Week+2+Summary

During our team discussion this week we discussed what we feel are the most important strategies and what we would do if we were to observe teachers and find they are not incorporating the strategies we feel are the most important. The strategies we each found to be our most important are:

• Project-based learning

• Technology integration (twice)

• Developmentally appropriate practices

• Inquiry-based learning

• Problem-based learning

• On-line presence

• Differentiation

Even though we had very few duplicate strategies our thoughts were really were quite similar. Each one of us included some reference to technology in our top two strategies. We also had a recurrence of the concept of students working together on authentic projects such as those found in project-based and problem-based learning as well as inquiry-based learning. The types of evidence we would look for as we do our observations also had some common threads. Evidence of pre-planning, student work beyond the classroom, student choices for creativity, and student engagement were critical to all of our views.

We had quite a bit of discussion on the team discussion as well as during our Google+ Hangout session about what we would do if we did not observe the strategies we feel are so important when we do observations of teachers. First we really felt that to do any observation justice we need to have pre-observation conferences with teachers so we can decide together, with the teacher, what the focus of the analysis would be. If we decide ahead of time what strategies we are going to be most concerned with then there should be no surprises. We do realize that sometimes there is not enough time for conferences prior to all observations so it will be important to encourage teachers through positive reinforcement of what they are doing well and then try to get them to do a mental shift into some of the possibilities of what the other strategies might be when doing a post-observation conference.