Teachers who instruct in schools that are improving continuously use a quality-driven instructional model. This means teachers clearly show, demonstrate, or model for students what is to be learned. Then, they provide opportunities for students to use what was learned and provide constructive feedback and monitoring as students learn. Moreover, they help all students and strive themselves to become self-contained learners -- to be their own teachers, able to ask themselves good, new questions and guide their efforts in answering them.
Once per month a LearningFront™ coach or a school-based instructional leader supports the work of teachers in grade level team meetings to plan and develop standards-based instruction and assessment tasks. TaskBuilderOnline™ is available for each teacher to use in developing standards-based tasks. Teachers can use TaskBuilderOnline™ independently, in grade level teams, or at home on a personal computer connected to the Internet.
After each monthly session the teachers deliver the standards-based instruction and assessment tasks to their students and discuss the results during the next month’s coaching session. The standards-based tasks and results are used to demonstrate teaching and student learning in grade level portfolios and to plan for additional standards-based tasks for the following month.
Standards-based instruction tasks are developed to address both basic skills and rigorous content and process standards. The results of the tasks are summarized, examples of student work are collected, and the tasks, scoring tools, and assessments are stored in a three-ring notebook for other teachers to access. Samples of these standards-based instruction and assessment tasks are posted on school instructional web sites: TaskBuilderOnline™ Network of Learning Communities
This quality-driven improvement process is known as the “TaskBuilder Figure 8 Strategy.” Click here to see how the TaskBuilder Figure 8 Strategy has increased student performance in a school on statewide high stakes assessments. |
