Additionally, the governor is proposing legislation that would cap enrollment of low-performing cyber charters until performance improves, impose a moratorium on new cyber charter schools, subject charter management companies to the state’s Right to Know Law, and establish a new funding formula for charters.

“Pennsylvania’s charter school law is the worst in the nation and is failing students, teachers, school districts and taxpayers,” Wolf said in a news release. “There are high-quality charter schools, but some of them, especially some cyber charter schools, are underperforming.

This means that for over a decade and a half, the most vulnerable and struggling districts lost proportionally the most students along with their per-pupil funding.

companies providing the service

Over the three growth periods in this study, the typical charter school student in Pennsylvania hadsimilar academic growth in reading and weaker math growth compared to their TPS counterparts. Inmath, the learning difference is about the equivalent to losing 30 days of learning compared to theirTPS peers. In the first two growth periods of the study, students in Pennsylvania charter schoolsexperience growth similar to their TPS peers in reading, while experiencing weaker growth in math. Bythe third growth period, students in Pennsylvania charter schools exhibit similar growth to their TPScounterparts in both reading and math.

The third set of analysis illustrates the impact of online charter schools in Pennsylvania, also referredto as cyber charter schools.

The 2011 findings also showed wide variation in student andschool performance, with a quarter of charter schools outperforming their local school options inreading and over half outpacing their local TPS in math.

"I'd tell my teacher, 'I don't get this,' and she'd say, 'You have to figure it out for yourself,' and I'd say, 'But I don't get it,'"

"I was told that in the student-centered model, my role as a teacher was primarily to supervise students to make sure they were using Buzz."

The companies needed the EAA's students to do well in order to prove the effectiveness of their products when making sales pitches to other schools and districts;

met students where they were academically rather than forcing them to march lock-step through the traditional, age-based grade system.

"Usually these teams are built around the more experienced teachers. It is problematic when novice or non-teachers are in charge of creating school-based curriculum and course content."

"We're building this plane as we fly it," is a phrase numerous sources we've interviewed have attributed to Mary Esselman, who was in the thick of the technological planning.

"We do have too many failing schools in our state," he said. "If you look at us statewide, only 16 percent of our kids are college-ready. That's absolutely unacceptable.

So, once again, we have proof that, instead of investing the resources necessary to accomplish the goal of turning around our worst-performing schools as quickly as possible, the EAA operated on the cheap, using an untested, unproven, beta stage software platform with the teachers and students the beta testing guinea pigs.

Instead of being a model for implementing a computer-based teaching model, BUZZ crashed regularly, had major content deficiencies, and was so hard to use that its benefits were all but overwhelmed by its flaws.

help you identify your high opportunity students

If you are a Canvas-user, enable the Notes column in your gradebook and record brief notes about what each student has shared with you.

building community is at the heart of learning, whether on-ground, online, or hybrid.

The pedagogies of most online classes, then, are fixed in advance.

Sometimes, clear objectives or outcomes are important at the outset of an assignment or course, but we need to leave room for those outcomes to be more roughly handled.

I so often hear variations of “my students won’t do this assignment if it’s not worth points.” We need to give students reasons less banal than points to do the work of learning.

Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we’ve helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space.

and lackluster (or lack of) pedagogy

We should not try to fix what’s wrong with online learning now; instead, we should pretend it never happened, start from scratch, and begin playfully outside the borders of how we’ve always taught and how we relate to the machines that can help us teach

adoptable

“How can we eliminate a text book?” “How can we make assignments that are meaningful, student-centered, and relevant?” “How can we make this course equally accessible to native English speakers and second language learners?”

we should never let its design decisions — its architecture — dictate our pedagogies.

Online and hybrid course design should be motivated not by cost savings but by the pedagogical benefits of learning that happens and persists beyond the classroom.

The chunks, though, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, semesters, quarters, are arbitrary. The course is not always the best container for learning.

At many institutions there’s a problematic divide between instructional designers and teachers — between those building online courses and those teaching them. Expert teachers need to build their own online courses or we need to create closer collaborative relationships between teachers and instructional designers.

Rigor has to be fostered through genuine engagement.

What we need is to ignore the hype and misrepresentations (on both sides of the debate) and gather together more people willing to carefully reflect on how, where, and why we learn online.

