Engaged

Free Teleseminar: Improving School Climate Through a Whole Child Approach

January 31st, 2012

Join ASCD Managing Director of the Whole Child Initiative Molly McCloskey in conversation with ASCD author and Rutgers University professor Maurice J. Elias. McCloskey will share information about specific initiatives and examples of how a whole child approach ensures that each child, in each community, is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

Monday, February 27, 2012, 12:00 p.m. eastern time
Call in to 1-800-868-1123 and use code 70187505

The teleseminar is part of a series of monthly meetings of the Improving School Climate for Academic and Life Success project at Rutgers, designed to support social-emotional character development (SECD) and antibullying initiatives in schools. The format allows you to call in and listen (only), though you can e-mail questions during the teleseminar to mjeru@aol.com. On the other hand, it’s very convenient and you can listen in the car, in the office, at home, or while shopping. We will also post the audio of the teleseminar here on the Whole Child Blog within a few days of completion.

In the Rutgers University Center for Applied Psychology, Elias serves as director of Social-Emotional Learning Lab and is the academic director of the Civic Engagement and Service Education Partnerships program. He is also the coordinator of the Expert Advisory Group to the New Jersey Coalition for Bullying Awareness and Prevention and writes an Edutopia blog on SECD for the George Lucas Educational Foundation.

Our Country Deserves a Great Education System

January 25th, 2012

In this TEDx presentation, Brian M. Stecher, associate director and senior social scientist at RAND Education, suggests three steps we need to take to cultivate schools where students can thrive.

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A Call to Action!

January 19th, 2012

Sign for Whole Child

The We the People initiative is the Obama administration’s effort to provide citizens with a new way to petition the administration to take action on a range of important issues facing the United States. If a petition garners 25,000 signatures within 30 days, White House staff reviews it, sends it to the appropriate policy experts, and issues an official response.

Today ASCD is taking advantage of this initiative and petitioning the administration to make whole child education a national priority. We petition the Obama administration to establish a President’s Council on the Whole Child to help students be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged, and we urge you to add your voice in support of this holistic and child-centered push for education at the executive office level.

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Teaching and Assessing Meaningfully in a Standards-Based World

January 11th, 2012

Great Performances

Post submitted by Larry Lewin and Betty Shoemaker, authors of Great Performances: Creating Classroom-Based Assessment Tasks, 2nd ed., where they tackle the sparkles and blemishes of performance assessments. With expertise in performance-based assessment, differentiated instruction, literacy, integrated thematic curriculum, and teaching comprehension with student-based questioning, they are influencing decision makers about both the importance and quality of great classroom-based assessments instead of high stakes standardized tests. Connect with Lewin by e-mail at larry@larrylewin.com and Shoemaker at dr.betty.shoemaker@comcast.net.

“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”

—John Dewey, Democracy And Education (1916)

We have some great news! The second edition of our book, Great Performances: Creating Classroom-Based Assessment Tasks, has just been published. We would like to say that it is single-handedly bringing adequate yearly progress (AYP) to its knees. Well … we can hope that it at least has influenced, and will continue to influence, decision makers about the importance of and quality of great classroom-based assessments as compared to high-stakes standardized tests.

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Our Top 10 Blog Posts in 2011

December 30th, 2011

In the past year, experts and practitioners in the field, whole child partners, and ASCD staff have shared their stories, ideas, and resources to help you ensure that each child, in each community, is healthy, engaged, supported, and challenged and is college-, career-, and citizenship-ready. These are the top 10 posts you read in 2011.

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Bridging Disparities in U.S. Student Learning

December 23rd, 2011

Nine years after NCLB, although there have been improvements in test scores of U.S. minority students, serious gaps persist between the achievement of white students and their black and Latino counterparts.

In Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap, authors A. Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera, nationally recognized experts in the fields of education, psychology, and equity, critically examine what’s wrong with popular approaches to closing achievement gaps in U.S. schools and discuss more potent approaches. Drawing from decades of research, they detail strategies any teacher can take to promote strong student engagement, inner orientations to learning, and in-school assets for at-risk minority kids.

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Lesson Planning for Engagement

December 22nd, 2011

Post written by Fiona S. Baker, a teacher educator with an interest in responsive classroom professional development. She has more than 25 years of experience as a classroom teacher, workshop presenter, school consultant, and faculty member at universities and colleges, and she currently teaches at the Emirates College for Advanced Education in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Connect with Baker by e-mail at fbaker@ecae.ac.ae. This post was originally featured in ASCD Express.

Why is it that after all the teacher’s diligent lesson planning, classroom learners are often disengaged and have little desire to apply effort? There may be myriad reasons for this, but lesson-planning principles and strategies can help draw in learners.

All learners implicitly ask four fundamental questions:

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Creating Rigorous and Relevant Assessments with Authentic Intellectual Work

December 20th, 2011

Andrew Miller

Post submitted by Andrew Miller, an international consultant who works independently and for groups such as the Buck Institute for Education and Abeo School Change (formally known as the Small Schools Project). He has taught both online and in the brick-and-mortar setting, incorporating his core tenets of culturally responsive teaching, project-based learning, and game-based learning. Connect with Miller on Twitter @betamiller.

When we ask students to do, perform, and produce, we must ensure that these tasks or assessments demand rigor and relevance. But let’s be honest, sometimes these words are thrown around as buzz words in education or are difficult to truly internalize as teachers when we are design assessments. What does it look like to ask students to do rigorous work? What does an assessment that has relevance look like? I can make my own assumptions, but how do I know if my assumptions are truly asking for depth of rigor and relevance?

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Student Learning Communities

December 14th, 2011

Celina Brennan

Post written by Celina Brennan, a 3/4/5 multiage teacher at Salnave Elementary School in the Cheney (Wash.) Public Schools district and recipient of Washington State ASCD’s 2011 Outstanding Young Educator Award. She is a district leader in literacy and has opened her classroom to educators as a model of differentiated instruction that meets the social, emotional, and academic needs of all learners. Connect with Brennan on the ASCD EDge® social network and on her blog, written with her teaching partner Ann Ottmar.

Professional learning communities (PLCs) are the topic of many conversations within education: the culture that is imperative for success, the goals we choose to focus on, the protocols we should follow, the structure that must be in place, and the realities that we face. There is an abundance of research I have read to support how PLCs are necessary in improving students’ learning. I myself belong to an amazing PLC (as well as many micro PLCs within my PLC). But my thoughts lately have been on how to take the characteristics of successful PLCs and apply them within the walls of the classroom for students.

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From Differentiated Instruction to Differentiated Assessment

December 13th, 2011

Post written by Douglas B. Reeves, founder of the Leadership and Learning Center in Salem, Mass., and author of ASCD books on educational leadership. Connect with Reeves by e-mail at DReeves@LeadAndLearn.com. This post was originally featured in ASCD Express.

For all the ink that has been spilled regarding the issue of differentiated instruction, little has been said about differentiated assessment. There is no doubt that students come to school with a variety of backgrounds and learning needs, and Carol Ann Tomlinson (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006) and others (e.g., Stefanakis & Meier, 2010; Fogarty & Pete, 2010) have documented the importance of the issue and the potential success of the results.

The devil, as always, is in the details, and as Schmoker (2010) recently noted, some teachers find the demands of creating different lessons for the learning needs of each student overwhelming. Here are some practical ideas for busy teachers who want to meet the different needs of students while managing the demands on their already busy schedules.

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