Search results for ""Author Elizabeth A. City""

What’s the scarcest resource in schools? Almost any educator will answer, “Time.” The lack of time for colleagues to work together is one of the biggest barriers to improving teaching and learning. All too often, educators also say that the biggest waste of time ismeetings. People in schools attend dozens, if not hundreds, of meetings a year. How can that time be used wisely?This book, by two editors of Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning,attempts to bring about a fundamental shift in how educators think about the meetings they attend. The authors make the case that these gatherings are potentially the most important venue where adult and organizational learning can take place in schools, and that making more effective use of this time is an important key to increasing student achievement.In Meeting Wise, the authors show why planning meetings is a high-leverage strategy for changing how people work together in the service of school improvement. To this end, they have created a meeting-planning “checklist” to develop a common language for discussing and improving the quality of meetings. In addition, they provide guidelines for readers on “wise facilitating” and “wise participating,” and also include “top tips” and “common dilemmas.”Simple, succinct, and practical, Meeting Wise is designed to be read and applied at every level of the educational enterprise, from district leadership meetings and professional developmentsessions to teacher-team meetings and even teachers’ meetings with parents and students.

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Walk into any school in America and you will see adults who care deeply about their students and are doing the best they can every day to help students learn. But you will also see a high degree of variability among classrooms—much higher than in most other industrialized countries. Today we are asking schools to do something they have never done before—educate all students to high levels—yet we don’t know how to do that in every classroom for every child. This book is intended to help education leaders and practitioners develop a shared understanding of what high-quality instruction looks like and what schools and districts need to do to support it. Inspired by the medical-rounds model used by physicians, the authors have pioneered a new form of professional learning known as instructional rounds networks. Through this process, educators develop a shared practice of observing, discussing, and analyzing learning and teaching.

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