Comical Teacher Grading Practices

Great satire about how teachers grade papers is perceived. We all know that most teachers do their best to have accurate assessments, but then again we have all had that one teacher who we felt was not actually grading our work. This might be a fun video to show just before a staff training on proper assessment strategies just to lighten the mood. Be careful though, this might offend some teachers so make sure you know how your staff would react to the video first.

How Data Helps Teachers

This is a great clip to show in a professional development training to demonstrate the value of using data in the classroom. Teachers have access to more quality data than ever, on factors like student performance, attendance, and more. When used along with pedagogy, content knowledge, and professional judgment, these data can be used responsibly to improve outcomes for students. 

Why are some teachers and schools successful?

John Hattie, an educational researcher, discusses what makes schools and teachers successful.  After studying thousands of schools, teachers, and students, this video identifies what his data shows.  This video would be great to show at a teacher inservice to generate conversations on methods that might makes your educational environment more successful.  His findings are interesting.  A question that is addressed is, "What influences student achievement?"

Below is a chart that shows some of his findings:

The Importance of Time for Professional Development

In this video Bill Gates discusses the importance of time for Professional Developments with the Washington State Teacher of the Year, Katie Brown.  Katie does an excellent job discussing what her school does to improve the educational environment. In the video, collaboration, whole-group learning, small-group training, individual coaching, and teachers observing teachers are all discussed on their relevance to Professional Development.

PaperRater

Here is a tutorial I created that demonstrates the advantages of using PaperRater.com to help you grade written papers.  I love this website and highly recommend it to teachers that want to grade their papers quicker.  I also let my students know that I use this site to grade papers and therefore they can use the same tool I grade them with so that they kind of know what to expect.  This also contains a plagiarism detector that is great.