Grading is based on student mastery of a set of standards and assessments that are created at the networklevel.

The tools and resources are then linked to their curriculum map so teachers can understand howto meaningfully integrate digital content or tools into their lessons.

Ifwe can’t do it in all schools, we don’t do it in any schools.

students go through an intake with the teachersto understand why they failed the chapter test and what skills they are deficient in.

Much depends,however, on whetherone considers a teacher-created Google document,slides, or spreadsheetto be online content

Online curriculum, instructional materials, andonline drills that do not include the full scopeand sequence of a for-credit course.

The education programwas created to fill gaps in student learning, to challenge students who have exceptionally high ability levels,to provide high school credit opportunities for students who are eligible to do so but struggle with certaincurricula, and to create opportunities for students who need to have an alternate route to graduation.

it’s really a time for them to interact with me

“no significant differencesbetween online and face-to-face students in pass ratesin subsequent math classesor their likelihood of beingon track for graduationat the end of the secondyear of high school.”

Urban schools were more likely to offercredit recovery than suburban schools,high-poverty more likely than low-poverty, and large schools more likelythan small schools

Some, like the Missouri Virtual Instructional Program andWest Virginia Virtual, mostly or entirely rely on courses and teachers from private vendors, which they thenprovide to schools across their state.

RVA’s online course catalog offers studentsaccess to a variety of courses, many more than what most of the small districts in the consortium wouldotherwise be able to provide.

Most online school studentshave needs that are not wellmet by traditional schools,desire a high level of timeflexibility, and have parents/families who are able tosupport their learningat home.

The categories overlap; for example, online schools use data and assessment extensively. Traditionalschools, however, often use data and assessment in the absence of online courses, which is why weput data and assessment in its own category

The activity theory for organisations relates to how two different organisational contexts that interact with each other develop and eventually share a common language, culture and environment, in order to reach common goals.

students observe scientific processes they normally do not experience at school, and then report on what they have observed; in doing so, they develop skills such as asking questions, scientific reading, organising information and planning a presentation

Studies have also shown that learning is a unified concept; any distinction between formal and informal science learning is artificial

However, students who are not interested in school science often choose to participate in science activities outside school.

In addition, many practitioners in the field of informal science learning recognise the need to create productive collaborations between informal science education organisations and schools

leaving students with little room to develop their own approaches to answering the question

They require a question or problem that serves to organize and drive activities; and these activities result in a series of artifacts, or products, that culminate in a final product that addresses the driving question.

Drawing analogies from everyday learning, researchers argue that knowledge is contextualized; that is, learners construct knowledge by solving complex problems in situations in which they use cognitive tools, multiple sources of information, and other individuals as resources

Schooled people do better, although they rarely use the supposedly general algorithms taught in school. Instead, they invent new methods specific to the situation at hand.

Yet to be tru-ly skillful outside school, people must develop situation-specific forms of competence.

utside school, actions are intimately connected with objects and events; people often use the objects and events directly in their reasoning, without necessarily using symbols to represent them. School learning, by contrast, is mostly symbol-based; indeed, con-nections to the events and objects symbolized are often lost.

school is an institution that values thought that proceeds independently, without aid of physi­cal and cognitive tools.

No individual in the system can pilot the ship alone. The knowledge necessary for successful piloting is distributed throughout the whole system.

his result pattern suggests that while negative emotionsmight lead to burnout, positive experiences on the job may have a protective effect.

These findings pinpoint the importance of imparting teachers with personal skills and with social skills in order to promote well-being and job satisfaction and cope better with burnout and depression. Hence, boosting teachers’ confidence in their capability essential for increasing the overall well-being and probably to improve the performance of the school

emotional exhaustion, a feeling of cynicism, and a sense of personal and professional inefficiency

burnout is a “prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job”

Practice testing and distributed practice received high utility assessments because they benefit learners of different ages and abilities and have been shown to boost students’ performance across many criterion tasks and even in educational contexts

who believed that parents, caregivers, peers, and the culture at large are responsible for developing higher-order functions.

this is different than simply copying someone else's behavior.

it is time to actually perform the behavior you observed.

Retention can be affected by a number of factors, but the ability to pull up information later and act on it

The goal of assimilation is to maintain the status quo. By assimilating information, you are keeping your existing knowledge and schemas intact and simply finding a place to store this new information.

