Feature Friday: Summer Reading!

Summer break offers a great opportunity to reflect on our teaching and to catch up on some of the reading that is so hard to fit in during the school year. There are a variety of summer reading opportunities that you can take advantage of as a member of the Puxi HS staff.

August Book Club Discussion
If you like discussing books with others, but can't fit it in during the school year, an August Book Club could work for you! Participants would read the book over the summer and then we would meet when we get back to Shanghai in August to discuss. Professional reads and just for fun titles are both an option. Interested? Click here to give your input by the end of the day on Wednesday, June 1st, and then look for more details in a follow-up email.

Teacher Professional Library
As we shift our focus to assessment next year, you may want to get a jump start on ideas for yourself and/or your PLC, or perhaps do some reading to learn from the experts in the field. You can now check out books right from my office (thanks to Marie for setting that up!). Here are a few examples of available titles that are relevant to our current work:

• Classroom Assessment for Student Learning (Chappuis)
• Kid by Kid, Skill by Skill (Eaker & Keating)
• Collaborating for Success with the Common Core (Baily, Jakicic & Spiller)
• Essential Questions (McTighe & Wiggins)
• Learning Targets (Moss & Brookhart)
• Test Better, Teach Better (Popham)
• Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom (Tomlinson & Moon)
• How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading (Brookhart)
• Setting the Standard for Project Based Learning (Larmer)
• Five Disciplines of PLC Leaders (Kanold)

Need Something Shorter or More Portable?

The bulletin board in the mailroom currently features a selection of articles focused on sound assessment practices that support the implementation of Question 2: How will we know if they know it or are able to do it? If you are a member of ASCD, you can access these digitally; otherwise, pick up a hard copy to read on the flight to whatever cool place you're headed this summer. 

Another awesome option is The Main Idea: Current Education Book Summaries. Founder Jenn David-Lang creates an 8-page summary of a current education book each month and maintains an archive of all past titles. The summary contains the core ideas of the book, and she organizes those ideas with enough accompanying details and examples so that you can have a working knowledge of its content. While The Main Idea is a subscription service, I will confide that I have found some of the summaries posted online by using my Google machine. Definitely worth a browse!

Professional Learning

A lot of professional learning has been going on behind the scenes this year. Here is one highlight from this past week:

Book Study Group
The last meeting of the year for the Common Formative Assessment book study group took place on Wednesday at lunch with a discussion focused on how to more fully involve students in the assessment process. Teachers shared a range of strategies that they have tried in the past or currently use, and they reflected on the positive benefits they've experienced, including a shifting of the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student.

This book group met six times throughout the school year, with each meeting's discussion focused around one or two chapters. According to Bob Cook, "For me, the best part of the book club were the conversations about how other people tackle the same issues that I find myself confronting. They provided insights that I hadn't thought of myself.  Oh, and great brownies!" Bob also appreciated that the meetings gave him the opportunity to talk with people in other departments whom he doesn't typically see that often.

CFA Study Group members (Jo, YiYun and Alyson not pictured)

I am currently taking suggestions for possible books for next year (or a summer book group if there's interest) and will send out a survey in a week or so to see who would like to participate. If you have a topic or a particular book you'd be interested in reading, please let me know! A few that are already on the table for consideration:

Teaching for Social Justice

Developing Assessments for the NGSS

Kid by Kid, Skill by Skill

Collaborating for Success with the Common Core

Essential Questions &/or Learning Targets

Embedded Formative Assessment