This summer, John (Our Vice President) called one of our clients to schedule some workshops for the year. We’d worked with this particular school district for several years and were familiar with some of their needs, but as is always a part of our process, we asked them to share with us what their current [...]
An Alternative to Traditional Walk-Throughs I was visiting a school recently and taking the instructional leaders on classroom walkthroughs as a part of the leadership training we were doing in the district. The purpose of the walkthrough was to help the leaders learn how to distinguish rigorous instruction and provide teachers with effective feedback that [...]
I welcomed Laura into my office and offered her a seat at the small conference table across from my desk. I sat down next to her and opened my observation notes. Smiling, I thanked her for coming in and handed her a written summary of the main points I wanted to discuss. One-by-one, I reviewed [...]
I welcomed Laura into my office and offered her a seat at the small conference table across from my desk. I sat down next to her and opened my observation notes. Smiling, I thanked her for coming in and handed her a written summary of the main points I wanted to discuss. One-by-one, I reviewed [...]
Because our professional development at Mindsteps™ is fully customizable, how schools implement our work looks different from school to school. While the concepts and principles are the same, how each gets implemented is highly individual to each teacher. Here is how one school has used our workshops and materials on rigorous instruction* to create a school-wide focus [...]
Every year, we spend time at Mindsteps™ conducting student focus groups with the schools we serve on an ongoing basis. We conduct these focus groups to find out if the work we are doing with teachers and administrators is really making a difference where it counts – with the students. Every year, I am surprised [...]
Marta is an AP Calculus teacher who attended one of my Rigor Workshops over the summer. She wanted to learn strategies for increasing the level of rigor of her course and how to deal with students who struggled with the rigor of AP level work. Throughout the morning, Marta seemed to enjoy learning how to build [...]
We recently worked with school district to conduct vertical team training. Initially, they wanted me to help the middle and high school teachers in the core subject areas to do a better job of aligning their instruction. We started the day with an activity we call “Five in/ Five out,” where we ask teachers to [...]
Recently, I conducted a workshop for instructional coaches who wanted to learn more about how to promote and support rigorous instruction in their schools. I had about 150 k-12 instructional coaches at the training and we started the day by looking at some classroom video footage. I asked the coaches to watch each five-minute slice [...]
I’d seen this before. Teachers who are working so hard that they eventually get burned out. They want so badly to do the right thing that they end up doing everything.
