Excellent Collaboration

With collective teacher efficacy scoring at the top of the Hattie's scale of effect sizes at 1.57 [Hattie, The Applicability of Visible Learning to Higher Education, 2015] and areas like teacher estimates of achievement, response to intervention, strategies to integrate prior knowledge and classroom discussion also ranking near the top; the way we conduct our collaborations with other educators becomes extremely important in addressing these areas. What makes collaboration time effective and efficient? Let's take a look at some strategies that we can use for collaboration that will help us to make better use of our time together. All collaboration…

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Doing This Together

As I was researching the Hattie's effect size for teacher clarity (.75 by the way) for another article that I was writing, I couldn't help but notice the top of the chart. There at the top of the bar graph that was being used to display the effect sizes in a comparative format was the longest bar with the effect size number of 1.57 [J. Hattie, visiblelearningplus.com, December 2017]! It just jumped out there as one of only seven effect sizes that exceeded 1.0 but easily outdistanced its closest competitor, self-reported grades, which stood at only 1.33. With an effect…

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Just Another Fad?

In today's world of education, we talk a lot about things like collaboration, collective teacher efficacy, student self-assessment, feedback and much more as a part of effective educational practice, but when you have been in education for many years, as I have, many "effective educational practices" have proven not to be as effective as we once thought. How do we know that what we are doing today is not just another "fad" that will go away only to be replaced by the next one? How can we be confident that the things we are doing today will last and that…

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