Love it! Definitely was a bit of a Tetris game making it all work, but it was so helpful in so many ways for me. I hope the same holds true for you.
08.03.2026 00:39
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Love it! Definitely was a bit of a Tetris game making it all work, but it was so helpful in so many ways for me. I hope the same holds true for you.
Are you a teacher who thinks a lot about your room layout? We’ve got diagrams!
@mrrablin.bsky.social shows you how he moves easily between whole class, small group, and individual work. 🪑
#ClassroomDesign #EduSky
We are way too quick to ascribe students with a "lack of motivation." It takes much less vulnerability to say "I don't wanna" than it does to say "I don't actually understand this" or "I don't know how to do this" or "I am just trying to make it through the day."
Thuan Nguyen opens his keynote by humbly telling us he’s an introvert who’s very nervous, and then softly captivates an entire room where you could hear a pin drop the entire time.
Reminder: power and influence is not synonymous with loud and outgoing.
#NCCE26
A picture of Jason and Mike in front of a room standing next to a projector screen.
Not only is the 30 in 50 from @neif.bsky.social and Mike one of the most mind-blowing sessions at #NCCE26 every year, but I also typically laugh more than the rest of the sessions combined. Such a great and entertaining team!
One of my favorite moments of every session I do is the moment where teachers get to meet each other (no ice breakers, just conversations).
Watching people interact who care so much about kids and the future is always so encouraging.
A photo of Katie Fielding presenting from a lectern with a screen on the left of the photo showing a penguin with captions underneath it.
A little bonus tool that @katiefielding.com mentioned in her presentation today is called ZipCaption that allows for free live captions (that are super accurate) no matter what’s on your screen.
ZipCaption.app
Looking forward to seeing you around the conference!
Admittedly quite a dense read, but an important one nonetheless.
It looks at the value of sequencing knowledge acquisition (and the subsequent assessment and instruction) into a learning progression.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
"By diagnosing students’ mastery of specific cognitive attributes, we revealed the heterogeneity of cognitive profiles behind identical total scores, confirming the limitations of traditional summative assessments and underscoring the advantages of fine-grained, attribute-level evaluation."
Source⬇️
A screenshot of a figure from a study. There are boxes with ones and zeroes and red lines connecting them in a somewhat random patter.
A picture of a man smoking a cigarette and standing in front of a wall with lots of papers tacked up and red lines drawn between them.
Spending some of my day digging into the research around learning progressions.
The screenshot below is one of the figures included in the study for my reference.
I genuinely feel like there's the same energy in both of these photos.
So much professional learning feels like a shotgun approach that changes year-to-year with no real purpose behind it.
Make the purpose tangible, achievable, and student-focused, and that can be the game-changer for your professional learning.
3/3
personalized learning pathways, etc.)?
3) What type of professional learning do teachers need to support this type of work in the classroom?
This provides purpose, clarity, consistency, and buy-in (only when teachers are involved in this process) for professional learning.
2/
Professional development is only meaningful if you plan backwards.
1) What lifelong skills do we want our graduates to possess (collaboration, independent learning skills, etc.)?
2) What needs to happen in our classrooms in order for students to develop those skills (group work...
1/
Using a 50% minimum policy in a school without any additional grading reform to examine the ineffectiveness, inaccuracy, and inequity of averaging points over time to calculate a grade is the equivalent of using a bandaid to treat cancer.
You can't quick fix a systemic issue for long.
Been a minute since I wrote a lengthy thread, but this was weighing on my mind.
Overall, we can no longer assume that the creation of something represents and understanding of the underlying concepts. That is an inference that was never really safe to make anyways.
Instead, look for direct evidence of understanding with additional explanations from the student.
I often have a half-sheet ready to roll like the example below. This helps me listen for specific elements of learning while capturing notes for validity purposes.
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
This is useful for group discussion scenarios (socratic seminar or philosophical chairs, for example). As I listen, I mark where students demonstrate a level of understanding (typically adding the date, too).
This gives me additional evidence of learning.
For individual oral assessments ⬇️
Oral assessment, especially now, is wildly underutilized. Having students talk about their learning not only helps their learning, but it also adds a layer of accountability to accurately represent their learning.
Here's example of something I use with my class...
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
All of these are examples of learning memos in which the student completes an additional step where they explain how they demonstrated their learning in their task.
The next reply shares oral assessment resources.
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
It is no longer (and maybe never was) effective to expect a task to be an accurate representation of student learning.
With generative AI able to create most tasks, it requires a decoupling in which students explain their learning separately from the task itself.
Resources in the comment below ⬇️
I love that. It’s exactly as it should be. It’s like we forgot that the whole point of assessment is to uncover what a student really knows, and we have so much evidence to do that.
Yeah, they were all covered in collars and tags. There were about 10 up there, and they all had quite a bit of jewelry.
A great horned owl closeup. The owl is looking over its shoulder at the camera.
A group of bighorn sheep in tall grasses. They have medium-sized horns.
A great blue heron in flight. There are tall yellow grasses behind it.
An eagle soars against the clouds. The photo is black and white with a gradient from light up top to black at the bottom.
A little timeline cleanse.
Spent a couple nights out in the Yakima River Canyon this week looking for the wildlife that sticks around for the winter (if you can call it that this year).
Here are a couple favorites.
Here's a collection of some of the more unique classroom management techniques I've gathered over the years.
www.edutopia.org/article/clas...
We need to be looking for a better way, not looking to minimize the harm of the current way.
This is why I hate the conversation about grading formatives.
It misses the mark. It thinks small. It is a limiting discussion in a world of possibilities.
12/12
We don't need to weight formatives less.
We need to be asking why we are using points and averages over time to determine a grade.
We need to recognize that the most commonly-used grading system in US schools is full of holes, doesn't support learning, and disadvantages specific groups.
11/
This is why I fault the "don't grade formative work" statement.
It's not because that statement is inherently bad or that minimizing the scoring impact of early formative assessments is a bad thing, but rather that it halts the work of grading reform that needs to happen.
10/
Instead, what if all four of those assignments were scored, and at the end of the unit a true evaluation happens where the teacher (possibly with the student) looks at the evidence of learning, prioritizes recent and consistent evidence and then uses that to determine the grade.
9/