Overview
Below you will find a full compilation of ANet’s public blog posts, including our Lessons from the Field and Leader and Teacher Spotlight Blogs. Browse each section to find relevant articles and ideas to spark new ideas or deepen your foundation.
In Response to COVID-19
- Distance learning: New toolkit for education leaders
- Addressing Students’ Learning Loss Checklists
- Distance learning: New toolkit for education leaders
- Resources our partner schools are finding helpful right now
Coaching
General
- Trust and transformation: Effective coaching relies on relationships
- A day in the life of an instructional coach
- Laying the foundation for game-changing coaching
- Developmental coaching: Small steps toward big goals
- Coach spots an opportunity to collaborate, with powerful results
Coaching teachers
- 3 steps to productive coaching observations
- A powerful observation process you can adopt
- How to use questioning to coach teachers
- Advance student learning with shorter, more frequent coaching sessions
- Co-planning: An effective teacher development strategy
- Let your students drive their learning
- Using data to help students and teachers
- Improving teacher practice through developmental coaching
- Sometimes the best way to help your students is not to help them.
- Building teacher capacity at DCIS at Ford
- Differentiated coaching creates steady growth at Denison Elementary
Coaching leaders
- Why leader learning matters
- Developing leaders to develop teachers
- The power of committing to a priority
- Zooming in on your instructional priority
- Learning, to lead: How coaching has empowered one school principal
- Coach spots an opportunity to collaborate, with powerful results
Instructional Leadership
Adult culture and collaboration
- Looking for new resources for the new school year? Try the Choice Board Challenge!
- What happens when all teachers feel accountable for their school’s English Learners?
- Transforming instructional practice leads to student outcomes
- Why leader learning matters
- Key school leader move: Roll up your sleeves and plan, plan, plan
- Birmingham principal leads by example. Never stops learning.
- Teacher leaders broaden Dever’s knowledge base
- Learning together at Bradford
- Making teacher collaboration go POP
- Everyone learns at St. John Paul II Academy—adults, too!
- “Never done”: How one school builds a culture of success
- Developing leaders to develop teachers
- Distributing leadership across your team
- Setting the stage for powerful adult learning
- Creating a “culture of error” among teachers and leaders
- Educators collaborate and grow when they feel safe.
- BCS Professional Learning Collaborative
- What does the evidence show?
Student culture
- Students and teachers reflect on virtual learning and what they will take back into the physical classroom with them
- Driving family engagement by working alongside teachers-leaders
- Planning for Success at Winnemucca Junior High
- A culture shift drives gains at P.S. 197
- Tench Tilghman’s strong school community gets students talking
- Making Waves Academy’s three commitments that increased student engagement
- An A+ school culture
- White Street School jumps from turnaround to the highest status
- Community and culture spark gains at Patterson Elementary
- A successful start: Systems, routines, AND content
Instructional Priorities
- The power of committing to a priority
- Zooming in on your instructional priority
- La Cima’s focus leads to huge gains on ELA summatives
- Pursuing instructional priorities as a team
- Focus like a laser on your RCEP goal.
- A shift in focus boosts learning at Bruce Randolph
Leveraging the teaching and learning cycle
- Principals reimagine data as compass, not report card
- Learning walk helps leaders plan for progress
- A powerful observation process you can adopt
- Change is hard, but it can lead to great things for students.
Formative Assessments
Assessment strategy
- New Guidance: 3 principles for assessments during instructional recovery and beyond
- How one district saved time and boosted teaching with curriculum-embedded assessments
- ANet assessments recognized for excellence in independent study
- Flipping the way we think about assessments
- “Our Assessment Plan Needs an Overhaul!” 3 Keys to a Smart Assessment Strategy
- An unaligned assessment strategy can undermine quality curriculum.
- Curriculum-embedded assessments: One tool in your assessment strategy toolbox
- Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the outcomes it gets.
- Drag and drop could provide a lift: Is your school ready for online assessments?
Leveraging data
- ANet Family Reports help teachers engage parents in student academic success (7.13.20)
- Don’t just weigh the pig
- Sharing data with families
- Principals reimagine data as compass, not report card
- Assessment previews: Mapping the way to mastery
- What matters when analyzing data: STUDENTS
- What matters when analyzing data: STUDENTS (Part II)
- Leveraging assessments for instructional change
- Using anecdotal notes to differentiate instruction
- The 6 stages of accepting data-driven instruction—in GIFs
- Knowing what they know
- School Data Should Be A Springboard, Not A Scoreboard
About Assessments
- How do you know if an assessment is high quality?
- Quality assessments can provide a map.
- The pitfalls and disappointments of item banks
- What are formative and summative assessments?
- Assessing assessments
- The testing cap: We must get ahead of potential unintended consequences.
