Too often in education, we experience one of two system afflictions that we gotta deal with right away if we want all students to learn. 1. Data overload. 2. Initiative fatigue.

I must admit that my work in schools is always part training and part therapy session. Trust me, I understand. Been there....and I...like...so get it 😊

The passionate educators in our schools are so eager to do anything they can to help students learn that we sometimes jump on too many things and spend too much time staring at spreadsheets.

Count me in if anyone wants to chat about this.

I like to preach strategic RESTRAINT! Doing less and doing them well. My advice. Start with a couple of things that will really, really help kids learn and get those right first.

Here are a few that I suggest:

Tier 1
✏️Previewing, pre-teaching course content (especially for struggling students)
✏️Reviewing critical content (spiraled and purposeful)
✏️Academic discourse (using content vocab)
✏️Spaced practice (distributed and intentional)

As for the data, don't get me started. You've heard me say many times that the data cannot be used simply to sort and label kids.

There are key steps we can take to get students to proficiency, but labeling students is not of them. Just knowing who there are is not enough, because children cannot be reduced to a number and labeling students is not an intervention.