Hey @informed_members @Certified_Educators !
Here’s Q2 from this week’s X-Men themed #formativechat about trying new assessment and learning strategies for 2019! We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Shout-out to Lᴀᴜʀᴀ Sᴛᴇɪɴʙʀɪɴᴋ for leading our discussion on Monday and to @rdene915 for continuing to recruit awesome guest hosts!
PLCs or TBTs are the secret to teacher collaboration. It requires administration support and teacher buy in, but the end result is like the _House_series where the doctors solved challenging issues through collaborative meetings. The core of these meetings involve common goals, common assessments, and planning. It is hard to embrace because people feel that they are losing their individuality and control but instead of one person planning and creating, multiple are working together. The end result–a better product.
I love the “House” analogy, Ray!
What does this look like when it comes to planning based on common assessment data? Where is the line drawn between what a team collectively does and what an individual teacher decides to do? For example, are the objectives of the upcoming lessons the same across the team while the re-teaching approaches different depending on the teacher and students?
I wish I could take credit for the analogy. The analogy is my principals. He has been a tremendous support with our PLCs.
At my district, like many, PLC’s are the “new” thing, except they are not always done the correct way. For my campus, we meet with our team (for me that is one other teacher) formally once a week (In actuality, we meet every day!) to plan lessons based on our unit IFG which shares prior knowledge/standards, expectations, specificity, possible resources, writing and assessment requirements, etc. We determine who will be doing what in regards to typing up or copying materials. We create assessments and go over each question to determine the DOK for questions as well as determining if we actually covered the material we thought we would. After common assessments we look at how students did and determine what, if anything we need to reteach or make sure we c over again prior to state testing ( a HUGE issue in the state of Texas) My colleague and I have really challenged ourselves with technology this year- I’ve gotten her involved in Formative and we work to challenge ourselves to be better and try new approaches.
I am on a 2nd team where we do all the same things, but two of us are aware that one of the teachers will close his door and do exactly what he wants to do.
IN reality, we don’t really do PLC’s like they should be done (as they really shouldn’t be set meetings), but what we do does seem to work most of the time.
Wow! The extent to which you and your colleague collaborate on assessment is really impressive. It sounds like you have a great working relationship that helps you both do what’s best for your students. I am so happy to hear that Formative is a part of that collaboration!
