:: The 4th Era ::

Teacher professional learning is of increasing interest as one way to support the increasingly complex skills students need to learn in preparation for further education and work in the 21st century. Sophisticated forms of teaching are needed to develop student competencies such as deep mastery of challenging content, critical thinking, complex problem-solving,

effective communication and collaboration, and self-direction. In turn, effective professional development (PD) is needed to help teachers learn and refine the pedagogies required to teach these skills. However, research has shown that many PD initiatives appear ineffective in supporting changes in teacher practices and student learning. Accordingly, we set out to discover the features of effective PD.

This paper reviews 35 methodologically rigorous studies that have demonstrated a positive link between teacher professional development, teaching practices, and student outcomes. We identify the features of these approaches and offer rich  descriptions of these models to inform those seeking to understand the nature of the initiatives.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/?s=coaching

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/?s=professional+development

To read.

Curation can be used as an authentic activity with many disciplines to enable students to critically evaluate resources for a common interest. Would like to hear more about discipline based projects.

I am eager to delve into this further....  

The real scalibility in education comes with the Internet....freeing education from a place and from a specific time. With this comes changing pedagogies including peer-learning. Donald makes a case for recording lectures - videos provide opportunity for repeated access to new content. Some familiar messages here and interesting focus on scalibility.

Divorce your school from bells and national standards drive n data production in favour of connections. developing problem based learning requires questioning the structure that our schools operate within. Counter. Culture. 

Learning by doing has always been a pattern to master a craft. This is particularly true for the  new-normal which cannot simply be taught as it is not there yet. 

What i mean is that the higher skill of entrepreneurship must be mastered in the same way: by doing, but with an OS that enables better results 

The Common Core testing is rapidly approaching and this article discusses a research paper that was just released by UCLA's National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards & Student Testing. 

They state that "the assessments hold a lot of promise for improving teacher practice and student learning" and that "the test-making projects face key financial, technical, and political challenges that could affect their success."

They also reference a variety of resources, including one new to me called the Depth of Knowledge Levels (DOK), which provides four levels (the link to the DOK is at http://dese.mo.gov/divimprove/sia/msip/DOK_Chart.pdf):

* Level One is recall

* Level Two is skill/concept

* Level Three is strategic thinking

* Level Four is extended thinking

The link to this DOK reminds me of Bloom's Taxonomy with verbs to help you understand each section as well as activities based on the level. The question that remains to be answered is if the tests being created by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium will reach these levels, and according to this report it appears that will have "the more lengthy, complex performance tasks being crafted by the two groups...seemed likely to assess skills at DOK Level 4."

The post also discusses some of the issues that remain, including cost and time of testing, cost of scoring, dealing with accomocations, and "Managing the "shock to the public and to teachers' instructional practice" that the tests' increased intellectual rigor will demand."

How do you test creativity and innovation using "set" core standards of evaluation? Creativity and innovation require a certain amount of willingness for failure and risk taking. How does training for common core test "standards" assist that higher level goal?