collaboration
Flexible Learning Time Provides System Approach to Differentiation in a Competency Education School
Brian Stack, principal of Sanborn Regional High School in New Hampshire shares how developing a flexible learning time each day provides intervention and enrichment for students and how this time has been a key to providing students with the differentiation and personalization needed success in their competency-based system.
LearnZillion: Dreaming Big About Collaborative PD
Historically, most PD has been the low engagement top-down model. PLCs have benefits of teacher-owned collaboration. The LearnZillion approach “combines the rigor and consistency of the top-down approach with the benefits of teacher collaboration,” said Westendorf.
New Assessments for New Skills
Without measurement the teaching of collaboration is extremely difficult. The current challenge is how to develop Collaborative Assessment tasks, particularly formative assessments that align with local curriculum, contexts and needs.
Deeper Learning in High Need Schools
Many of the schools we studied this summer serve high challenge low income communities. They share six characteristics that appear to support the success of low-income students.
Distributed Workforce: Better Conditions, Costs, & Outcomes
Organizations that effectively manage a remote workforce are clear about their goals, focus on outcomes more than activities, provide extensive training, make a variety of collaboration tools available, and, finally, they plan the work and work the plan.
Out of My Element: Forming Bonds Between Science and Language Arts
I’ve always considered myself a willing and even eager collaborator with teachers of almost any discipline. As someone who tends to see the big picture, intentionally or not, I notice connections among disciplines so often it almost feels second nature to me. Yet in my practice, I have mostly integrated subject areas within my own classes and under my own control.
5 Ways to Use Google Docs in the Classroom
Google Docs is a user friendly suite of online collaborative tools that come with tremendous potential for use in the classroom. Last year all of the students in our school received Google Docs accounts and I was kept quite busy getting students and teachers up and running with the new tools, then discovering innovative ways to use them as effective tools for learning. Here are some of the favorites.
Defining (and Driving) Collaboration
By: Jordan Lippman. In today's world, both employers and educational institutions place a high value on soft skills that are transferable across professional, academic, and social situations. One of the most frequently cited skills is collaboration.
How to Work Together to Build Capacities for Collaboration
Having challenged, in my previous post for Getting Smart, some of the common notions we educators share about collaboration, I acknowledge that it is only fair that I take some time to wrestle with what collaboration really means and why it is so important as we prepare our students for the future.
Collaboration, Really?
When I think of instances of true collaboration, Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir comes to mind: a blending of individual voices, each making his or her best effort to interpret the phrasing to contribute to the breathtakingly beautiful whole, all with the common goal of rendering a beautiful piece of music together. This extraordinary accomplishment suggests to me a metaphor for what we need to be doing as educators.