There are three new hard links across the top of this page. They are my attempt to consolidate some of the major blue chip breakthrough ideas we have come up with over the years in one place. Otherwise they will scroll out and be lost.
The rubrics and templates are to capture in flow chart or rubric form some of those blue chip ideas mentioned above. I have been working with James on this, and he said this on this topic:
…One thing that might make the rubrics different from templates is that I can easily imagine there being several versions of different rubrics for the same thing, like the freewrite or jGR. On the website, then, the rubric section could have multiple examples of rubrics for the same thing, but the flowcharts for the different templates will hopefully be able to contain all the different options a teacher can use during the activity. So maybe it’d be best to aim for ONE flowchart per template so that it can present to the viewer all the options available in summary form….
James also made this point about these two new links:
…in my view templates are one thing, showing processes, and rubrics another, covering assessment….
We will see how this plays out. It is not going to be an easy project and it will necessarily involve everybody in the group, because of the size of the project, as explained in greater detail below.
The third new hard link, labeled “Beginner Training” is going to be a huge amount of short training videos that reflect much of the content in TPRS in a Year! I’ll make them short – three to five minutes in length – so that they are easy to watch, and I will make them on as many topics I can think of. A massive splash of ideas for beginners, since it is easier to watch a video than read. I may also include on that hard link my training DVDs for quick easy reference as well.
This PLC is just one big violin workshop. We are now making real violins to play because we are real people and our kids are real students. We are not making violins out of paper torn from books anymore. Wood chips are flying everywhere. The work is intense and the hours are long. We put gouges in our fingers with chisels every day and it hurts. But sweet music will be the result.
To change the image, we have kind of turned this PLC into a big room for brown and black belt instructors but we need to remember that not everyone reading here is a black belt – yet. But they will be. I sense in this group the capacity to kick the shit out of the old way of teaching, to kick it out the back door, that smelly old back door by the lunchroom, and we can keep on kicking until we kick instruction that is offensive and smelly and insulting to children right out of many school buildings in America today.
We all feel the energy. It’s fun. Finally, after a lifetime of dull plodding through my career where I could barely drag my ass out of bed (24 years of that!), teaching is actually fun! It’s because of Susan Gross (mainly) and Blaine and Stephen Krashen and (name everybody in group).
So keep your eyes on those hard links above as they slowly grow and morph and become what I want them to be – a place of very useful, practical, instant high quality clarification of the high octane ideas we daily talk about here.
In that light, I am open for suggestions from the group about any requests they may have for rubrics or templates. I will write up as many of the rubrics – for content only -and then anyone with tech ability (see James’ example of the R and D rubric he made and thank you James for that) who feels so inclined is welcome to create and share the flow charts/rubrics/templates to share with the others.
There are too many of these for one person to make and I couldn’t make a flow chart any more than I could fly to the moon. I was going to ask James because he is so good at making flow charts, but we are all just too busy and there are too many to make. Maybe everybody could pick one and make it. Otherwise, your favorite template/rubric may never make it into the list. That’s the one bad thing about this format for communication – stuff scrolls out – so we have to make this a big project for everybody here.
I hope we get enough communication going about the flow chart/template/rubrics in the comment fields below to make the dream of not losing the best ideas we have created here begin to happen.