Seattle Schools Community Forum: Edu Speak - Friday Memo to the Board of October 2

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Edu Speak - Friday Memo to the Board of October 2:

Edu Speak - Friday Memo to the Board of October 2

We hear a lot about Edu-Speak, the obscure jargon of education administration professionals that appears designed to create the illusion of science and action where there is neither. As a classic example, I present the Teaching and Learning Update from the October 2, 2015 Friday Memo to the Board. It's about the implementation of MTSS and I challenge you all to find meaning in it. To me, it seems to say that the folks in the JSCEE have wistfully unreasonable expectations for the magic of MTSS but they have no effective means of implementing it. Instead, they can only fantasize about the miracles it would bring if only... if only. It's like someone daydreaming about winning the lottery when they didn't even buy a ticket.


Targeted Universalism, Formative Practice and MTSS:

A primary focus of our work in the Department of Curriculum, Assessment and Instruction is formative practice and its potential to close opportunity gaps for all of our struggling students, regardless of class, race or other factors.

Our goal is to strengthen teacher collaboration around student data to transform teaching practice for the benefit of every student. As we state in our Theory of Action: If schools have high functioning teams of teachers collaborating to analyze common formative assessments, then teachers will make instructional shifts that result in opportunity gaps closing.

Three key concepts:

1. Formative practice benefits EVERY student. This work exemplifies the concept of “targeted universalism” – the practice of following targeted strategies to reach universal goals. Formative practice targets struggling students but ultimately benefits all students, universally. Our strategies target struggling students, but when we can Seattle Schools Community Forum: Edu Speak - Friday Memo to the Board of October 2: