Edu-Leadership

Mastering Accountability

The challenge of delivering good instruction to our students is our task as educators. Judging its effectiveness is our obligation. For this reason alone, a system of accountability is important to the overall goal of achieving high performance in schools today. The alignment of curriculum standards, instructional strategies, and assessment is a powerful tool for mastering high achievement in the classroom. Our Mastering Accountability series begins with an exploration of instructional practices that provide a promise of greater student performance--one step at a time.

		Instruction
		The Art and Science of Frequent Reviews Learning is rarely as simple as hearing it once, seeing it once, or doing it once. Provide students with frequent reviews and frequent opportunities to keep knowledge, processes, skills, and performance fresh and current in their minds.
		The Power of Emotions Many students come to us with their own natural and readily available supply of curiosity and interest in learning. And the rest? Not quite so simple. By planning valid emotional experiences within the classroom, whether heart warming storybooks, humor, human interest or personal stories, games, debates, or even through the decision making process, teachers can stage the condition for building long term memory and emotional learning into their curriculum.
		Patterning and Connections Patterning is the process of organizing information into meaningful and useful patterns. These patterns are then used as a means of understanding, processing, or memorizing large amounts of information.
		WOW! Projects "Exert your intelligence, passion, and enthusiasm on a WOW! Project." Give students room to explore, to dig, to find out, to think, to ponder, to wonder, to question, and to "out their passion." Make your next classroom assignment a WOW! Project.
		Instructional Strategies: A Classification Chart Instructional strategies are the tools that we use to create learning opportunities for our students. But how do we know which ones to use, why to use them, and how to combine them to provide the maximum learning potential? Effective Instruction: Aligning Needs, Goals, and Purpose There is no effective one-size-fits-all approach to instruction. And no matter how well designed or how "current" the mode of instruction is, applied inappropriately, it may yield little or no growth in the learner. Surviving The Competitive World of Accountability Winning is sometimes simply a matter of wearing out the competition. Build endurance for survival over the long haul through ongoing and continuous increments of training and development in areas such as instruction, classroom management, teaming, and technology.