Diane Ravitch explains that differentiation involves "offering several different learning experiences in response to students' varied needs. Educators may vary learning activities and materials by difficulty, so as to challenge students at different readiness levels; by topic, in response to students' interests; and by students' preferred ways of learning or expressing themselves." This month's featured resource, Differentiating Like A Star, offers suggestions for differentiating instruction, including using data, assigning tasks or texts, and creating classroom groups. The more stars you're able to introduce, the more strategic and targeted the instruction!
Well-managed classrooms allow teaching and learning to flourish. But creating an ideal learning environment for your students is multifaceted, and often challenging — so much so that many teachers name classroom management as one of their most difficult tasks.
This month's featured resource offers 25 techniques to help you diversify your classroom management skills, and trigger positive reactions from your students. Which one will work best for you?
We believe that effective professional development bridges theory and practice, and not only promotes critical reflection, but also the implementation and application of learning as a way to refine your teaching.
Our featured resource offers an effective sequence for professional development that allows educators to engage in a cycle of learning, applying, reflecting, and sharing (also known as LARS.). This tool can be used by administrators and school leaders to support educators in implementing specific strategies, concepts, or techniques into their practice. The LARS method can help create a powerful learning community in which educators are able to learn with and from one another and establish best practices that can be shared across classrooms.
As election month approaches, it's a fitting time to examine the political and social issues that affect our students most. How can you explore these themes in your classroom? Download our featured resource, which offers a guide to teaching in the current political climate, including protocols and practices educators can use to create safe spaces for students as they consider their perspectives and investigate the influences that shape their lives.
For additional guidance, reach out to our team of expert coaches, who can offer customized support for you & your students!
The beginning of the school year is a valuable time for teachers and students to engage in conversations around goal setting. Identifying goals can help increase student engagement by providing a sense of purpose to students as they learn, and can also help create a sense of accountability.
This month's featured resource offers educators a template for supporting students in setting personal goals, with a focus on those that are S.M.A.R.T.: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. For additional guidance, reach out to our team of expert coaches, who can offer customized support for you & your students!
How do we help teachers not simply stay in their jobs, but become committed, successful, practitioners?
The numbers are daunting: approximately 50% of teachers leave within their first five years of teaching. This rapid turnover negatively impacts districts, schools, and students. All over the country, schools and principals are left scrambling to find teachers at the last minute, and school culture, curriculum, and instruction suffer from a lack of continuity. Statistically, this high turnover disproportionately affects schools primarily serving students from low-income families and students of color.
What can we do to address the issue of teacher attrition? How do we help teachers not simply stay in their jobs, but become committed, successful, practitioners? Certainly, a strong supportive school culture helps, and we recognize that ongoing mentoring, strong preparation, and a repertoire of instructional moves go a long way in helping new teachers experience success.
Ready-to-use resources
Research shows that teachers who are well-prepared and well-mentored are much more likely to make a long-term commitment to the profession, and increase their effectiveness while doing so. At CPET, we specialize in offering new teachers ongoing, individualized mentorship as well as ready-to-use resources they need to be successful in the classroom.
Engaging with a community of peers
The New Teacher Network at Teachers College (NTN@TC) is a community of practice for individuals in their first three year of teaching. NTN@TC provides a custom blend of in-person and online collaboration, personalized support through customized professional development workshops, on-site coaching, and a dedicated online community. Since its establishment in 2014, nearly 250 Teachers College graduates have connected to the network. Though some network benefits are limited to Teachers College alumni, all new teachers can benefit from our in-person workshops and conferences, many of which are tailored specifically for the experiences of first- to third-year teachers:
Three simple ways to incorporate critical reflection into your practice.
When designing professional development projects, we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified as we support educators. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Communities of practice, Contextualized practice, Critical reflection, Cultivating strengths, and Cycles of inquiry. As part of our series investigating each of these principles, let’s dig deeper into critical reflection. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)
Critical reflection includes meta-cognition, self-awareness, and considering multiple viewpoints — features which result in reflective action. Individuals who are able to reflect critically on their experiences are better positioned to learn from their successes and missteps so that they can be constantly improving their practice. The basic principles of critical reflection are all the more relevant today as we live in this fast-paced world, and we include opportunities for personal, professional, and peer-to-peer reflection in all of our workshop experiences.
What can reflection look like?
A cornerstone of CPET conferences and institutes, critical reflection helps us begin each Chancellor’s Day with time, space, and guidance that positions teachers as experts who can articulate the needs and desired outcomes for their learning.
