Effective Teaching/ Effective Learning with Debra Pickering (Amber Snell)

The big ideas from this conference were ways to engage students, provide rigor, set specific learning targets, and give effective feedback. Wow, that’s a lot! She advised teachers to use humor and games to engage students and practice skills at the same time. We also had a great conversation about professionalism and collegiality versus congeniality. In order to move forward as a staff you really need to give each other realistic feedback, collegiality not congeniality. This led us from RSU#1 to talk about the coaching cycle and pose the question about having everyone be part of the cycle so we can observe each other and give feedback on a regular cycle to improve our teaching.

We also had a great discussion of learning targets versus tasks. The task is how you learn the target, but the target is the skill you want students to master.

No instructional strategy works well in all situations. Therefore, once you have your instructional goals, you need to constantly check and re-check them.

Feedback should be SPECIFIC and in DOLLOPS.

Feedback is most powerful when it is from the student to the teacher to decide what to do next. Students and teachers can keep track via formative graphs. Also, NO parent projects! What is the learning goal for the project? What skill/learning target is being assessed?

Here is the link to the slideshow from the conference, too https://docs.google.com/a/rsu1.org/file/d/0B9IUKlIgqFMAY1lyQ2tKTlg3NG8/edit .