On Wednesday during collaboration, many of us got our first glimpse of the Network for Educator Effectiveness (NEE) that our district will be implementing this year for teacher evaluations. There are few things if any that will get a group of educators fired up more than a meeting about teacher evaluations. Just like many of you, I have been curious to see how this new system will work and be implemented. After watching the videos and listening to the conversations that we had about the standards, it seemed to me that the common themes shared by the teachers that were scoring high was their ability to engage their students with the types of questions that stimulated discussion and their frequency of checking for understanding. While these two strategies are not the only two standards teachers will be judged on, your effectiveness as a teacher will increase dramatically if you can improve in these two areas. Ineffective questions involve recall or a simple yes or no to answer. On the other hand, effective questions are open-ended and involve higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, interpretation, prediction, and evaluation. Checking for understanding can and should be completed using various techniques. A couple of techniques used effectively in the last video were using whiteboards and cards. As the school year continues, experiment and explore with different questioning styles and checking for understanding techniques to elevate your level of instruction.
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AuthorI'm Ben Rubey, Instructional Coach at Excelsior Springs Middle School. Archives
April 2015
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