According to studies by Hattie and Marzano, various forms of feedback (teacher -> student, student -> teacher, peer -> peer) have proven especially effective for improving students’ learning performance. However, there is a question of how to organize feedback of…
Challenges on the path to a school as a learning organization
The office of the Ministerial Representative for modern secondary schools in Western Upper Bavaria as well as the School Development Authority Sundsvall aim at the development of their schools as learning organizations. A learning organization refers to an adaptable organization which is responsive to external…
Modern management for secondary modern schools
The aim of our schools must be not only to safeguard but also to improve the quality of teaching as well as student and teacher performance. One vital prerequisite for this is modern management. The entire school community benefits from…
My experiences with class observations
My training was complete. I had also completed what I often experienced as excruciating commentary from seminar instructors. I felt one thing was clear: in the future, the door of my classroom would remain closed. I had no further interest…
Findings of the project and measures taken
Resulting from the cooperation with our Swedish project partners we can present the following findings and measures: 1. Insight into Swedish school system and school inspection We have received a good overview and, in some instances, insight into the Swedish school…
Regional teacher training for secondary schools in Western Upper Bavaria
In 2013, the supervisory district for secondary schools in Western Upper Bavaria changed both the form and substance of its approach to continuing education based on the newest research on sustainable learning as well as on the reliable results of…
Supported Experiments
According to John Hattie (2009), teaching quality has by far the most effect on student performance. If teachers are to improve their practice they need to spend some extra time to try out new approaches. The term ‘supported experiment’ was…
Car Pool Database with Manipulatives
(See background post “Manipulatives“) When it comes to relational databases I find that almost all of my students, at some point, really struggle to understand how a database management system works. How does it look up the needed information across all those connected tables?…
Questions tags with manipulatives
(See background post “Manipulatives“) Last time when I introduced question tags to my English class I started the lesson with my students taking notes of a video I found on YouTube: Theo, the guy in the video, gives an excellent introduction to this…
Evidence-based school development – Sundsvall`s approach
Sundsvall researching schools are different from at least some other schools, not by the understanding of, more by how they relate to evidence-based practices. Instead of implementing these methods the research schools take the starting point for their development work, and the encountered problems, in…