- How I stopped worrying and learned to love assessments
Equity
addressing Unfinished learning
- Close the gaps in unfinished learning to keep students on track
- Bridging the Gap: Three approaches to personalized learning
- Scaffolding instruction
high Expectations
- Low expectations hurt when I was a kid. They still do.
- High expectations are a matter of equity
- Case study: “We can’t leave good instruction to chance.”
- Case study: Providing high-impact curriculum support to teachers and leaders
- Changing the narrative: Success for all students at Chinook Middle School
- Bessemer Academy’s can-do culture boosts school rating
- A case for rich math tasks: Equity for students
- The importance of standards for equal educational opportunity
Mindset
- A dangerous misconception about older struggling readers
- The powerful impact of putting scholars at the heart of your vision for instructional excellence
- Unfinished learning, or unfinished teaching? A mindset shift
- Dyslexia and Dysteachia
- Deficit Mindset
- Growth Mindset
Bias and inequity
- Multiplying the Efforts of Bob Moses
- Black Liberation and the Conversation on Race in Schools
- Reflection alongside action in celebration of Juneteenth
- Remedying inaccessible curriculum for our most marginalized students
- Long-time leaders learning to build bridges to their students with learning and thinking needs
- A teacher said something biased. I struggled with how to respond.
- Equity in education
- Representation matters: Celebrating Black history all year
- Our vision: A world of educational equity
- More pain. More hope.
- Letter from an ANet coach
- Inequity doesn’t follow neat borders.
- “Though”: Bias in a single word
- As if we needed another reason to close the achievement gap
Professional Development
- 5 principles to create lasting change for students; Maximize the impact of your district’s ESSER funds
- “We’re in this together”: Setting the stage for powerful adult learning
- Why leader learning matters
- Building teacher capacity at DCIS at Ford
- Aligning professional development to instructional priorities
- “Lesson study” for teaching development
- Teachers drive their development at the Condon K-8 School
- Harry Sharp Family School leverages PD for Common Core instructional alignment
- Integrating planning and PD saves time, gets results
- Strong School-Based Professional Development that Leads to Impact
Math
Conceptual understanding
- Conceptual understanding in math
- Are your students clear on the concepts?
- Developing conceptual understanding alongside procedural skill
- Behind BEES’ Big Boost
- Encouraging students to share their math thinking
Supporting students
- Supporting ELL students with language-intensive math
- How to help students who struggle with y = mx + b
- “The magic is in the mess”: Kids learn math by doing math.
Rigor
- Rigor in mathematics
- Addressing unfinished learning in the context of grade-level work
- Math teachers target aspects of rigor at Gerena
- Targeting aspects of rigor in math instruction
- Rigorous instruction sparks change at Gwynns Falls Elementary
focusing on the Standards
- Moving from “unpacking” to “understanding” math standards
- Extra time selecting resources and planning yields results for Stanley
- Is that lesson delicious? Why a curriculum is like a cookbook
Data analysis
- Connecting math concepts across grades
- Previewing assessments in math
- Analyzing math data for student strengths
- Evidence drives exciting progress at DEPSA
ELA
Text complextiy
- Text complexity
- Measuring text complexity to inform planning
- Renaissance Charter School gives the gift of text complexity
- Text complexity drives ELA growth at Admiral King School
- Text quality matters for higher level understanding
- #BarOrBetter
text dependent questions
- How to engage students with text-dependent questions
- Sparking text-dependent discussion
- Focus questions
- Asking the right questions in reading instruction
- Student discussion at the heart of learning
- Deep engagement with text at any age
- Getting second-graders to focus on evidence from the text
- Crafting text-dependent questions to guide reading, writing, and discussion
Text based planning
- How I learned to love text-based planning
- Shifting to text-based planning brings exciting results
- Extra time selecting resources and planning yields results for Stanley
- The 3 keys to starting text talks
- A text-based approach to planning close reading
- Text talks: “I can’t imagine planning any other way.”
- Internalizing and planning from literacy resources
- Planning for Success at Winnemucca Junior High
- Case study: “We can’t leave good instruction to chance.”
Data analysis
- Fill the pothole, don’t repave the road: Ensuring your literacy data isn’t a roadblock to student progress
- Previewing assessments in ELA
- Our evolving approach to ELA data analysis
- Analyzing student work for actionable trends in literacy
- Building a culture of learning at Henderson Hopkins
- Savoy teachers use data to improve students’ ability to respond to prompt
leveraging standards
- Leveraging the vertical progressions in ELA
- Unpacking the standards: Leveraging the shared language of the Common Core
writing
- Rich discussions, better readers and writers
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Mozart Elementary focuses on writing types, sees writing gains