Assimilation and accommodation both work in tandem as part of the learning process.2 Some information is incorporated into our existing schemas through the process of assimilation, while other information leads to the development of new schemas or total transformations of existing ideas through the process of accommodation.

The process is somewhat subjective, because we tend to modify experience or information to fit in with our pre-existing beliefs

Raising children free from these stereotypes and limitations, she believed, would lead to greater freedom and fewer restrictions of free will

When subjected to societal disapproval, people will often feel pressured to alter their behavior or face rejection by those who disapprove of them.

All of these influences add up to how gender schema is formed.

Gender schema theory was introduced by psychologist Sandra Bem in 1981 and asserted that children learn about male and female roles from the culture in which they live.

People are more likely to pay attention to things that fit in with their current schemas.

Event schemas are focused on patterns of behavior that should be followed for certain events.

Punishment does not teach a person how to behave appropriately.

Skinner’s learning theories have been discredited by more current ones that consider higher order and more complex forms of learning.

Skinner found that when and how often behaviors were reinforced played a role in the speed and strength of acquisition.

negatively reinforcing your behavior (not your child's).

Respondent behaviors

Skinner was more interested in how the consequences of people's actions influenced their behavior.

the transmission of information from teacher to learner is essentially the transmission of the response appropriate to a certain stimulus.

Radical behaviorists such as Skinner also made the ontological claim that facts about mental states are reducible to facts about behavioral dispositions.

they focused on objectively observable, quantifiable events and behavior. They argued that since it is not possible to observe objectively or to quantify what occurs in the mind, scientific theories should take into account only observable indicators such as stimulus-response sequences.

Their methodology was primarily introspective, relying heavily on first-person reports of sensations and the constituents of immediate experiences.

This means that it does not allow for any degree of free will in the individual.

It is more likely that behavior is due to an interaction between nature (biology) and nurture (environment).

The stimuli that have become associated with nicotine were neutral stimuli (NS) before “learning” took place but they became conditioned stimuli (CS), with repeated pairings. They can produce the conditioned response (CR).

and these cues can trigger a feeling of craving

the conditioned stimulus acts as a type of signal or cue for the unconditioned stimulus

therefore is a natural response which has not been taught

learning method in which a specific behavior is associated with either a positive or negative consequence.

Instead of feeling anxious and tense in these situations, the child will learn to stay relaxed and calm.

However, if the smell of food were no longer paired with the whistle, eventually the conditioned response (hunger) would disappear.

the whistle sound would eventually trigger the conditioned response.

The conditioned stimulus is a previously neutral stimulus that, after becoming associated with the unconditioned stimulus, eventually comes to trigger a conditioned response.

Behaviorism assumes that all learning occurs through interactions with the environment and that environment shapes behavior.

This learning process creates a conditioned response through associations between an unconditioned stimulus and a neutral stimulus.

Looking at the size of coaching programs, we find that the average effectiveness of the coaching program declines as the number of teachers involved increases, suggesting the difficulty of successfully taking such programs to scale.

For both outcomes, the magnitude of the effect of coaching is comparable to or exceeds the largest published estimates of the difference in performance between a novice teacher and an experienced veteran.

The role of the coach may be performed by a range of personnel, including administrators, master teachers, curriculum designers, external experts, and other classroom teachers.

You can start by having each student create a weekly goal and an action plan to accomplish the goal. Once the goal is set, remind students to look over their action plan throughout the week to see if they are on target to accomplish their goal.

You can do this by incorporating group projects and activities into your curriculum that require collaboration and an understanding of the perspectives of others.

We can start by simply listening to what they are saying. Naturally, most people listen to respond instead of listening to learn, but as teachers, it is vital that we actively listen to what our students are saying to us and each other.

There is no magic pill that we can give our students, but there are intentional actions we can take to incorporate SEL skills into classrooms to help develop the whole child.

When in need of help, students reread directions, checkwith Home-Group members (3-4 students who are inschool or at home on the same days), check the digitalPeer Expert Board, and then put their name on the digitalHelp Board

review teacher notes and the schedule theydesigned for themselves for the week,

Curate an instructional plan forstudents, whether at home orschool, that will addresscognitive, learning style, andcultural differences.

