An Article Worth Archiving

This terrific article titled, Will Your PLC Put the One-Four in 2014? provides some essential strategies to a strong Professional Learning Community.  With our focus and belief being, All Kids Can Learn, we can make a difference within every student.  If you do not follow John Wink on twitter or subscribe to his blog, I encourage you to do so. Every blog post is worth the read.

"Say what you want about integrating technology, becoming more innovative with assessments or designing more real world learning environments, but if it doesn't guarantee that all kids will learn, those things are kind of pointless." - John Wink

An Article Worth Printing and Placing Inside Your Plan Book

This article titled, What Is Performance Assessment by Tom Vander Ark, explains that schools who value deeper learning work to design and to implement quality performance tasks. 

In the narrowest sense, according to ETS, performance assessment is “A test in which the test taker actually demonstrates the skills the test is intended to measure by doing real-world tasks that require those skills, rather than by answering questions asking how to do them.” – Tom Vander Ark

An Article Worth Sharing

In the article titled, Fostering Teacher Leadership Through Collaborative Inquiry, Jenni Donohoo presents a four-stage model that allow for teachers to become more meaningfully involved in school-improvement and a catalyst for change.   

"Rather than being merely consumers of research and the professional knowledge that accompanies it, teachers engaged in collaborative inquiry become producers and disseminators of knowledge." - Jenni Donohoo

Learning After Hours

Click Here to view an archive of our first #piconnect chat!

As a Result of Your Lesson.....

Dr. Justin Tarte recently published a piece called, It's Not Teaching If There's No Learning.   (Click to read full article)

"We can have the most wonderfully planned lesson in the world with varying degrees of differentiation, plenty of opportunities for global collaboration, autonomy and flexibility in how to demonstrate student understanding, and a healthy dose of technology integration, but if the students aren't able to accomplish or demonstrate any level of learning or understanding, then our lesson frankly was not a success." - Justin Tarte

Tips For Choosing Strategic Partners

Our Piedmont Intermediate blog creates one place to share our knowledge and experiences so that we can all benefit as a personal learning community of teachers.  Recently, Mrs. Dunn shared with me a video from The Teaching Channel called, Choosing Strategic Partners.  I think we all agree that partner work is effective, but not all partners work well together. Click here to view the 2 minute clip and think about the following questions:

• What can you learn from Ms. Tse about choosing partners for your students?
• How does Ms. Tse consider the task when selecting partners?
• When might you allow students to pick their own partners?

Hook Them the Second Students Walk Through Your Door

Show Me the Strategies is a great article that provides many resources on how to engage your students from the time your students walk through your classroom door.  "What happens in the first minutes of your class will indicate your success for the rest of the class period."  If students could vote with their feet, what will you do the first five minutes of every lesson so that students will want to be in your classroom?  Something to think about.