District Management Group (DMG) Report for Best Practice

The District Management Group's Report on Best Practice was part of the genesis to create and implement Vermont's Act 173. Below are the Group's summary pages regarding "Best Practice." Here is a link to the complete document if you would like to view it: Full Version DMG Report.  DMG's Summary Report was completed circa 2017. The report is very comprehensive regarding support for students re: instructional experts or highly qualified instructors.

 

 

Review Previous Days Material for Continuity and to Enhance Long Term Memory

For students with Learning Disabilities, it is important to start the days lesson for the first three-to-eight minutes by reviewing the previous days lesson. Not only does it help in building a schema so students see the connection of why the previous material was important - it connects to what is currently being learned and what will be learned in the future. It also allows for a review of the important concepts and skills that connect past learning to present learning and the future.

Using math as an example: Archer and others recommend spending the start of a days lesson going over the previous days homework for problems and questions, then going over problems where there were clear examples of errors, then reviewing the skills and concepts that are required for success in that days lesson and finally, reviewing the lesson vocabulary that students must know to be successful.

Learning Disabled students need repetition of important concepts far beyond their non-disabled peers  and information of how concepts and main ideas fit together toward a coherent whole. Over teaching important concepts and skills to those students helps them move important themes and ideas from short-term to long-term memory.

Getting to Know Your Students' Learning Profile

Multiple Intelligence Survey for Elementary Students

Research into Differentiated Instruction informs us that it is important to make a personal connection with our students and learn about their learning goals, strengths, needs and passions. This indeed is one of the things that helps us create "community" in our classrooms. (Gregory, Kaufeldt, 2012), (Doubet, Hockett 2010)

One of the easier things the authors talk about is doing quick one or two sentence fun surveys to learn personally about our students: "Who is your favorite cartoon character?" "What is your favorite ice cream?" "Are you a Red Sox or Yankee fan?" A fun way to add movement to this activity is to have students move to the area that represents their choice: one corner is vanilla, another corner is chocolate. This allows the classroom teacher to create tiering scenarios to group students by interest if that is the goal.

A little more refined is to know our student's learning strengths and profiles around the major modalities of instruction. This is the work of Howard Gardner: mathematical-logical, verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, and bodily-kinesthetic, to name a few. Here's a link to a visual of Gardner's work. This link is to Laura Candler's MI Survey for Elementary Students (click here).

Available Online at One Drive at URL:

Equity and Inclusion Power Point - January 24, 2020 
(Big File: Give it a little bit to load. Thanks)

Some Themes from this Presentation:

• The importance of building good relationships with students is paramount.
• How we communicate with students and the words we use is important.
• A Growth Mindset (Dweck) centers on the idea that hard work and effort are the keys to success.
• As part of the Universal Design for Learning profile allowing students to present information in various ways is important. (Vary the methods for response and navigation by students)
• We did share an Equity and Inclusion definition but realize that we need to make it amenable to the Molly Stark community. They also need to contribute to that definition.