Quality Instruction: How Teachers Make a Difference

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Quality Instruction How Teachers Make a
Difference

• Rural Schools Renewal Conference
• 20/10/06
• Faye Brownlie

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Unfulfilled Expectations - Catherine Snow, 1991
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Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
- National Research Council, 1998

• Quality reading instruction in the primary grades
  is the single best defense against reading
  failure, overcoming even the effect of childhood
  backgrounds that increase the risk of reading
  difficulties.

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Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children
- National Research Council, 1998

• Effective instruction requires that teachers
• focus on
• The relationships between letters and sounds
• The process of obtaining meaning from print
• Practice for fluency

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Teacher Quality and Student Achievement Linda
Darling- Hammond, 1999

• the quality of a teaching force is a much more
  powerful predictor of student achievement levels
  than other factors, including student demographic
  characteristics and measures of school resources.
  Teacher quality accounted for 40-60 of the
  variance in the NAEP achievement for 4th and 8th
  grade reading and math.

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Allington, 2001

• The most powerful feature of schools, in terms of
  developing children as readers and writers, is
  the quality of classroom instruction.

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Principles of Learning

• Learning is an active process
• Learning is an individual and social process
• Children learn in different ways and at different
  rates

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Student Achievement Task Force - 2003

• Classroom Management
• Engagement
• Inquiry questions
• Social responsibility

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Reading Dont Fix No Chevys Going with the
Flow - Smith Wilhelm

• The study why boys were passionate about their
  interests and how this related to their literate
  activity inside and outside of school
• The goal to make literacy learning in school
  resemble the passionate engagements sought
  outside of school

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Csikszentmihayli (1990)

• Flow -
• intense engagement

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Csikszentmihayli, Smith Wilhelm

• Control competence
• Challenge with an appropriate level of skill
• Clear goals feedback
• A focus on the immediate experience
• Social

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• 3 Minutes

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Teaching Content to All
Open-ended teaching
adapted
modified
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The Gradual Release Model

• Model
• Guided practice
• Independent practice
• Independent application
• Pearson (1992)

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Readers Digest 09/06

• Its a bit like a marriage. For the most part,
  parents and teachers have the best interests of
  the child at heart. And they know its better if
  they keep talking to each other. Still,
  sometimes what should be said is left unsaid -
  both the positive and the negative.

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4 Minutes

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• So this story is about opening up those lines of
  communication. First, with the help of Leger
  Marketing, we polled 630 Canadian parents. In a
  web survey, we presented them with 14 statements
  and asked them if they had ever wanted to say any
  of these things to teachers.

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4 Minutes

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• The biggest surprise for everybody - for Readers
  Digest, for parents and for teachers - was that a
  whopping 90 percent of parents said teachers were
  doing a very good or good job. This is an
  extraordinary level of satisfaction.

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4 Minutes

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• Perhaps even more extraordinary is the fact that
  nobody is talking about it.

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2 Minutes

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Schema for Instructional Support

• Connecting (pre)
• Processing (during)
• Transforming and personalizing (post)
• Brownlie, Close, Wingren (1988)

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Questioning

• Present a picture
• Ask students to pose questions about the picture
• Present a second picture
• Notice how questions change as students link the
  pictures
• Student Diversity, 2nd ed. - Brownlie, Feniak,
  Schnellert

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3 Minutes

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3 Minutes

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3 Minutes

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Student Achievement Task Force - 2003

• Student Learning Strategies
• Independence
• Plan, monitor, revise
• Metacognition

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Student Achievement Task Force - 2003

• Background Knowledge
• Activate
• Build
• Motivate

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• 1992
• 1996
• 2006

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• USA
• India
• North Korea

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3 Minutes

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• The strategy was once to try to detonate in
  secret. But no more.
• North Korea all but yelled look at me in
  announcing that it plans
• a generation of commercial satellitescan see
  objects 2-3 feet wide

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3 Minutes

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Student Achievement Task Force - 2003

• Student/Teacher Positive Interactions
• Relationships
• Safe environment
• Risk-taking

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Student Achievement Task Force - 2003

• Expectations and Challenge
• Teaching with the end in mind
• Building criteria with students
• Scaffolding for all learners

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Student Achievement Task Force - 2003

• Feedback
• Shift in assessment purposes
• Classroom observation

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Black Wiliam, 1998

• Review of 250 articles
• Improving formative assessment raises standards
• Few initiatives in education have had such a
  strong body of evidence to support a claim to
  raise standards.

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Assessment OF Learning

• Purpose reporting out, summative assessment
• Examples standardized tests such as Gates
  McGinitie, CAT, CTBS end of the unit tests most
  scantron tests Spring DART, Final RAD

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Assessment FOR Learning

• Purpose guide instruction
• Performance-based assessment
• Fall DART (Brownlie)
• Initial RAD (Pearson)
• Smart Reading (Close, New West.)
• QCA (Pearson)
• SRA (Student Diversity, 2nd ed., Ministry
  Webcast, 2004)

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Assessment FOR Learning

• Descriptive scoring
• Coding in teams
• Class/grade profile of strengths and areas of
  need
• Action plans developed - whats next?
• Individual students identified for further
  assessment

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Assessment AS Learning

• Purpose students taking responsibility for
  their own learning
• Setting goals
• Monitoring their progress toward
  their goals

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Assessment AS Learning Grand Conversations -
Brownlie

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Structures to support teaching

• Teacher teams
• School plans
• On-going professional development
• A formative assessment process
• A summative assessment process
• District alignment of goals and supports

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Cedar Community Secondary - Science 8 Lara Tait
Stacy Aitken, 2006

• 
  

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Mission Action Research Paula Chmilar, 2005-06

• DART
• focused teaching
• SRA
• focused teaching
• SRA
• focused teaching

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Mission - Chmilar

• Lesson study
• Co-plan lesson
• Teach and observe
• Review and refine lesson
• Another teaches observe and refine
• Teach lesson in own classes

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Campbell River District Initiative 2005-06

• Response to spring grade 3 DART
• 5 schools identified - lower performing students
• 8 week intervention
• 5 extra .5 teachers, 4days/week
• CT worked with leveled texts, targeted students
• Extra teacher taught reciprocal questioning

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Nisgaa - Mary Takasaka 2005-06

• Conduct oral interviews with spring and fall
  assessment
• Meets 11 to mark with most of primary/intermediat
  e teachers
• Compares oral/written responses
• Build class and district focus together
• Graphic organizers visual thinking

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15-30

• Without -
• professional development
• ongoing formative assessment of students, and
• ongoing summative assessment of students and
  programs
• Reading Next - Biancarosa Snow, 2004