Getting started: three ways to incorporate reflection
Reflection recipes Teaching is like cooking: both an art and a science. Invite participants to reflect by making a list of ingredients from their year. Turn the ingredients from a list into a reflection recipe. What do they notice? What happens when they add a creative element to their practical list? Participants share their recipes, draw connections between experiences, and consider how they gain perspective on their school year as a result of this reflection. Reflection inventory Not all participants will be into the touchy-feely-artsy reflection. For those folks, we include a teaching career inventory as a means for reflection. Using a timeline template, participants review what they’ve taught over their experience as a teacher, what education they have pursued themselves, and their goals, and then consider next steps for their future as an educator. Teachers may want to sit in subject area groups to bounce ideas off one another. Reading reflection Following a period of research or reading, utilize our What, So What, Now What resource to help jumpstart your reflective process:
Differentiated instruction aims to meet the diverse needs of students. But it can be difficult to design lessons that support students who are struggling without restricting those who are ready for more advanced study.
This month's featured resource, the Rigormeter, offers educators a straightforward outline of six learning stages, along with suggested actions for student engagement in each phase of the learning process. For additional guidance, reach out to our team!
According to the Danielson framework, a coherently sequenced and aligned lesson plan is one of the marks of a highly effective teacher. But finding ways to pace your lessons is a difficult task, considering you're also trying to strike a balance between modeling, guided practice, and application. Throw in the fact that students work at different paces, and you've got yourself a nice little challenge.
How can you enhance your lessons? Our featured resource may be able to help! It offers tips and tricks to support lesson timing, transitions, and more. For additional guidance, reach out to our team of expert coaches who can help level up your lesson planning!
How to step back, look, and listen to see where communities may be forming or where we can invite them to form.
When designing professional development projects, we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified as we support educators. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Communities of practice, Contextualized practice, Critical reflection, Cultivating strengths, and Cycles of inquiry. As part of our series investigating each of these principles, let’s dig deeper into communities of practice. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)
Identifying members of your community with an interest in professional development can be a first step in building an internal coaching structure within your school, and if you’re already humming along with a teacher coaching practice, looping back to some basics can help you identify additional teachers to invite into a growing community of practice.
“Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”
Step back
We often become so familiar with our own school and colleagues that we miss a new or forming interest — especially when it’s late in the school year and we’re sure we know everyone well enough to ascertain who is interested in receiving or leading PD and who isn’t. However, if we step back, we may see something new. At the next grade level team meeting, take a breath and look around as if it were the beginning of the school year. During your next staff meeting, imagine the people around you have changed over the school year (they probably have) and look and listen for new evidence of the desire to grow professionally. Look Take a look over a list of your staff and identify which teachers have tried something new in their classroom. What might happen if you invite them to share with one other teacher, in their department, or with the larger community? Where do you see teachers gathering in pairs or small groups? Do they share a common interest that could translate into professional learning? For instance, back when the first Harry Potter book came out, teachers reading the book decided to gather together to form a book club that spent the first half hour talking about their own experience of the book and the second half talking about how they could spark their own student’s imagination through creative writing prompts. Look around. Where might professional learning groups be a logical next step to what is already happening? Listen Perhaps it’s more likely in your situation that teachers aren’t forming their own learning groups naturally. Take a moment instead to listen for the needs you hear being voiced. Do you hear struggles in the form of complaints? There’s not enough time. / How am I supposed to fit [this] in? / I’ve tried everything with [this kid]! What teacher do you know who has struggled through this same problem in the past? Consider asking the teacher who overcame the struggle to invite the teacher in the midst of the struggle to problem-solve together. Listen to the whole staff: do you have results from any recent survey you can dip back into for a sense of the needs across your team? Identify several needs and offer a problem of practice protocol in your next email to staff or invite teachers to form small groups that engage with a protocol to address their concerns. Maybe it’s time for a new survey focused on asking questions directly about PD needs and especially about the interest of teachers to collaborate and learn from one another. It’s a great time to listen for needs that you want to meet over the summer and going into 2019-20.
The reality is that communities of practice are everywhere. Sometimes we can see them clearly and other times we need to step back, look, and listen to see where they may be forming or where we can invite them to form between folks who don’t realize that just across the hall is someone else with the same interest or struggle. Wagner describes it like this:
[Communities of practice] are a familiar experience, so familiar perhaps that it often escapes our attention. Yet when it is given a name and brought into focus, it becomes a perspective that can help us understand our world better. In particular, it allows us to see past more obvious formal structures such as organizations, classrooms, or nations, and perceive the structures defined by engagement in practice and the informal learning that comes with it.
Numerous studies underscore the importance of student engagement and its impact on attendance and achievement; however, engaging students at this point in the school year can often feel like a challenge. What can you do?
