East Brooklyn Community High School is a small transfer school located in Brownsville. The school has a small staff and a small population of students compared to most high schools in New York City. The history department has four teacher, Ron the Global Europe and Global Asia teacher, Ariela the Global Middle East, Global Latin America and Caribbean and Economics teacher, Jimmy the SPED teacher who helps out in all the history classes and myself Dominique the US History and Government teacher. Together we are a tight unit that spreads the love of history to our students. As a department every week, we check in on student performance, lesson study projects, and regent preparation for students in addition to weekly lesson approaches. Sometimes if we have time during our meetings we help, each other map out upcoming units. As a department, we observe each other classes to learn different strategies of teaching content and literacy.
At East Brooklyn Community High School, we follow a different type of rubric to assets students. Each day teachers are to
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focus on a skill when learning different content. When creating worksheets for students the learning target and “look fors” must be present to the students. For example, I observe and interview Ron and he was focused on “The Enlightenment”. His learning target “understood the time period known as the Enlightenment”. For the skill, students would do a reading on a theory from famous philosophers of the Enlightenment. There is a list of look fors. Students will be able to read a text, underline important information, and circle words that are important or may not understand, and write comments throughout the text. This skill is preparing them to read for understanding and taking notes. The following day students will perform a whole class discussion. Ron, my former high school track coach and history teacher has been teaching for about 15 years. Ron is very experience and knows how to engage students to different types of content. I observe Ron’s class frequently to learn some of his strategies. Over the past few weeks, the Ron had an overarching question on the idea of “authority”. Ron opens up the unit of understand the term Renaissance using the Frayer Model. Frayer Model is a strategy I borrowed from Ron to introduce new terms. I also used his idea of having students draw a visual of the term instead of giving non-examples. Before students dissect, the term “The Enlightenment” he has a short clip that sum up the history of the “The Enlightenment”. In the short video clip the definition of “The Enlightenment” is stated, the facts and examples are present moreover; the video clip gives brief examples of “The Enlightenment”. Students proceed to work independently after learning the skill of the day. Ron models how independent work should be done. For independent work students read excerpts from the social contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ron modified the reading so students could understand the text. While he modifies the reading he also gives students guided questions to answer in between paragraphs. When I interviews Ron I asked him why he gave guided questions in between the text and not all at the end he stated it helps students understand the purpose of each paragraph and allows students to break down the text so they can comprehend what they have read. As a teacher it is sometimes difficult to monitor every student independent work in a 45 to 55 minute period. I was curious on how Ron would assess the students while they were doing independent work. Ron made it very clear in simple to both the students and myself as the observer/interviewer. Ron put a rubric on top of the worksheet write above the independent work directions. There were 3 boxes. The first box was “E” meaning exceed. Student will exceed the task if all guided questions are answered and correct, students map out the skill Ron modeled in class for their read strategy and reflecting on the text. “M” meaning meets, Ron described how students would meet the task by doing the following steps. The last box would be “N” meaning student needs improvement in completing guided questions, answering the guided questions, doing the skill and etc. I thought this method was an effective way for the students to assess themselves but also for the teacher to look at every student’s reflection on their own work. This reminds me of the UBD lesson plan stage two describing the things students will be able to do. Using the text from the independent work students will participate in a whole class discussion. On the following day I went to observe Ariela who was conducting the whole class discussion on the social contract text by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Before conducting the whole class discussion students were given time to look over the reading and guided questions to refresh their memory on the text. In addition Ariela asked the students to pick out two pieces of information that stand out to them in the text. Using the two pieces of information they picked out student will explain why it is significant to them. The students had about fifteen minutes to look over the text and gather information for the whole class discussion. After the fifteen minutes was over the whole class discussion began. Ariela created a protocol to allow all students to participate. Going around the classroom each student read the piece of information they choose. After every student gave their speech they began the whole class
discussion. Personally I thought this protocol worked for her class but if I were to do it I do not think it would have been as effective. I first felt that students should introduce where in the text they are getting the information. This allows students to practice referencing form a text. In addition, it would have been nice to hear students answer and discuss some of the guided questions from the pervious day. This allowed student to share their thoughts and answered before getting into what they felt was a significant or important part of the text. Another suggestion is ways of assessing the student during this activity. I was unclear on how students were being assessed. Little did I realize Ariela was taking notes on students individually based on their participation? With her recordings she would give the students an “E”, “M” or “N”. Overall I think both activities compliment each other and show me as a new teacher different ways to approach a text for multiple days.
This case study is a situation from Case Studies on Educational Administration (Kowalski, 2011). The background information is listed below.
Thomas Jefferson was a man who believed that all American citizens need to be educated so that they may exercise their rights. He saw public education as essential to a democracy. One proposal he made for public education would guarantee that all children could attend public schools for three years. However, much like other early school reforms, this proposal received much rejection and was never brought into being. Despite this rejection, Jefferson still believed that America needed public education. Eventually, he opened the University of Virginia. Even though his bills and proposals to benefit public education never saw the light of day, he still made many contributions to public education by providing the foundation on how a democracy should handle educating its
Detroit, once known as a bustling city of fast cars and bling, is now known for its poor education system. Detroit, minus its Red Wings, has failed at every turn economically and educationally. With its population cut in half and poverty rates soaring, there is no telling what can stop this disaster of a city. The only hope, it seems, is to better educate the region that Detroit inhabits. Detroit Public Schools has been one of the worst performing school districts in recent years. In 2013, the city of Detroit filed chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest account of bankruptcy to-date. Good teachers avoid Detroit Public Schools because of the poverty, job quality, and low pay, leaving children with the unqualified teachers they have today in this poverty-plagued city that they call home.
