In their new book, Embedding Formative Assessment, Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy make a simple, interesting, and really useful suggestion. Instead of using a rubric to communicate expectations for a given piece of student writing, Wiliam and Leahy suggest using work samples, instead–ideally two or more. “Rubrics,” they note, “rarely have the same meaning for students…
Had a great day Monday talking Check for Understanding with school leaders at RELAY GSE’s National Principal’s Academy. We were talking about observing carefully during student independent work, and particularly the topics of Standardize the Format and Tracking Not Watching–techniques 3 and 4 in TLaC 2.0. If you combine these with Everybody Writes (technique 37) and…
While watching video of teachers this morning, I had a realization about 100% that I’m eager to share. Ultimately, it’s going to cause me to rewrite that section of TLaC 2.0, and because of that I am going to use the opportunity to describe a few other edits to 100% that I think are important as…
At TLaC Towers, high above the teeming streets of our tiny little upstate hamlet, summer vacation means time to kick back, relax, and, well, analyze video of great teachers. In that sense it’s just like the rest of the year except there are flip-slops and people get sassy with the ironic nicknames… well, Jen Kim, one of…
My team and I have been on a vocabulary binge, watching lesson after lesson to pick up best practices and commonalities among teachers. We see brilliant things but even so, we can’t use all of the video. One single factor makes more vocabulary lessons unusable as exemplars than any other. Want to guess what it is?…