Start with this month's featured resource, which includes 16 practical strategies for student engagement. These strategies, which range from highlighting student work to crafting a scavenger hunt, can work for multiple content areas and grade levels. Each suggestion here can get you started — and we're here to offer additional support as you continue to re-imagine engagement in your classroom.
As educators, our job is to help students succeed academically, while also nurturing their social and emotional health — two tasks that are often in conflict with one another. This month's featured resource, which is designed to help you identify and respond to student pressures, can help you find effective ways to both educate and care for your students.
By identifying the pressures that impact students, and understanding how you can respond to them — both structurally and relationally — you can help create a more socially and emotionally responsive environment.
Equip students with the skills and knowledge they need in order to have authority over their exams.
As we move closer to the end of the school year and approach the high-stakes testing season, we know educators are grappling with the question: to test prep or not to test prep?
When it comes to high-stakes exams that help determine whether or not students will graduate from high school (as is the case with some New York State Regents exams), which colleges they may have access to (based on their SAT or ACT scores), or whether or not they can move to a new grade level (as is the case for elementary students and their scores on NYC ELA and Math exams), there’s no doubt that schools and teachers should strategically plan for test prep. We need to be able to support students in meeting the demands of these exams, and to equip them with the skills and knowledge needed to have authority over the exam. To help get you started with implementing strategic, positive test prep, check out our Regents Intervention System for Excellence (RISE) resource, which offers guidance for helping students gain access, agency, and authority over exams.
Preparation is key
Most standardized exams are their own unique genre — they ask questions in unfamiliar ways, and include tasks that may only exist in the specific format on the exam. Some exams may seem foreign to students because of their formatting, structure, and use of language. One way to think about the importance of test prep is to understand that taking a long, grueling exam once a year is similar to running a marathon. None of us would want to run a marathon without training for it, or without gathering advance information that will help us achieve our goal. While we should take time to prepare students for challenging, high-stakes exams, it’s crucial that we don’t overinform the focus of our curriculum or instruction. Instead, we should offer test prep strategies that allow students to exercise agency over the exam. To avoid narrowing our instruction to focus solely on test prep, it may be helpful to think of preparation as two components: understanding the content and skills related to the exam, and understanding the structure of the exam itself.
Understanding content and skills
Allowing students to learn exam-related skills and content is best accomplished by strategically building key skills, standards, and understandings into your curriculum throughout the year. Ideally, you would also be able to scaffold these components in the time leading up to the exam. You can then periodically assess student learning throughout the year and re-teach, review, and reinforce areas that still need some work. Going back to our marathon analogy, we can think of this part of the test prep process as conditioning and training so that our students have the tools needed to run the race.
Understanding exam structure
The second part of test prep involves getting to know the exam — it’s genre, language, scope, and scoring methods. We want students to be able to take charge of their exam and have an understanding of all its components. Students should have the opportunity to take a practice exam in its entirety, so that they have a chance to practice their pacing, and time to develop their own best practices for test-taking. Again, thinking about the exam as a marathon that our students are being asked to run, the more our students know about the course of the race, the more empowered they’ll be when developing strategies to tackle it.
If we regularly gauge student progress on as they learn the key skills needed to succeed on an exam, and assess their mastery of the exam’s sections, we can adjust and differentiate our teaching to offer students what they need to be as prepared as possible, while maintaining a positive and enriching experience in our classrooms.
Data-driven instruction can dramatically improve student achievement. By engaging in consistent and thoughtful analysis of student data, you can gather valuable insights into the strengths and struggles of your students, and determine how to best differentiate your instruction.
Get started with one of our favorite protocols, What, So What, Now What to help jumpstart your inquiry process. Interested in personalized support? Get in touch with our coaching team to learn how we can assist you with data analysis, reports, and preparing for state exams.
Parent-teacher conferences are just around the corner, and it's a valuable time for schools to reflect on promising practices and processes for communicating with parents. Research shows that parent engagement can have a significant impact on student achievement.
To support your efforts, we invite you to download our Real Talk resource, which is designed to help you identify what might be preventing communication with parents, and offers specific steps educators can take to improve & increase parent engagement. For additional, in-depth support, reach out to our coaching team!
Disruptive students can cause more problems for teachers than those who are disrespectful or defiant. Disruptions throw the lesson off track, influence other students, and can leave you feeling helpless in your own classroom.
How do you deal with them? Try using our Three Sweeps resource to help address these behaviors in productive ways. For more in-depth support, reach out to our coaching team!
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
I was walking down the hallway of one of our classic New York City high schools, talking with a teacher who was struggling with classroom culture issues. They were explaining that day in and day out, it was the same thing with the same kids. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned to the teacher, and said, “The thing is — if nothing changes, nothing changes.”
