Nine Strategies
I found a wonderful resource to help the teachers. In a previous post, I mentioned that my principal and her assistants were working on putting together a professional development program where teachers would work in study groups. This resource is an internet hotlist for the "Marzano 9", the nine instructional strategies from his book What Works in Classroom Instruction.
It is apparent that a school district in Arizona had some teachers pull together a list of web resources for each of the nine strategies. The hotlist is about a year old and I didn't check to see if all of the links were live, but from what I can tell, it is still viable.
This is how I would use this resource in a professional development context. Our administration does 5-minute walk throughs where they punch in a bunch of quick observations based on the high yield strategies into a palm pilot and then download it into a report. This will help them track what happens in the school, and perhaps with individual teachers. Based on the walkthroughs, weaknesses might show up. It's hard to tell this for an individual teacher because the walkthroughs are done at random and it is possible that the administrator may never see something during the visit that the teacher does on a frequent basis.
If for example, the administration sees very little non-linguistic representation, it could be a "skill of the week". The teachers could read that chapter from Marzano's book, take a look at the web resources to get further ideas, and then after focusing on that strategy discuss the strategy reflectively with her colleagues and supervisor. I think teachers need to be responsible for their own learning. They really resent being told what to study or learn. This resource may help teachers look at their instructional practices a little differently. In addition, these web resources were written by other teachers, which makes them all the more effective and valuable.
It is apparent that a school district in Arizona had some teachers pull together a list of web resources for each of the nine strategies. The hotlist is about a year old and I didn't check to see if all of the links were live, but from what I can tell, it is still viable.
This is how I would use this resource in a professional development context. Our administration does 5-minute walk throughs where they punch in a bunch of quick observations based on the high yield strategies into a palm pilot and then download it into a report. This will help them track what happens in the school, and perhaps with individual teachers. Based on the walkthroughs, weaknesses might show up. It's hard to tell this for an individual teacher because the walkthroughs are done at random and it is possible that the administrator may never see something during the visit that the teacher does on a frequent basis.
If for example, the administration sees very little non-linguistic representation, it could be a "skill of the week". The teachers could read that chapter from Marzano's book, take a look at the web resources to get further ideas, and then after focusing on that strategy discuss the strategy reflectively with her colleagues and supervisor. I think teachers need to be responsible for their own learning. They really resent being told what to study or learn. This resource may help teachers look at their instructional practices a little differently. In addition, these web resources were written by other teachers, which makes them all the more effective and valuable.
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