How can a busy classroom teacher build science confident students who understand the content, can solve problems, communicate their knowledge, and perform well on standardized achievement tests?

When students are engaged in a “balance” of science instruction and activities, they can experience success in applying their science skills and reasoning ability to solve real-life problems requiring scientific thought processes.  This webinar provides classroom teachers with a variety of tools for how to “balance” their science instruction and assessment.

Tired of grading systems that are not working?  Based on his newest book, The Elements of Grading (Solution Tree, October 2010), Dr. Douglas B. Reeves will present the four fundamental requirements of grading systems: accuracy, fairness, timeliness, and specificity.  He will offer practical ways to improve your grading systems now and suggest ways to conduct constructive inquiries into the grading systems of your schools.

Dr. Douglas B. Reeves provides his latest research on student success in high-poverty, high-minority schools.  This seminar particularly focuses on the role of leadership in improving professional practices and student results.

100-day plans help leaders and other stakeholders identify those initiatives that will have the greatest impact on student achievement.  In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Create a set of focused initiatives and goals that will provide short term winds and long term impact.
• Provide opportunities for stakeholders to reduce the number of current initiatives while going deeper with initiatives that matter most.
• Recognize the advantages and/or disadvantages of parallel processing and task switching.
• Understand the difference between technical and cultural changes.
• Effectively create a 100-day plan using five simple steps.

Finally, participants will learn that quality programs with the greatest impact on student achievement and teach professional practice aren't comprised of mountains of written plans and complex expectations.

100-day plans are about implementation, not about program purchases.  Implementation is free.  When educational organizations determin the most important practices and are committed to sustaining those practices, costs will actually decrease due to better informed resource allocation and drastic reduction in student failure.  Students will no longer have to repeat courses or re-take exams, and extra programs for students who drop out will no longer be necessary.

Everyone wants to make “data-driven decisions” – after all, we’ve never heard a school claim to make “ignorance-based decisions.”  But the problem is not a lack of data – it is that we have too much data that is unhelpful, unspecific, and old, and not enough data that can be used to make effective decisions.  In this interactive Webinar, Dr. Douglas Reeves will discuss practical ideas for improved use of data from the classroom to the board room.  Participants will learn:

• From Opinion to Mathematical Certainty:
  Five Standards of Evidence
• Essential Characteristics of Data
• How to Filter Data and Focus on Essentials
• Case Studies of Effective Use of Data
• Being a Critical Consumer of Data Claims
• Ambiguous and Inconsistent Data
• Comparative Risk in Data Analysis
• Questions and Discussion

When all teachers use writing as a thinking-learning tool, achievement in all subject areas rises. This webinar will highlight the following: the benefits of using writing across the curriculum at all grade levels; the power of abbreviated, common rubrics; and several case studies of schools that have experienced success.

Principals are faced with a variety of demands on their time, energy, and resources.  With all of the demands on them, and knowing that if you have 10 goals, you have none, what are three things that Principals can focus on to maximize their efforts?