Teacher Evalution

4/30/14

Today is the day in the Aspiring Principal's Leadership Academy that we are focusing on teacher evaluation . Here are some take aways.

My personal definition of quality instruction:

Quailtity instruction engages diverse learners in problem soling thinking to create succesful life long learners.

My groups refined definition

Quailty instruction 

* Student Engagement

* Teacher Knowledge 

* Ability to Differential

* Edivence of Learning and Critical Thinking

* Reflective parctice by teacher 

My refined defintion:

Quailtity instruction engages diverse learners in critical  thinking to create succesful life long learners given by a reflective teacher. 

It's interestine to see the evolution. 

We watched a clip of a teacher then were asked to grade that teacher. My insight from this is evaulation happens in context and continum. What you evalution needs to be set by expectation. Leaders need to develop a context for that evalution. What are we working on as abuiding/team/culture? Evalutions are a continum. They should be done many times during the year. with different focuses to create an overall picture of that teacher's parctice. 

 a walk through  is not the place  to make inference and judgement. There's time to collective edivence and descriptions. Not inferences. 

Today's Learning: YouTube editing

So my goal for today was to learn how to edit videos in YouTube/editor. Sounds like a good goal huh?

However first you must have videos. I have Google Glass, so there's no shortage of video. It's just getting them uploaded. Long learning shorten for your benefit: the fastest way to do this is to plug Glass into your laptop via the USB cable then copy them to your hard drive then upload them to YouTube. Yes there's a YouTube app on Glass, but this is faster for many videos.

YouTube editor allows the basic functions. I added my videos together, moved them around, edited some down, and put in some transitions. There are caption, audio files, and a few other functions. I'll play with those next time. It does take awhile to process the file - long enough to write a blog entry.

Start at youtube.com/editor
I'll build some infographic as I play more.

I did not hear you is a lie #deeplearning

Yesterday I said to my daughter "I'm sorry I did not hear you. What doesn't she like?" Based on my reading of How to Create a Mind by R. Kurzweil, I now understand what was really going on in my mind.

Background:
My daughter and I were talking about her friend Eva. We talked about their friendship. We were in the car listening to Pandora. Emily was looking at the radio display when she said, "Eva does not like this band anymore."  I was driving so I did not see where she was looking. When she said that I just could not understand what she said that Eva didn't like. I understood the "Eva does not like" and the "anymore".  But the middle was lost to me. Naturally I said "I'm sorry I did not hear you. What doesn't she like?"

Then it hit me. I heard the first and last words just fine. There was nothing to interfere with me hearing the middle section but my mind. We were talking about their friendship so I thought she said her but that did not fit the rest of the conversation so I stopped the conversation.

Your mind stores information in patterns. One of it's greatest abilities is to predict those patterns. This seems up processing and selectively activates pathways of hierarchical patterns that may related to the conversation. We teach predicting skills as part of reading comprehension because good readers can get ahead of the story by predicting so they can process the meaning of the story.

You, the reader, had no problem making sense of her comment because I included where she was looking. I was driving so when she made that statement, I did not see where she was looking. It was not that I did not hear her. It was that what she said did not match any of my predictions. Worst then that, for my mind, it was a band I had never heard of so it did not match any of my patterns. So I just simply did not understand.

Kurzweil states that our mind is always predicting. Our predictions are based on our experiences. Experiences are the bases for perceptions. Perceptions influence how we perceive the world around us.

It's not that I could not hear her. It is that my predictions did not match what she said in anyway. Nor did what she say match any know patterns in my mind. My mind hear that as a garbled mess because it did not match my understanding. It was a moment of insight for me into how our mind works based on my reading from How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil. I highly recommend it.

How to Create a mind: Pattern based learning reflections

As I read the book, How to Create a Mind I am thinking about how this impacts instruction.
If the mind is structured in hierarchical pattern, how does that impact our teaching?
What strategies build those patterns and connect the hierarchical relationships.

"Will's dying but his mind is a serial of electrical patterns that we can upload" Transcedence Movie trailer.