I want it NOW !
THREE EFFECTIVE TEACHING STRATEGIES IN AN AGE WHERE WE WANT IT ALL . NOW .
Educators can ’ t wait weeks , months or years for effective classroom data . Strengthening the classroom experience begins with how you build lesson plans .
20 Leadership
We live in an age of instant gratification . We can check Facebook to see what our friends are doing . We can go to Twitter for news and the latest headlines . And shopping is made easy by clicking a few buttons and we can have our purchases delivered the next day with free shipping . If we find ourselves reminiscing about an old movie , within minutes we can stream the entire film or simply our favorite clips .
Though our society moves at breakneck speed , education hasn ’ t caught up with the times quite yet . School leaders often find themselves well into one school year by the time data from the previous year is processed and released . Parents and the overall community demand immediate accountability and corrective action if the numbers fall short , which can be challenging and frustrating for administrators and principals desiring data and a means of translating it into usable information to make an immediate instructional difference in the classroom .
Nothing supplants official data and test scores provided directly from official number crunchers or experts at the state level . However , data does not have to be a large and unwieldy monolith . If we begin to think about data in a simpler and more tangible way , we can train teachers to consistently manage information and create meaning from it at the classroom level . Daily , formative data collection can empower teachers to change or deepen their instruction when it matters most . Daily , formative data is essential to successful teaching , but it doesn ’ t have to be fancy to be effective .
I have the privilege of working with educators all over the country . Although most are familiar with the term “ data-driven decision making ,” many have not been equipped with the tools to implement this successfully . Many teachers may wait until grading time or “ test day ” to determine how much a student knows about a particular topic . Unfortunately , waiting for this data means it ’ s too late to address misconceptions and re-teach what might not have
By Carrie Lupoli