Stop Using the Least Likely Example
I’m at a Solution Tree Professional Learning Communities event this week. It’s fine, if a bit too salesy. As for the content, it’s pretty basic stuff. Speaker after speaker has stressed the importance of working as a team so that student achievement isn’t dependent on the teacher lottery because everyone is working together to ensure the success of every child. Ideally, according to the presenters, teachers collaborate to decide on essential standards, share best practices, assess students to evaluate their teaching, and then decide how to respond when kids don’t learn and when they do. Importantly, teachers take collective responsibility for student learning. A big part of this is comparing assessment data to improve teaching. Unfortunately, the presenters regularly made this sound simple. It’s not.
One of the examples used in a session was one we’ve all heard before:
“So if we as a grade level give a common assessment and my two colleagues’ classes have 95 percent proficiency and I have 50 perfect, what should we do about that?”
And of course the answer is obvious.
Except I guess it isn’t, because this example keeps getting used. The implication behind the question is something like the following.
We have teachers working in isolation and they need to collaborate more and if they worked together to design common assessments, then got back together to look at the results of those common assessments, then took the next step of sharing best practices or having students who failed receive reteaching from the higher CONTINUE READING: Stop Using the Least Likely Example - Teacher Habits
