Expeditionary Learning Site Seminar at King Middle School

On May 9th and 10th I attended a KING MIDDLE SCHOOL SITE SEMINAR along with 60 educators from Maine and as far away as Colorado,

We started the day with KIng Middle School students leading us in STUDENT LED INIATIVES (CREW/ADVISOR ACTIVITIES), tours of King Middle by 8th graders and attending King’s Celebration of Learning at the EXPO.
Next, we could choose breakout sessions on Faculty Grading Guide, Social Studies and Math Power Standards, Student Led Conferences, Habits of Work and Learning, or Extended Learning at King. I chose “Faculty Grading Guide” In my session King presented the work they have done around identifying power standards and developing a faculty grading guide for standards based learning (if you are interested in a hard copy let me know). King goes to full standards based grading and reporting for the 2013-2014 school year. DAY 2 of my site visit started with two hours of observing classes of my choice working on expeditions: critiquing podcasts and writing pieces, gathering data on air quality around Portland, building windmills, creating lunch for the site visit participants, graphing types of crabs found at Biddeford Pool (evasive species) and predicting what they will find during their field work next week (2 previous years of data) and everyday teaching and learning. I spent the rest of my day doing Crew Activities with the health and PE teacher and look forward to adding those to BMS’s crew activities AND participating in a STudent-engaged assessment at KIng and in EL schools workshop.
Check out the videos of best practices at vimeo.com/channels/corepractices on Decriptive feedback, using data with students learning targets and much more!