York City. Each presenter focused on ways that these projects ask students to use ethnographic approaches in their writing, and to inquire critically into their own culture. Sarah Montgomery-Glinski, a CPET Lead Professional Development Coach, also presented her work on Forget About the Test: Facilitating Senior Performance Based Assessments at a South Bronx Consortium High School.
Congratulations everyone! One of CPET's Professional Development coaches, Gregory Benoit, is featured this week on the Teachers College homepage as part of the Future Leaders of TC spotlight! To read more about his journey to TC and his future plans, click here. Congratulations to CPET literacy coaches Kerry McKibbin and Stephen Brodbar, who presented at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Boston on November 22, 2013. Their talk was entitled (Language) Arts and Sciences: Strategies and Concepts for Enhancing our English Curricula While Supporting Students' Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Needs in an Era of Common Core. In it, the teacher educators spoke about ways in which English educators can view current reform movements that provide funding for the sciences as opportunities to deepen their students' writing and reading skills. For more details, click here.
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The Quality Review. It’s the only qualitative evaluation that a school receives and it provides the opportunity to showcase the unique characteristics of the school community that may be masked by statistics, algorithms, and percentages. That being said, they’re also extremely stressful, overwhelming, and sometimes, all consuming. It is so challenging to help a stranger to your school see all of the processes, practices, and procedures that work together to strengthen your school community in alignment with the city’s expectations. We are so excited to honor CPET partner schools who achieved the rating of Proficient or Well Developed on this year’s Quality Review! Congratulations! Excelsior Preparatory High School
The 2013 Share Fair, a joint effort between the CFN402 Network and the Center for Professional Education of Teachers, provided an opportunity to celebrate the dedication of network teachers throughout CPET's 2012-13 workshop series. Throughout the year, teachers were supported in unit and lesson planning, as well as aligning their curriculum with the Common Core standards. For the Share Fair, teachers joined together to construct presentations and showcase the many valuable resources available to members of the educational community. CPET 2012-13 Workshop Series In collaboration with CFN402, CPET provided a monthly workshop series for New York City teachers within the Network on Unit Planning with the Common Core. Through the workshops, teachers dug deeper into the priority standards of writing arguments, reading information texts, and modeling with mathematics. Teachers also worked with coaches to develop unit plans that were both relevant to their students' interests, essential in their content, and aligned to the standards. The culminating Share Fair on June 6th at Teachers College was a powerful demonstration of their innovation and dedication. SAMPLE PRESENTATIONSSince New York State adopted the Common Core Learning Standards, our coaches have been working with educators throughout the city to align curriculum with the standards. We've developed many tools to help teachers identify the areas of their curriculum that do not yet meet the Common Core standards, and have developed unit plans for subject areas where commercial curriculum has not yet been developed.
Throughout this process, we've reorganized the standards so that strands for each grade are in one place -- teachers no longer have to hunt through the entire document to find grade level standards for each strand. Below, you can download a copy of the ELA, History, or Science CCLS for grades 6-12. Even schools in good standing within the city can find themselves struggling to meet AYP on State Tests. This is what happened to Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies (MACS) in the Bronx. Despite high scores on their NYC Progress Report, missing AYP goals by just a few points positioned them as a SINI school, partially because of scores on the ELA Regents exam. The school considered this data carefully and the CPET coach worked with English teachers to analyze the data and identify leverage points for targeting students at different performance levels. Because the school has been part of the CPET Design Your Own Periodic Assessment program, we were able to combine the efforts and goals of the DYO with the goal of an increased Regents pass rate. We designed our DYO rubric to align with the Critical Lens Rubric and monitored student performance across grade levels. Teachers analyzed their DYO data to identify strengths and struggles throughout the year and used the assessments as predictive Regents scores. Further analysis of the DYO and the ELA Regents demonstrated a 91% correlation between the two exams—confirming that these mid-year assessments were valid and reliable methods of monitoring student progress. Publication: Columbia Spectator
Date: November 28, 2012 Summary: Teachers College has begun to fulfill its pledge of a partnership with 12 Harlem public schools, establishing professional development workshops for teachers and expanding after-school programming for seven schools this semester. Excerpt: "The Partnership Consortium is a wonderful way for Columbia students to learn about the day-to-day life of NYC public schools from a student’s perspective, and not from a professor, or text,” Landis said in an email. “Having this hands-on experience will hopefully bring more qualified, passionate graduates to public schools.” The information garnered from focus groups will “help inform the development of family engagement programming that will be tailored to each specific school setting to address identified barriers to student success,” Michael Laucello, the teaching assistant for Brassard’s class, said in an email." Read the full article on Columbia Spectator. Under the umbrella of the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) reside three related but specialized literacy initiatives that are run by individuals who are passionate about education. The three initiatives that make up CPET are SEI, SLI, and SPI. Roberta Lenger Kang along with Courtney Brown and Elizabeth Fox lead the SLI organization under the guidance and direction of Ruth Vinz. How was SLI started and why was it started? This is probably a question best answered by Ruth, who started SLI as a way to help schools and even whole Regions across the city (in early 2000’s) focus on the essential qualities of Literacy across content areas. In 2007, the city established a mandate that teachers must conduct Periodic assessments at least three times per year until students passed the Regents in ELA and in Math. That lead to the development of the Design Your Own assessment program. Can you tell us more about the DYO program? The DYO program is an alternative to the standardized assessment approaches offered by the city. Instead of having students take standardized tests three times per year, we support schools to design assessments that are more aligned with their mission and vision of the school. The DYO Program has grown, as we’ve seen how the work of assessments spreads into curriculum mapping, instructional practices, school structures, professional development and a host of other. Ultimately, I think SLI was created to fill a need for Professional Professional Development that meets the needs of school communities. |
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