• Discussion of PVAAS and TVAAS
• March 7 - Jay McTighe (Understanding by Design) is speaking at the NEIU ($100)
• Understanding by Design - similar to backwards design (looking at the final result and plan to get there). The fist thing you should do is plan/create the assessment. Frame your expectations.
• get away from ‘covering a curriculum’ to creating a curriculum that gets students activly engaged.
• Effective Teaching Principles (Accd. to Edwin Ellis)
• Students are engaged actively during an instructional task.
• Students experience high moderate success rates which are correlated positively with student learning outcomes.
• Students have increased opportunities to learn content since the opportunity to learn is correlated positively with increased student achievement. Therefore, the more content covered, the greater the potential for student learning.
• Much of student time in the class is being taught or supervised by their teacher.
• Instruction is deliberately and carefully scaffolded.
• The critical forms of knowledge associated with strategic learning (a) declaritive knowledge, (b) procedural knowledge, and (c) conditional knowledge are addressed.
• Teaching is presented in a manner that assists students in organizing, storing and retrieving knowledge.
• Instruction is strategic i.e. I apply rules and techniques that enable students to complete problems and tasks successfully and independantly.
• Instruction is explicit
• Sameness (linking a single concept with many ideas and providing students numerous examples to promote generalization is taught both within and across subjects).
• Differentiated Instruction
• Curriculum Mapping
• Thoughts:
• On average - about one full year of time is consumed simply by transition time between classes throughout a child’s K-12 career. What are some things that can be done to maximize the effective contact time and minimize the wated time in transitions.
• Students in classroom where the teacher puts the objective on the board (or something similar) are proven to do better

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