Posts

Teacher Evaluation

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My husband, Brad (a high school teacher) has worked at various international schools and currently works for a US public school in Sicily (Department of Defense Education Activity School), which I will call School A. I interviewed Brad about how teachers are evaluated at school A and the international school he worked at in Hong Kong (School B). At School A the principal shows up at random to do observations and there is no pre or post observation meetings. The principal doesn’t take notes and doesn’t give any feedback. At the end of the year she rates all the teachers as “satisfactory” .  She will arbitrarily state that some teachers aren’t “doing what they are supposed to be doing” but what they are “supposed to be doing” has never been outlined. My husband heard from another teacher that as long as you write your standards on the board that is all the principal is looking for. Teacher observation at School B was much like the video “The Formal Observation” outlined in the Teach
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High Stakes Testing

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“Educators tend to be against high stakes testing…Students may worry much about passing their exams”  (Edridge, p. 2, 5), rings true in my ears. As I prepare for my PRAXIS, a step towards my teaching license,  my life has become totally absorbed with high stakes testing. The expense, the worry, the time consuming nature of studying for multiple choice general knowledge tests, has given me a empathy for students around the world who are being subjected to high stakes testing. Academic research has shown that high stakes testing is not the best measure of student achievement  or ability(Edridge, 2001). However, these types of assessments prevail as they are easy to administer and gather tidy scores that quickly assess if a student is a success of failure. At its core high stakes testing aims to help keep teachers, students and school districts accountable and improve achievement (Huang, Han and Schnapp, 2012).  In this blog post I will be comparing two schools; Department of Defens
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Celebrating the world

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As an ESL teacher it is easy for my lessons to reflect the diversity of my class and world. My lessons reflect standards that focus on reading, writing, speaking and listening which are easily adapted to include multicultural activities. It is important that my class celebrates diversity and creates a safe space for students to talk about their cultures as well as the cultures of the host culture we are in. At various times I have taught students from different countries (Russian, Israeli, Latvian, German) in a school culture (American) that differs from the host country culture (Estonia). On any given class period we would discuss American traditions as well as Estonian and Russian. It is important for students to experience learning from multiple perspectives and multiple cultures. A lesson about describing connections can be taught about comparing and contrasting key characters from a texts. This lesson teaches about multiple perspectives (highlighting two different perspectiv
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Differentiated Strategies

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This blog post includes differentiation strategies to meet the needs of my students to make sure they are able to access the content that is taught. My kindergarten classroom is focusing on an English Language Arts Standard where the objectives address: asking and answering questions about key details, main idea and supporting details and connections between characters, ideas and events. As explained by McCarthy, 2014) learning is making a cohesive unit out of the what the teacher is responsible for and what the students bring to the classroom. As the teacher I am responsible for: content, process and product, while the students bring readiness (current skill level), interests (choices and background) and learning process (brain/multiple intelligences). Image (McCarthy, 2014)  I will ensure that my classroom teaching includes differentiation in content, process, product and learning environments for learning disabled students and students of various readiness levels. 
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Think like an assessor

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Assessments will help me guide student’s learning. In this post I will explore two kinds of assessments. Formative assessments: informal checks to ensure students understand what is being covered in this unit. Performance Based assessments: summative in nature and demonstrate the learning that has occured at the end of the unit.  Performance based assessments ensure that students don’t just know the information passively but actively use the information in a meaningful way (The School Redesign Network at Stanford University, 2008). Standard in Reading Informational Texts: Key Ideas and Details Within the concept Reading for Informational Texts (targeted at Kindergarten age students) I explored the standard relating to “ key ideas and details ”. I wrote three objectives using SMART guidelines and then explored an assessment that will measure that objective. SMART Objectives are: specific , measurable , attainable , relevant/results oriented and time bound . I will hi
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