The thesis, or the main idea of the book, is that by using specific communication techniques, we can turn difficult discussions into productive learning conversations.
Neck the social studies teacher and lets out feelings inside him. David Petrakis is Melinda’s lab
When it comes to Pleviak Elementary School we take leadership very seriously. I spoke with the assistant Principal at Pleviak Nikki Gardner about the leadership framework at Pleviak and at Round Lake Area School District 116. During our talk we discussed how Pleviak uses a distributed leadership framework where decision making is spread across a variety of committees. These committees are then led by a variety of teachers in the building. There are a total of eleven committees that cover a wide range of areas. We also discussed the district leadership team. It is called the School Improvement Leadership Team (SILT) that consists of three to four staff members from each building in the district and they have monthly meetings about facilitating district initiatives that will help meet the district goals.
Many people are given the opportunity to overcome challenges that can change their life. In the movie Lean on Me, the students and faculty of the inner city school Eastside High School, located in Paterson New Jersey, are given such opportunity.
Belleville West High School presides in the middle of an abandoned field and a family oriented community. Here you’ll find different clubs and activities that can fit just about every student’s liking. However, Spectrum, the LGBT club, has the lowest rate of members of all school clubs.
Sci Academy is a coed, charter high school in New Orleans, Louisiana. SA holds classes for pupils in grades 9 through 12. The school enrollment is around 400, and there is a 15:1 student to teacher ratio. The gender mix is evenly divided. Following state assessments, 74 percent of students are proficient in Mathematics and 69 percent are proficient in English. Based on state assessment scores and the school's success at preparing pupils for college, SA is nationally ranked by US News and World Report with a bronze medal. The graduation rate is 76 percent. SA is part of the Recovery School District (Rsd) -Collegiate Academies. Sci Academy has an open admission policy.
...a or wanted to test or try something, an opportunity was given to do so. It was decided that everyone was to participate evenly, which was done through the division of jobs, depending on that person’s experience and knowledge upon that specific field. For example, someone might have been in charge of the assembling of parts through gluing while another may have been nailing a screw. In the beginning, and even throughout the assembly of the car, it was a struggle to know exactly what order of steps were required to achieve something (for example, how to successful nail the screw into the piece of wood) but it was much easier to overcome these problems as everyone remained calm and engaged in discussions; this meant that everyone had to take responsibility for their learning by thinking more critically and suggesting ideas or methods of improvement with full honesty.
In order to make certain that all of the words get used, the teacher might have to supply a few of sentences of her own. After allowing time for each pair or small group of students to compose their sentences, the teacher should reconvene the class and ask students to select sentences to share out loud. As students read their sentences, the teacher can write them on the board. The teacher continues to request sentences from the students until each word in the list has been used at least one time. At this stage, the teacher does yet not evaluate the accuracy of each sentence with respect to what students will be reading.
When I completed Middle School, I was living with my dad and uncle, but during the Summer my dad went into federal prison. My uncle couldn't take care of me so I had to move with my mom's friend down in Florida. Then another situation happened where I couldn't live with my mom's friends anymore so I had to go back to New York and live with my Grandma, since my dad was still in prison. Since then, I still live my Grandma, but I now attend Brentwood High School because my address runs with their district.
Neither rubric is better than the other. All have a place in authentic assessment (Custer, 1996), correspond as closely as possible to real world experience going beyond the typical pencil and paper activity (Montgomery, 2002),, and calling for greater accountability and transparency, especially in the assessment of student learning (Diller & Phelps, 2008).
Through assessment students and teachers are able to determine the level of mastery a student has achieved with standards taught. Both formative and summative assessment should be purposeful and targeted to gain the most accurate data to drive further instruction (Ainsworth, 2010). While this syllabus does a good job of identifying the need for both formal and informal assessments, the way in which this is communicated does not provide enough detail for understanding. Simply listing assessment types does not give any insight into how these assessments fit in the learning process of this course. While some of the assessments mentioned could be common assessments chosen by the school or district to gain insight into the effectiveness of instruction, the inclusion of authentic assessments is most beneficial to students and demonstrates learning in a context closer to that of a work environment (Rovai, 2004). Unfortunately, this particular course, according to this syllabus, relies heavily on quizzes and traditional tests and essays to form the bulk of assessment opportunities. While other activities, such as formative assessments, journaling and discussions are mentioned as possible avenues for scoring, they are given a very low percentage of the overall grade. This shows that they are not valued for their ability to show progression and mastery. If this is indeed the case, this puts the students as a
The teacher will also make norm-referenced and criterion referenced interpretations of assessment through this website. They have graph and color-coded bands that show widely held expectations for children’s development and learning. The teacher will use this website and graph to communicate twice a year with the parents about the child’s strength, weakness or any area of