I recently spent two months teaching from a distance using video technology to beam my face and voice - and when I wanted to my computer screen or document camera - into classrooms. That process is worthy of reflection, but what struck me most was the difference in the schools I was teaching to. I had two schools on screen at the same time, geographically about a half an hour away from each other, 9th grade and later 7th grade.
Despite being the same age - outwardly in fact indistinguishable - they could not have been more different. At school A, most students did most of the work assigned, they were prepared for and active in class; they paid attention; they emailed me when they had questions. In school B, most of the students d not do the work; they were unprepared for and inattentive in class. I never head from most of them. I showed a short video - a 4-minute performance. The students in schools A watched, listened, learned; the students in school B laughed. I had occasion to visit both schools - it was just after hurricane Sandy and we could not connect electronically. The feel of the schools was very different. School A felt alive; school B felt subdued. The walls spoke to me as well, school A's covered with posters, school B's bare. I have always known that a schol - the teachers, the administration, every aspect of it - has a meaningful impact on the students. What struck me was how great the difference can be, and because I was teaching at both schools simultaneously, the difference was evident every day, inevery aspect of
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I was listening to a story on NPR recently about the collection of saliva samples from 100,000 patients and what they were able to learn from it by looking at these individuals' medical histories. They were interviewing a medical researcher, a Nobelist, talking about disease. She said, "Disease is not an event; it's a process." Upon hearing this, I immediately thought of assessment and the way so many teachers and schools and states assess students with one-off, high-stakes tests that are events, not processes. True assessment, meaningful assessment that tells us where a student is and what they have come to understand, is a process. The school I am at now assesses teachers with three 15-minute "walk throughs." Contrast that with a school I taught at several years ago where a supervisor sat in on four of my classes - three in a row of one and one of a different class. She got a very clear idea of how I teach and whether learning was taking place. (I am happy to report that she concluded that it was.) Sad to say, this is the only school I have been at that took the observation and assessment of teachers so seriously, making it a process and not an event.
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AuthorAfter teaching for 10 years and using lots of technology, I have decided to move into the technology side of education. Archives
December 2015
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