Be prepared to enrich students who already know your planned curriculum. What's Next? provides the tools you need to preassess students and practical strategies to further their learning. Concrete examples from different content areas and grade levels illustrate the ideas in action. Written for singletons and teacher teams alike, this comprehensive resource allows you to test and choose the strategies that work best for your classroom.
This book will show you how to:
- Recognize the purpose of question 4 within the PLC at Work® process: What do I do when they already know it?
- Rethink instruction to empower students to further their learning.
- Implement a variety of strategies for students to show what they know.
- Use a different strategy each month and choose what works best.
- Fully implement question 4 by combining the strategies that best suit your classroom.
Contents: Introduction
Chapter 1: Showing What I Know With Inventories and Curriculum Compacting
Chapter 2: Showing What I Know With Multiple-Choice Quizzes and Choice Boards
Chapter 3: Showing What I Know With KWL Charts and Alternative Assignments
Chapter 4: Showing What I Know With Student Questions and the Question Formulation Technique
Chapter 5: Showing What I Know With Drawing and Badges
Chapter 6: Showing What I Know With Skimming and Gaming
Chapter 7: Showing What I Know With Projects and the Hook
Chapter 8: Showing What I Know With Unit Tests and Problem-Solving Teams
Chapter 9: Pulling It All Together
References and Resources
Index
Mark Weichel, EdD, is assistant superintendent for teaching and learning at Westside Community Schools in Omaha, Nebraska. While he has served in this role, the district has received local and national attention for its commitment to collaboration, innovation, technology integration, and personalized learning. Mark and his team developed collaborative systems that have been written about in various journals, and they host visiting districts and attend state and national conferences. Previously, Mark was director of secondary curriculum, high school building administrator, and junior high school social studies teacher at Papillion La Vista Community Schools in Nebraska. He and staff implemented Professional Learning Communities at Work®; strategies and failure rates plummeted while standardized testing measures such as ACT, PLAN, and state writing assessments confirmed high levels of student learning. Mark and his leadership team at Papillion La Vista South High School presented at conferences nationwide, and their work was featured on AllThingsPLC.info and in 'Principal Leadership' magazine. They received the 2008 Ethel Percy Andrus Legacy Award for Innovation from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). Mark also taught in the graduate schools for Peru State College and the University of Nebraska Omaha. Mark earned a doctorate in educational administration from the University of Nebraska Omaha. To learn more about Mark's work, follow @westsideweichel on Twitter.
Steve Pearce is assistant superintendent of human resources for Batavia Public Schools in Illinois. He is former principal of Jane Addams Junior High and Margaret Mead Junior High schools, both in Schaumburg School District 54 in Illinois. During his tenure at Addams and Mead, Steve led his staffs in building professional learning communities with tremendous results. Steve and the staffs of Addams and Mead have assisted other educators in launching their PLC journeys by hosting interested school staffs for site visits. In addition, Steve has delivered presentations on the PLC at Work process to schools across the nation. In his first year at Addams in 2008-2009, Steve guided the staff to the highest levels of student achievement in the school's forty-year history. For years, Addams was the lowest-achieving school of the five junior highs in the district. In just one year of full PLC implementation, Addams became the highest-achieving junior high in reading and was second to Mead in mathematics. Addams also achieved the 90/90 board goal for two consecutive years, where 90 percent of the students achieved meets or exceeds status on the state assessment in both reading and mathematics. In 2010, Addams was recognized as a top-100 high-performing schools in Illinois for the first time in school history. In just three years at Mead, student achievement reached the highest levels in the school's twenty-eight-year history. In 2007, Mead was recognized in the top-fifty high-performing middle schools in the Chicago suburbs for the first time. Mead received the Academic Improvement Award from the Illinois School Board of Education for standardized test score gains. At the conclusion of Mead's second year of PLC implementation, Richard DuFour conducted an audit of the school's progress. After evaluating Mead, Dr. DuFour stated, "Mead could serve as a national model of what middle schools should be." For all these remarkable achievements, Addams and Mead are both featured on AllThingsPLC.info as evidence of effectiveness of the PLC at Work process.