BenchmarkDiscussion

Students continue working ondifferentiated learning activities.(Remote only? Hold discussionswith half of the class at a time.)

socially-distanced in-school students andat-home students can join

students may connect and workwith others at home or in schoolvia videoconferencing.

Students access an Activity List

indicate they arepresent

I recommend a cloud-baseddocument where students can post their thoughts or comments (in-school and at-home students) so thatthe teacher can follow the discussion

Time with the teacher “live” shifts to these Small-Group, Mini-Lessons and live discussions whereteachers can engage students in collectively grappling with content.

Whole-class lessons across video, sometimes called “live streaming,” are not effective -- I won’teven sugar-coat that

Teachers need to avoid reserving in-school days for lessons andteacher talk, thus, robbing students of the socialization skills they are craving

We cannot afford to depend on in-school time for lessons and at-home time only forpractice.

The key to a successful hybrid learning environment is implementing structures and strategiesthat work as well at home as they do in school, such that learning continues whether at home orat school -- no need for a change in methods with a change in setting

…address content, skills, and/or habits …follow a multi-step process …require application and transfer of knowledge and skill …require higher-order thinking …are personalized …are creative and open-ended …are assigned to corresponding common rubrics …result in original products or performances for the student

Measuring these school-wide standards—such as effective communication, problem solving, or habits of work—must include establishing clear criteria (rubrics), designing authentic assessments (performance tasks), and a calibrated system of tracking student performance.

That would enable all students to grapple with the same information. But he suggests then assigning them different tasks depending on their abilities.

“What are teachers trying to do, and how do we help them do those things?”

The content is random—clouds one day, zebras the next—and in any event, it’s considered relatively unimportant.

Technology is primarily used as a delivery system. Maybe it can deliver instruction better than a human being in some circumstances. But if the material it’s delivering is flawed or inadequate, or presented in an illogical order, it won’t provide much benefit.

One personalized-learning skeptic has observed, “If allowed to choose my own content in elementary school, I would have become an expert in princesses and dogs.”

like those in the Rocketship network, where one or two minimally trained supervisors oversee as many as 90 students during “Learning Lab” time.

there’s a greater chance he would have been interested in trying to do it.

“Virtual” charter schools—which offer online classes and generally produce dismal results—often enroll struggling students.

instructional software and online tutorials and games can help narrow the massive test-score gap

According to other studies, college students in the US who used laptops or digital devices in their classes did worse on exams. Eighth graders who took Algebra I online did much worse than those who took the course in person. And fourth graders who used tablets in all or almost all their classes had, on average, reading scores 14 points lower than those who never used them—a differential equivalent to an entire grade level.

Doing this too often, however, steals valuable time away from the teacher that may reduce the quality of instruction for all the other students.

However, every minute writing and grading retakes or grading long-overdue work is a minute that I’m not planning effective and creative instruction, grading current work so students receive timely feedback, or communicating with parents.

Under retake policies, parents at my school have expressed concerns about how overwhelmed their children become due to being caught in a vicious cycle of retakes.

Retakes and soft deadlines allow students to procrastinate

They spend hours a day on video games and social media

In math classes, where concepts constantly build on one another, traditional policies hold students to schedules that keep them learning with the class.

One of his research studies showed that college students who were held to firm deadlines performed better, in general, than students who chose their own deadlines or turned in all work at the end of the semester.

In my experience, however, the more lenient we are in these matters, the less students learn. The traditional policies—giving each assessment only once, penalizing late work, and giving zeros in some situations—help most students maximize their learning and improve their time management skills, preparing them for success in college and career.

Use a simple rubric and select 2-3 specific skills to grade

Feedback on a finished product is not useful to students

If we penalize students who make mistakes while practicing a skill, we create an environment where mistakes are scary

I had over a hundred assignments in my grade book

In contrast, participants in our experiments expected to be separated from their phones (this was the norm in the lab) and were not confronted with unanswerable notifications or calls while separated. We therefore suggest that defined and protected periods of separation, such as these, may allow consumers to perform better not just by reducing interruptions but also by increasing available cognitive capacity.

These results are consistent with the proposition that the effects of smartphone salience on available cognitive capacity stem from the singularly important role these devices play in many consumers’ lives.

