Can you tell the school year has started? We're both struggling to put stuff up here. The bolg is the first to go.
So I'm going to micro-blog a bit here -- keeping things short and to a quick point as a way of keeping this going.
Paul Facteau, a really talented Apple technology expert and staff development guy, was working with the staff of West Side Collaborative this week. What he was doing was trying to get the staff to decide on and design what the skills are that teachers should track to determine if a student is making progress in a class. His goal was to help them develop a data tracking system for that skills acquisition. It's heady stuff. But my first (and lasting) impression was that this stuff has already been done. That the Common Core has done that already, in some pretty useful and articulate ways. For instance, one of the CC 9th grade reading standards is "Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text." In other words, a student can use the evidence in a text to say what it's about (both on the surface and what the deeper meanings might be).
Why is it so hard to get teachers to pay attention to skill acquisition? Why do teachers resist tracking their students' growth? You look at a student's work and you determine if the student can use evidence to support an interpretation of a text. Why is this so hard?
Am I just being a simplistic moron? Or isn't this just knowing your kids and teaching them what they can't do, yet?
Get back to me on this, willya? I'd really like to get this solved and put behind me.
Peace,
Al
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