For students to feel empowered in their learning, they must understand the language, purpose, and goals of assessment. Dueck argues that students need to understand what they are supposed to be learning and determine whether they actually learned it. Clear objectives and cooperative assessments can help with these objectives.

Three essential elements--curriculum, sound instruction, and authentic literacy--are the primary, fundamental drivers of schooling and its improvement, says ASCD author Mike Schmoker. And yet they are rarely implemented. If our schools are to enter Marzano's "era of unprecedented effectiveness," then we must change the way we train…

What if all students had an opportunity to work through content at their own pace? What if all students had to master content before they moved on? The authors take their flipped-classroom model to the next level by flipping their classroom for mastery. In the flipped-mastery model, the teacher begins by organizing content around specific…

Although there has been much debate about how "learning loss" is conceptualized and the degree to which the pandemic has affected it (Dickler, 2021; Jacobson, 2021; Strauss, 2021), one thing is certain: the pandemic has likely exacerbated the instructional gaps that students already had, especially in the case of those who attend…

Education has a long-standing practice of turning worthwhile learning goals into lists of bits. One might even say that this practice is the original sin in curriculum design: take a complex whole, divide it into small pieces, string those together in a rigid sequence of instruction and testing, and call completion of this sequence…

In this article, Alfie Kohn discusses four questions about questioning--starting with questions that are more basic, and progressing to some that are "deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling." He begins by considering what questions we should ask students, and encourages teachers to keep questions with…

In his book "Drive," Daniel Pink writes that mastery is "the desire to get better and better at something that matters." If we consider this definition in the context of the classroom, students must have a desire to get better and must feel that what they're learning matters. Technology can help ensure these two criteria…

Why does professional learning for educators have such a mixed history? Why is it so hard to find solid research evidence of professional development programs that actually improve student learning outcomes? Part of the answer, writes Thomas R. Guskey, is that professional learning experiences for educators are rarely well planned. Consequently,…

When the teaching of strategies for understanding literature crowds out a close reading of literary works themselves, something is amiss in language arts instruction, and students lose out. This has become the case in too many elementary and even secondary classrooms today, Senechal believes. Using a strategy-based lesson proposed by Stephanie…

I am suggesting here that working from within involves a set of teaching strategies that may help us bridge the gap between our rhetoric about more humane schools and classroom realities." (Author)

Throughout nearly 300 years of policymaking in the United States, educators have promoted eight broad goals of schooling: basic academic skills, critical thinking and problem solving, social skills and work ethic, citizenship, physical health, emotional health, the arts and literature, and preparation for skilled employment. A recent survey about…

Each of the five principal goals of education--cultural literacy, understanding, synthesis, mastery, and involvement--is best achieved using teaching strategies that develop thinking skills appropriate to the curriculum objectives associated with the goal in question. The specific strategy selected depends on learner readiness and content…

Some of the great urban teachers believe that it is their job to make sure that all students succeed. The different strategies used by teachers to help students in achieving their goals are discussed.

Describes Sparta (Illinois) Board of Education's efforts to improve their district's educational delivery system by adopting an outcome-based approach involving specific instructional strategies, a uniform discipline program, and outcomes developed for each grade level. (MLH)