Teaching, arguably, comes down to replacing the answer to the question ‘did you teach it?’ with the answer to the question ‘did they learn it?’ This is known as Check for Understanding (CFU). Doing CFU successfully involves gathering ‘real time’ data, as you teach, and this applies to teaching in pretty much every venue in which…
Love this clip we shot last week of Maggie Johnson’s 8th grade English class at Troy Prep, and for a tiny little reason. The clip opens with Maggie’s class coming out of three minutes or so of independent work to start class- a Do Now with questions asking students to…
My colleague Joaquin Hernandez sent me a note yesterday afternoon. He’d read the two blog posts I did on keeping discussions on topic–I called that getting discussion a bit more “inside the box”–and he wanted me to see something. As a coincidence he’d just cut a montage of Uncommon’s Ryan Miller for discussion at one of…
I’m looking for some tales of Implementation as I write TLAC 2.0. The topic is what I call “slates.” It’s a small (but mighty) part of Checking for Understanding where students show you objective data on their work in unison in order for you to be able to more simply and quickly assess it. More on…
Over on the TLac Facebook page we posted an amazing video of North Star Academy’s Ashley Hinton using non-verbals to correct minor off-task behaviors while still teaching. The clip met with instant response. Meanwhile in a fascinating view behind the curtain of Uncommon‘s culture of constant improvement, I thought I’d share the following exchange between Joaquin…