A little bit of stuff!

Often teachers ask questions about the walk through feedback or just questions on general topics in our building.  So here is a little on a few of the topics that have come up recently.

Anchor Charts: Many teachers have drastically improved the creation and usage of anchor charts in their classrooms. But are those anchor charts still relevant to what you are doing today, or are you just leaving them up because they are pretty? Now that you all are comfortable with creating them, push yourselves to find ways to have your students create them or co-create them with you.

Increasing the "I do": Model your thoughts. Model your way of doing something. Activate prior knowledge.  The more you model, the more successful our students can be.  Check out my blog from November 23, 2015 on this topic.

SAMR and the ONE Conference: Now that the ONE conference is done, what are you doing to level up?  Start with "leveling up" one lesson, in one class, and expand from there.  If you currently "live in" Substitution, start moving more of your lessons into Augmentation.  Remember you can't always live in "Redefinition", visit there when you are ready.

All of us fill out an "I commit" tag.  What did you commit to doing? Are you actively working to committing to what you wrote?  What can you do to accomplish the commitment you made?

Conferring vs Touching Base: Conferring and "touching base" with students are very similar things.  The main difference is the purpose of the conversations happening.  When conferring, you have a specific content focus.  There tends to be more teacher:student collaboration when conferring and the
student drives much of the conversation.  The picture to the right shows the roles of the student and the teacher when conferring. When you "touch base", it may be just a quick check in, "how are you doing?", "Your grade is this and this is what you need to do to improve it".

Check out this article for more on conferring!