The raffle has ended and the winners are listed below!
Congratulations to…
3rd Grade Winner: Carolyn Schwerin
4th Grade Winner: Teresa Trumble
5th Grade Winner: Stephanie Stephenson
6th Grade Winner: Jewell Samuelson
7th Grade Winner: Stephanie Nelson
8th Grade Winner: Ashley Meyer
FYI – If you used a school email to enter, please check that your email did not send your winnings to spam! Look for a message from melanie.licausi@gmail.com. If you don’t get it, message me!
If you would also like links to the 3rd-8th grade Common Core Math Quizzes with all standards, please sign up on the right menu bar under “Follow by Email.”
The winners have received their bundles by email attachment. Thank you to everyone who participated! If you didn’t win this time, be sure to follow my blog or store pages for sales and raffle updates. I do give away a lot of free materials, especially at conferences.
The AATM (Arizona Association of Teachers of Mathematics) Conference last Saturday was another great opportunity for me to learn from my peers. About 30 people in grades 1-8 attended my session on “Increasing Student Engagement with Learning Goals and Scales.” Interestingly enough, very few of them were required to use them in their classrooms. Although Marzano scales are becoming increasingly popular in school districts, some people just recognize that they are a good idea for getting kids to SEE and accept some responsibility for their own progress. We talked about the motivational factor for students, the pre-planning required by teachers, the ease of differentiation once you had the planning done, and the specific resources I used to write scales and present pictorial examples of each level so students can understand what’s expected. We talked about using these examples to form assessments so students can track their growth. These topics can be found in many of my previous blog posts such as the ones listed below, or my YouTube tutorial which briefly covers what I did in my classroom.
The biggest question I received was whether or not the assessments cover the Mathematical Practices. One eighth grade teacher was interested in using the Marzano Assessments and Portfolio Pages for tracking student progress, but her administration expected her to have something more to assess that students could solve problems in multiple ways for example. We talked about adding quizzes, or requiring students to solve extra problems or show extra work before they can “pass” the level 3 in their student portfolio. Here’s a great video to explain the intent of the practices. The 8 Mathematical Practices cross into every grade level. They are not meant to be small explicit bits of knowledge that we can quantitatively assess in just one or two simple ways – they are meant to be developed over several years, like the character of a person. They can be assessed or practiced in multiple ways and may be applied differently in each cluster. Trying to create a one or two-page assessment on this so that students can check it off their list defeats the purpose of learning to incorporate these practices as habits of mind, every day.
The bottom line is that the teachers I talk to understand that regardless of their own professional judgement, districts and administrators will require all sorts of things that you just have to do. I can sympathize because that was the experience I had when I found myself writing specific scales for my multi-age classes. Some districts are helping teachers more than others. The previous conference I attended was in Traverse City, MI where their district administration is actually writing scales for them! They’re not necessarily in a student-friendly ready-to-present format, but it’s a great start and a lot of work done for those teachers.
Next week I will be talking about some changes I am making to my materials, math and upcoming ELA. 🙂 YOU make requests and I hear you! Come back to give input or ask any questions you have. See you then!
Thank you to Mary S. for commenting on the 5th Grade Common Core Math Assessment with Marzano Scales last week. A lot of schools are trying to incorporate Marzano’s research but don’t always put the time into creating resources for their teachers. That’s what got me started! 🙂