We posit that individual differences in dependence on one’s smartphone will moderate the effects of smartphone salience on available cognitive capacity, such that individuals who most depend on their phones will suffer the most from their presence—and benefit the most from their absence.

Consistent with this evidence, we posit that the mere presence of consumers’ own smartphones can reduce the availability of attentional resources (i.e., cognitive capacity) even when consumers are successful at controlling the conscious orientation of attention (i.e., resisting overt distraction).

To our knowledge, only one prior study has investigated the cognitive effects of the mere presence of a mobile device—one that is not ringing, buzzing, or otherwise actively interfering with a focal task. Thornton et al. (2014, 485–86) found that a visually salient cellphone can impair performance on tasks requiring sustained attention by eliciting awareness of the “broad social and informational network … that one is not part of at the moment.”

Similarly, research in the educational sphere demonstrates that using mobile devices and social media while learning new material reduces comprehension and impairs academic performance (e.g., Froese et al. 2012).

Consistent with this position, research indicates that signals from one’s own phone (but not someone else’s) activate the same involuntary attention system that responds to the sound of one’s own name (Roye, Jacobsen, and Schröger 2007).

Automatic attention generally helps individuals make the most of their limited cognitive capacity by directing attention to frequently goal-relevant stimuli without requiring these goals to be constantly kept in mind.

Preferential attention to temporarily relevant stimuli, such as those associated with a current task or decision, is supported by WM; when a goal is active in WM, stimuli relevant to that goal are more likely to attract attention (e.g., Moskowitz 2002; Soto et al. 2005; Vogt et al. 2010).

Individuals are constantly surrounded by potentially meaningful information; however, their ability to use this information is consistently constrained by cognitive systems that are capable of attending to and processing only a small amount of the information available at any given time (e.g., Craik and Lockhart 1972; Newell and Simon 1972)

Schools and teachers aiming to adopt new practices must contend with the "geological dig" of previous policies that send contradictory signals and prevent a complete transformation of practice.(

Organizational structures must be redesigned so that they actively foster learning and collaboration about serious problems of practice.

Habits and cultures inside schools must foster critical inquiry into teaching practices and student outcomes.

Policies that support teachers' learning communities allow such structures and extra-school arrangements to come and go and change and evolve as necessary, rather than insist on permanent plans or promises.

Structures that break down isolation, that empower teachers with professional tasks, and that provide arenas for thinking through standards of practice are central to this kind of professional growth.

To serve teachers' needs, professional development must embrace a range of opportunities that allow teachers to share what they know and what they want to learn and to connect their learning to the contexts of their teaching.

PDSs create settings in which novices enter professional practice by working with expert practitioners while veteran teachers renew their own professional development as they assume roles as mentors, university adjuncts, and teacher leaders.

Effective professional development involves teachers both as learners and as teachers and allows them to struggle with the uncertainties that accompany each role

"teacher training"

The success of this agenda ultimately turns on teachers' success in accomplishing the serious and difficult tasks of learning the skills and perspectives assumed by new visions of practice and unlearning the practices and beliefs about students and instruction that have dominated their professional lives to date

What types of knowledge acquisition does the CPD support, i.e. procedural or propositional? •Is the principal focus on individual or collective development? •To what extent is the CPD used as a form of accountability? •What capacity does the CPD allow for supporting professional autonomy? •Is the fundamental purpose of the CPD to provide a means of transmission or to facilitate transformative practice?

it recognises the range of different conditions required for transformative practice.

negotiating a joint enterprise gives rise to relations of mutual accountability among those involved’ (p. 81), therefore arguably promoting greater capacity for transformative practice than a managerial form of accountability would allow.

When the professional activity is collective, the amount of knowledge available in a clinical unit cannot be measured by the sum total of the knowledge possessed by its individual members. A more appropriate measure would be the knowledge generated by the richness of the connections between individuals.

there are no requirements for that person to have particular strengths in terms of interpersonal communication or to be trained in the role of supporter.