I wasn’t trying to be clever, it just seemed so clear and simple to me in that moment. If nothing changes, nothing changes. Why would we ever expect anything to change if we do not bring something new or different to the classroom? If we do not see our students differently, or if we do not speak to them differently? If we do not teach them differently?
The clearer this concept became in that moment, the clearer I saw this simple truth in all areas of my professional and personal life. I realized that when we have a goal that we want to reach, we must be the first to change our mindset and our actions. This is as true for school leaders working with teachers, administrators, and teacher leaders as it is for teachers working with students.
When I recently had the opportunity to support a group of teacher leaders and administrators in a three-day institute at Teachers College, I wanted to focus on helping them develop a strategic plan for school change. We knew that nothing would change if nothing changed — but we weren’t quite sure what should be changed first, which is why we developed a three-step process for our work. This process allowed us to reflect on the challenges that were having the biggest impact in their school community, and work collaboratively to develop strategic solutions.
Step 1: Identify your leverage area
Before developing a solution, we need to determine the underlying problem and the ultimate leverage area. Using our 5 Whys protocol, we can dig below the surface and identify the root cause of our challenge, which leads us to a new understanding of the problem. The 5 Whys begins with a basic statement of the problem, then prompts critical reflection to consider why this problem exists, in five rounds. While working through this process, we want to keep our critical reflection focused on factors that are within our sphere of influence. For example, if our challenge looks like this: Problem statement: Students are struggling on state tests. Why? Response: Poverty. ...well, there isn’t really anywhere to go to solve this problem! It can leave us feeling very powerless, when that isn’t the case at all. This isn’t to say that poverty isn’t an underlying reason, but it isn’t the only reason, and it is far too broad a topic to be resolved by a small group of people. Instead, it is more productive and empowering to focus on areas in which we have more influence. Let's see what happens when we reframe our challenge. Students are struggling on state tests. Why? Because the tests are long and students get tired. Why? Because students struggle with test-taking stamina. Why? Because they get tired and bored, and it’s difficult for them to retain focus. Why? Because the texts or tasks are complex and they struggle to comprehend them. Why? Because they struggle with assessment literacy and text types or question styles become difficult for them to read. This could go on and on, but notice how, when forced to keep the responses within the realm of the team’s influence, we can drill down to some concrete areas of focus. The 5 Whys protocol helps to unearth a tangible root issue that is contributing to the problem. By resolving the root cause, we can begin to see what we can change.
Step 2: Understand your connection to the challenge
In order to really incite change, every person needs to see how they are connected to the challenge, and articulate a way that they can personally contribute to the solution. By creating a personal action plan, each team member is invited to consider the nature of the problem, how it's connected to their role, and what they can do about it as an individual. Through a series of sentence starters, a personal action plan asks educators to examine their current role and responsibilities, where they have influence or decision-making power, and to reflect on what they can do to make an impact on the root issue. By using the sentence starter, “One thing I can do to make a difference is…” you begin with a powerful prompt as you consider what you can do to influence change in your community.
Step 3: Create a collaborative action plan
While everyone can individually contribute to a solution, more progress will be made if there is intentional collaboration. When educators work together to solve problems, they have a greater impact in a shorter time period. Consider the impact on struggling readers if one teacher uses a literacy strategy once a day for two weeks. The students will see that support 10 times. Now consider if five teachers used the strategy for two weeks. Students would see that strategy 50 times in 10 days. That kind of emphasis builds capacity within students at an exponential rate. This is what the collaborative action plan is all about — it helps to create a timeline, a team, and benchmark objectives to meet the goal.
Our ability to solve complex problems increases when we better understand the problem we’re trying to solve, when we’re able to get down into the root of the issue, and when we make a personal and collaborative commitment for targeted change. These strategies can be applied in all parts of organizations, and especially in schools where our actions impact the current and future lives of our students. Nothing changes when nothing changes. But when something changes, anything can change, and you can be a part of it. Be the change you want to see!
Learning has no limit, and teachers are constantly growing. Use our professional goal setting resource to start the year with some purposeful planning and short-term strategies to achieve your goals. Want to dig even deeper? Get in touch with one of our coaches who can offer direct support!
Check out our other resources here!
Success on NYS Regents exams relies heavily on students' abilities as readers, including their capacity to interpret questions, analyze passages, and make meaning from text. As you prepare your students for exams, explore this month's featured resource, designed to support students in identifying meaningful pieces of text and encourage them to make their thinking visible as they read.
Our guide to teaching in today's political climate offers an understanding of how politics manifest in classrooms, as well as possible protocols for teachers to implement. Learn how to provide space for discussion, establish norms, and reflect before lessons.
Download a copy, and check out our other resources here. |
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