@Kevin Berkopes when it comes to turnover, the more you can galvanize the students to take ownership of their own learning the better.

@Kevin Berkopes yes there were ongoing prescribed activities where older students would come into younger classrooms and vice versa to teach each other. That necessitated regular planning between teaching partners which included vertical alignment in anticipation of those events. All that stopped when we moved from the original charter school building into the historic Emmerich Manual HS, lost the president and other top leadership, death of the founder Christel Dehan and a whole slew other changes like the ones I mentioned above. I really don’t think it was anyone’s decision or fault it all just came unraveled at the seams due to dramatic circumstances.

@Kevin Berkopes does it require access some of us might not have? It’s still not working for me.

@Kevin Berkopes yep this one works! Looks like the old one has a stray word at the end

I like the jigsaw idea where you do two sessions of small groups. Students work together to unpack the first task then each member of the group splits off into a new group. The second groups are made up of students who each bring a different experience from the previous task. If you design it carefully those fit together in the second task and each student gets to contribute (has to for them to succeed).

@Kevin Berkopes The best thing about jigsaw is that even struggling students get to feel like the expert at the table because they are the only one that saw their previous task. It does require thoughtful intervention when a student had a misconception, letting them own the ideas and bring them to their new group then practice refining and deepening them in discussion with peers. It can be tempting to jump in and "correct" a misconception and sometimes you really do have to. Other times if you wait long enough another student will realize it can't be that way and they can use a strength in another area to reevaluate thinking in a weaker area. A lot of work goes into this to make it work. - You have to design the tasks carefully to actually fit together and support one another without being too similar. - You have to have been doing group work for long enough that the students understand the expectations. - It helps to have two or more long term groups so that some of the distractions can be worked through and groups start to gel. - I'm sure there's more. Group work is really powerful but if you do it without the right prep and without the students being ready it just devolves into the strongest student burning out covering for the weaker students and they all hate doing it. Our professional development on group work was quite strong and our administration provided lots of support and extra hands in the form of interventionists, special education and ML specialists, and admin class participation. Having an extra adult in the room for these occasions really made a difference with my larger class sizes. If my class size was 20 or under I bet i could do it myself.

Knowledge Gaps start forming from the beginning of a child's education. It's not so much a problem as it is a simple reality. If you set a measure that is time bound there will be those that achieve, fall short, and exceed. To me the "right pacing" has everything to do with goals. Slowing down so that students have more opportunities to close the gaps they need to in order to be able to grasp the current topic is better for developing real understanding of that topic. Most of the literature I've read says that the best way to build true procedural fluency is on a foundation of conceptual understanding. Other standards are connected to the one you are on. If you were to skip ahead to the next one many of the same existing gaps will hamper students on this new topic. Even if your goal is standards coverage moving on early wont lead to that on its own. You might be able to say you covered the standard but you are doing so knowing that your students haven't mastered them. There a few big issues to keep in mind when you are making the decision to slow down and stay longer in a particular topic. What is the impact going to be on the coherence of the broader mathematics? What can you do to ensure that you are continuing to build lessons that avoid siloing the content you are spending so long on? Another one is connected to silos. How do your students do when you test them on a topic covered earlier in the year? In other words how are they retaining the learning? If you slow down the pacing you can inadvertantly sacrifice some of the integration and spiraling that was built into your curriculum. This could lead to studnets conceptualizing the topic in a vacuum and therefore feeling free to leave it behind once they move to new topic. Your mileage may vary but I always felt like i needed to work extra hard once I started slowing down to make sure i kept all these opposing forces in tension and balance.

I actually think it’s assessment. There seems to be a troubling push to formalize assessment to the nth degree and make it “objective” with lots of attention on testing and evaluation of students through high stakes testing. These tests also have strict marking schemes which attempt to put a number on just how close to mastery a student is. We here all know there can and should be more to assessment than that. I think the professional judgement of an attentive teacher can offer much more insight into a students level of learning and understanding than any grade could, regardless of how granular they manage to make the test.

@Beth Curry-Smith how do you account for the other end of pacing issues? (the end of the year roles around and certain standards were never even introduced let alone mastered)