The mentoring or coaching relationship can be collegiate, for example, ‘peer coaching’, but is probably more likely to be hierarchical

Arguably, standards also provide a common language, making it easier for teachers to engage in dialogue about their professional practice.

one of the drawbacks of this model is that what is passed on in the cascading process is generally skills-focused, sometimes knowledge-focused, but rarely focuses on values

The cascade model involves individual teachers attending ‘training events’ and then cascading or disseminating the information to colleagues

performance management requires that somebody takes charge of evaluating and managing change in teacher performance, and this includes, where necessary, attempting to remedy perceived weaknesses in individual teacher performanc

What the training model fails to impact upon in any significant way is the manner in which this new knowledge is used in practice.

This model of CPD supports a skills-based, technocratic view of teaching whereby CPD provides teachers with the opportunity to update their skills in order to be able to demonstrate their competence.

These nine categories are then organised along a spectrum that identifies the relative potential capacity for transformative practice and professional autonomy inherent in each, the premise of this being that such conditions require teachers to be able to articulate their own conceptions of teaching and be able to select and justify appropriate modes of practice.

To avoid overload, future development efforts may want to consider the timing of projects and levels of teacher assistance needed to provide adequate support in the classroom prior to beginning projects.

While action research provided teachers with a tool for examining their own practice, the power of action research teaming stemmed from its ability to foster collaboration and professional development through collaborative research.

Preservice teachers’ uncertainties may be due to their developing understanding of what teaching and professional development entails.

Another inservice teacher reported that action research teaming provided a mechanism for professional growth through peer collaboration, “Research teaming creates a feeling of community and professionalism because teachers learn from one another and listen to each other as experts”

Other veteran teachers noted that action research teaming increased their awareness of student learning.

However, when asked if they would be willing to participate in action research teaming in the future, preservice teacher candidates were more positive (x̄=6.4)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=6.4)</mtext></math> than their veteran counterparts (x̄=5.8)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=5.8)</mtext></math>.

inservice teachers strongly believed action research teaming to be an effective vehicle to improve their teaching practice (x̄=6.0<math><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=6.0</mtext></math>, see Table 1); teacher candidates were less positive (x̄=4.7)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=4.7)</mtext></math> about collaborative action research as a vehicle to change their teaching. Inservice teachers were also more positive (x̄=5.5)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=5.5)</mtext></math> about the potential for collaborative action research for examining views about research than their preservice counterparts (x̄=4.2)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=4.2)</mtext></math>. Both groups viewed the collaboration process as an effective vehicle for dialoguing with their team counterparts, but again developmental differences appeared. Experienced teachers thought collaboration provided an effective vehicle to talk with their teacher candidates about both teaching (x̄=6.2)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=6.2)</mtext></math> and research (x̄=5.3)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=5.3)</mtext></math>. Teacher candidates, while generally positive about the dialogic possibilities of teaming, were markedly less positive about its potential to provide a forum for discussion about teaching (x̄=4.7)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=4.7)</mtext></math> and research (x̄=4.0)<math><mtext>(</mtext><mtext>x</mtext><mtext>̄</mtext><mtext>=4.0)</mtext></math>.

One way to overcome this isolation is to encourage collaboration with informed peers through established frameworks within school communities.

Traditionally, views of beginning as well as inservice teacher practice are typically organized to disseminate a knowledge base constructed almost exclusively by outside experts.

Specifically, professional development must include opportunities for active interpretive processes that examine the complex contexts of classrooms and schools

When collaboration does take place, it is too often limited to an exchange of daily anecdotes, or discussions of “tricks of the trade” to improve practice

but unless deliberate attempts to share findings are established, the products of teacher research often remain within individual classrooms

As teachers gained familiarity and agency, they moved from perceiving ‘research’ as a domain that existed outside the classroom, to doing research and seeing where it fits with classroom practice.

In our research program overall, we have observed the success of teacher teams who follow a cyclical structure of co-planning/ co-teaching/ implementation/ debriefing with enactments (practice) in between team meetings, and so we expected to see this pattern repeat itself (and it did).

This discussion informed the development of a problem statement (a brief statement encapsulating the problem under focus in the classroom) and corresponding research question.

The most important factor was that at least some visual evidence of classroom practice and student work was shared in team meetings, which allowed team members to literally see what was happening in one another’s classrooms.

they realized that they would be supported rather than judged and that team members would help to find answers

Teachers saw each other as mutually supportive.

Students are entitled to a more educative and user-friendly assessment system. They deserve far more feedback -- and opportunities to use it -- as part of the local assessment process.

Our job is to teach to the standards, not the test.