VCLA

What is our purpose?

Questions:

Do you believe that students need opportunities to take risks, struggle, make mistakes and work in self-directed ways with peers and with technology in order to acquire 21st skills?

Are your students engaged and interested in the “work” of school?

What would it look like in your classrooms if this was happening?

Is it happening? Why or why not? What competing commitments make it hard to transform teaching?

How are we doing?

How are we doing? (National and VT achievement gaps on NAEP 8th grade math)

Gap in 07 Gap in 130

5

10

15

20

25

30

National Vermont

The VT gap is WIDENING.

NECAP Reading Scores from 2007 to 2012 – the Interaction of Poverty and Gender

Poverty and Gender: To improve equity in outcomes,

we need to look at the interaction of poverty and

gender (and race)

All = All Assessed StudentsMNFRL = Male Not Free/Reduced Lunch FNFRL = Female Not Free/Reduced LunchMFRL = Male Free/Reduced LunchFFRL = Female Free/Reduced Lunch

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 201230

35

40

45

50

55

60

NECAP Grade 7 Reading Results by Gender and Family Income

ALL

MNFRL

FNFRL

MFRL

FFRL

Accountability: “Sanction the weak schools”….If we identify and sanction the low performers, we can get to 100% proficiency.

Autonomy: Being effective is a function of the school…if your kids score poorly, you must be a bad school.

“Logic” of NCLB

Elizabeth Green:

“Autonomy lets teachers succeed or fail on their own terms with little guidance. Accountability tells them only whether they have succeeded, not what to do to improve. Instead of helping, both prescriptions preserve a long-standing culture of abandonment.”

Is our enacted practice (what we do with children) aligned with our theory of action (our beliefs about what and how children should learn)?

Is our enacted practice (what we do with children) aligned with our theory of action (our beliefs about what and how children should learn)?

If not, why not?

Is our enacted practice (what we do with children) aligned with our theory of action (our beliefs about what and how children should learn)?

If not, why not?

How do you know? What is your evidence?

Martha’s Carpeting Task Martha was recarpeting her bedroom, which was 15 feet long and 10 feet wide. How many square feet of carpeting will she need to purchase?

(Examples taken with permission from Stein, M.K., Smith, M.S., Henningsen, M., & Silver, E.A. (2000). Implementing standards-based mathematics instruction: A casebook for professional development. New York: Teachers College Press.)

The Fencing Task Ms. Brown’s class will raise rabbits for their spring science fair. They have 24 feet of fencing with which to build a rectangular rabbit pen to keep the rabbits.• If Ms. Brown’s students want their rabbits to have

as much room as possible, how long would each of the sides of the pen be?

• How long would each of the sides of the pen be if they had only 16 feet of fencing?

• How would you go about determining the pen with the most room for any amount of fencing? Organize your work so that someone else who reads it will understand it.

The Montillation of Traxoline

It is very important that you learn about traxoline. Traxoline is a new form of zionter. It is montilled in Ceristanna. The Ceristannians gristerlate large amounts of fevon and then brachter it to quasel traxoline. Traxoline may well be one of our most lukized snezlaus in the future because of our zionter lescelidge.

Directions: Answer the following questions in complete sentences. Be sure to use your best handwriting. 1. What is traxoline? 2. Where is traxoline montilled? 3. How is traxoline quaselled? 4. Why is it important to know about traxoline?

(Rounds)

What is our purpose?What keeps us from achieving it?What do we do next?

Now that we are all in detention, what next?

The Golden Plunger Award