In Service

Sometimes, one needs a bit of a fire lit beneath them in order to stop procrastinating. It’s been an exciting week of blogging in our home, thanks to the inspiration of my daughter, Laura. And I figured since everyone else has gotten on the ball with this little challenge of hers, I should probably do [...]

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One of the districts that I’ve been working with for less than a year has built a variety of grade-level common formative assessments that they plan to begin using this fall. Getting to this point has been a long, winding road. Uphill. Both ways. In the dark. Through several feet of snow. Without proper footwear. And in the [...]

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Many of the school districts that I am working with this year have identified vocabulary development as an area in need of attention. Instructional practices are lagging behind what current research suggests might work best to help our students build deeper understandings about words.
Digging into this issue quickly leads most teachers to the realization that [...]

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As a coordinator for curriculum and staff development, I have the good fortune of working with many data-savvy administrators and teachers. Eager to uncover what the New York State Assessments truly demanded of students, and more importantly, determined to develop a common, deeply aligned curriculum that would produce results, this very group of educators challenged [...]

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Students and teachers in New York State spend a good portion of their school year sharpening their skills and knowledge in preparation for the English Language Arts Assessements in grades 3-8 and the Regents Examination, offered in grade 11. Ironically, if you were to ask many teachers to predict what was going to be on [...]

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If my building principal had pulled me aside ten years ago and asked me how I used data to inform my instruction, I would have handed her my latest stack of unit tests or essays and explained that at the end of each unit, I tried to get a handle on what my students were still [...]

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Stephen Peters is a former classroom teacher, assistant principal, principal, and director of secondary education. He is the author of Inspired to Learn: Why We Must Give Children Hope and Do You Know Enough About Me to Teach Me? He’s served on panels, hung out with everyone from Oprah Winfrey to the former U.S. Secretary [...]

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