“Teachers at Mount Desert Elementary School in Northeast Harbor, Maine, use proven Responsive Classroom techniques — such as relationship-building morning meetings and engaging student-led activities — to get students focused and ready to learn.”
Are your student’s engaged and armed to learn? Is your classroom a “responsive” one, watch this Video and decide.
If you have a child in preschool or entering preschool it’s important that you know that all preschool programs are not created the same. Many programs are nothing more than supervised play, with no organized curriculum or very little organized curriculum that is loosely aligned to developmentally appropriate activities. It is important that your child’s school has a developed curriculum that aligns to the preschool learning foundations.
The creation of these foundational standards was a critical step in the California Department of Education’s efforts to strengthen preschool education and school readiness and to close the achievement gap in California. They describe competencies—knowledge and skills—that most children can be expected to exhibit in a high-quality program as they complete their first or second year of preschool. In other words, the foundations describe what all young children typically learn with appropriate support.
In the second year of the project (2010-2011), participating teachers took assessments to measure their ability to choose appropriate strategies and to recognize and diagnose common student errors.
Classroom pedagogy (instructional practices) is one of the most important yet least understood factors in student achievement. This study sought to demystify effective teaching practices and provide insights into teacher evaluation and professional development. Dr. Robert Marzano has identified nine teaching strategies that have the highest impact on student learning:
1. Identifying similarities and differences 
2. Summarizing and note taking
3. Reinforcing effort and providing recognition
4. Homework and practice
5. Nonlinguistic representations
6. Cooperative learning
7. Setting objectives and providing feedback
8. Generating and testing hypotheses
9. Cues, questions, and advance organizers:
All students in participating teachers’ classrooms completed surveys about their experience in the classroom and their teachers’ ability to engage them in the course material. Recent education research has begun to explore whether students’ perceptions of the teaching they experience help in predicting how much those students learn.
The quality of the teacher has more impact on student learning than any other factor, including class size, school size, or even the social and economic status of the school. Educational stakeholders and leaders all across the United States are debating how to identify and measure effective teaching. The MET Project was launched in the fall of 2009, this two year project was designed with the goal of developing and testing multiple measures of teacher effectiveness. Two of the five areas this project identified and measured were Student Achievement and Classroom Observations. The findings of the study will be shared during the winter and spring of this current school year, 2001-2012.
