Friday, April 17, 2009

Conducting school study on our instructional groupings

Well, since I haven't posted many reflective blogs, I'll post a quick one to share what I'm planning for next week. I've been reading What Really Matters in Response to Intervention: Research-Based Designs by Richard Allington to prepare to lead staff in a book study over the summer (this is voluntary for staff, but I have 14 that are interested!)

According to Allington (and my own personal experience as a teacher), "the proportion of the school day allotted to whole-class instruction is a predictor of a school's academic achievement. The more whole-class teaching offered, the lower the academic achievement in that school." Allington provides a data-gathering tool to examine the distribution of whole-class, small group, and side-by-side lessons (teacher is working with an individual student) in general education classrooms. I've made my own google doc form to share http://docs.google.com/View?docID=df3fnv6m_1ffhv82ct&revision=_latest&hgd=1 I will use this form to get into EVERY classroom TWICE each day to tally the method of lesson delivery. At the end of the week, I will then use the 5th collumn to determine the percentage of observed lessons during the week (based on 10 observations) that were using whole-class instruction as the method of delivery.

As part of my professional reading in Allington's book, I also plan to send this document http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df3fnv6m_3fgfh5zd2 out to all staff in my weekly email. We won't be starting our book study for a while now, and there are many teachers that could benefit from reading this list to reflect upon their current practices.

1 comment:

  1. PrincipalJ,

    I'd love to hear how the data gathering is going. Have you really been able to get into every room twice each day for a week? How long are you staying? Any preliminary results?

    I am also an elem. principal. I struggle in my second year just getting into rooms at all some days.

    Anyway, I'd love to hear how it is going.

    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete

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