5 Affordable Ways to Brighten your Classroom As a teacher, I want the students who come into my classroom to be excited to be there! I want things to sparkle. I want to have large screens flashing with exciting content. I want a five-piece orchestra playing classical music in the background. However, my checking account…
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We are happy to report that we have teamed up with Parlier Unified School District to conduct an innovative, academic summer program designed to improve student literacy and math skills while supporting teachers through classroom coaching. The six-week academy, which begins this month, is being called “StepUP to Literacy”. Recently, a 2016 CAASPT assessment found…
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Educeri, the new online lesson subscription service recently launched by DataWORKS Educational Research, is giving away 100,000 free subscriptions. Free 3-month subscriptions will be available to teachers and school districts who contact DataWORKS and request a trial. Being called the “Netflix” for educators, Educeri provides easy-to-use online lessons that save teachers time and…
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The Problem with ELD Instruction Imagine being dropped in the middle of a foreign country where you don’t know the language. Now, imagine that you have been placed into a high school English class and the assignment is to analyze the metaphors in chapter 4 of The Grapes of Wrath. Except you don’t understand the…
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The final type of cognitive strategy that we will discuss in this series of blog posts is metacognitive strategies. As we’ve seen, cognitive strategies are the basic mental techniques we use to think, study, and learn (such as chunking, rehearsal, elaboration, and organization). Taking it to the next level, metacognitive strategies involve “thinking about thinking.” …
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This aerial picture of the students and staff at Heber School was taken when the school reached an 802 on the Academic Performance Index (API). Heber School has achieved a milestone that some thought was impossible to achieve. Heber School’s 2013 API is 839. For over one hundred years, Heber School was the only…
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Woodlake Valley Middle School Gains 67 API Points and 115 ELL sub-group API points through Partnership with DataWORKS Educational Research Woodlake Valley Middle School defies odds by closing the achievement gaps in AMAO 1, AMAO II, and AMAO III in 2012 -2013 Crediting its staff and a partnership with DataWORKS Educational Research, Woodlake Valley Middle…
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Read on to learn how DataWORKS used Explicit Direct Instruction, English Learner Strategies, and Classroom Coaching to help one school improve their API score more than 300 points in five years. North Park Middle School in EL Rancho Unified is eyeing an 800 API. They know they can do it, but it didn’t seem that…
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What makes an effective literacy program? As an adult, you already know how to read and write. You were given skills and tools in school to master reading and writing. These skills and tools came from a literacy program. A literacy program contains all the components necessary for you to master reading and writing. However,…
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Cursive is dead. Long live cursive. Just over a year ago, we published an article asking if cursive handwriting is still relevant in today’s educational system. In it, one of the rationales cited was so that students could read historical documents and, as our company’s resident expert in history, that got me thinking about what…
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