What did you learn at school today?

When the kids were younger and still at home, Lynn and I would make a practice of asking them at dinner, “What did you learn in school today?” The usual reply was, “Nothing.” After a few probing questions, we were able to find out that they had in fact learned a plenty. Every night the question was the same “What did you learn?” We never asked “What did your teacher do in class today?” although we did hear a few stories that made us wonder what was going on at that school. But that is a story for another day.

The point is we asked about learning, not teaching. And that is the job of our teachers at Taylor middle school as members of a professional learning community – to ask “what are our students learning today?” The corollary questions to this are:
• “How do I know they have learned what I taught?”
• “What do I do when my students don’t learn what I taught?”
• “What do I do with those students who already mastered what I taught?”

As I shared with the staff on opening day, the focus of our team meetings will be on:
• Developing a guaranteed viable curriculum which clearly states what kids are expected to know and be able to do
• Create short cycle assessments to measure if students learned what we taught
• Reteach those students who did not learn it the first time
• Enrich for those students who did learn it

We began be developing team norms at our first meeting. We will be moving shortly into setting SMART goals and developing short-cycle assessments.

Our entire focus of this endeavor will be to improve student learning.