As many of our members know, RAFT serves educators of many varieties including teachers, day care providers, homework center directors, homeschooling groups, and after-school program coordinators. We recently completed the fourth in a series of customized trainings for facilitators of an after-school program within the Alisal Union School District in Salinas! The training was taught by yours truly and the super-funny, very knowledgeable Tom Gates. Tom and I showed the participants how to extract DNA from strawberries, create cool roller racers, explore life and center of mass using “critter capsules”, use ratios, proportions, and sampling to estimate population size, convert numbers from base 10 to binary ...
Instructional leadership in today’s school communities is distributed among principals, superintendents, instructional coaches, and teachers. Teachers continue to focus their energy on the classroom but more and more they are being tapped to help improve their schools and/or districts. As instructional leaders, teachers have six basic roles: making learning the priority, setting high expectations, focusing content and instruction on standards, emphasizing continuing learning for students and colleagues, assessing learning using many data sources, and gaining community support for school/district success. Research in educational leadership has shown that teachers are effective in these roles because they tend to ...
The educators at RAFT enthusiastically endorse all 8 science practices and 8 engineering practices put forth in the Next Generation Science Standards. Read them and take them to heart! To give you the courage to open the book, we have created two incredibly condensed 1-pagers, called:> Science Practices - RAFT Style > Engineering Practices - RAFT Style These short documents were inspired by the larger NGSS document. We hope they help you get oriented and excited as you review the new standards in full.
Students do best when they are actively engaged in hands-on learning in a classroom environment that fosters social and emotional well-being. RAFT joins hands with Stanford's Cleo Eulau Center Resilience Consultant, Lisa Medoff, Ph.D., and EnCorps to share ideas and thoughts on how new teachers can best prepare for success in the classroom and in their professional careers. Teachers are given many ideas on how to foster resilience, to create positive classroom and school communities, and how to promote emotional and social competence. Motivating students involves preparing goals, addressing communication, engagement, and idenfying a positive sense of self. Hands-on learning benefits students (and teachers) by ...
I recently asked a teacher why she comes to RAFT and she replied, "To increase my knowledge base. You guys are full of knowledge!" Her response got me thinking - Is it that we possess lots of information on particular topics or that we are knowledgeable about ways of effectively teaching topics (through hands-on)? In other words, what was the knowledge to which the teacher referred? Mina Choi, an educator at Cheongju University, Korea, wrote an article entitled "Communities of Practice: An Alternative Learning Model for Knowledge Creation". She defined knowledge as a process of accumulation and understanding rather than an assortment of facts. In terms of the teacher’s question above RAFT is ...
I spent a wonderful 4 days in chilly Denver attending the National Conference of the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)! There were literally thousands of teachers, educators, administrators, and mentors in attendance! I enjoyed attending several math seminars and strolling among the exhibition vendors. It is clear to me that the National Common Core Standards are on everyone's minds and that there is a need for more hands-on math ideas, of which RAFT is the expert! I plan to participate as a speaker at next year's NCTM National Conference (in warmer New Orleans!) and we will have a booth to show the nation's educators how important our hands-on work is at RAFT and how RAFT connects so well with the ...
