Data Driven Teaching

I am somewhat amazed at the direction education has taken in the past couple years. Through classes there always seems to be the battle between data driven summative assessment and more informal yet informative formative assessment. Due to technology, it seems to make sense. Data is more readily available and the context is so accessible in any format considered. It is great to review a spreadsheet of a class and highlight skills versus weaknesses to help determine how to teach those students. It still seems like the data driven classroom has left behind the other important life-like factor and this is the formative assessment. During a PLC, these life experiences in the classroom are rarely considered, I would imagine primarily due to time. We are so divulged with data, resources, and school improvement that the topic of a child's personality is kind of forgotten.

I like to think that when all is said and done, the teacher is still using formative assessment in the classroom although it is not shared during benchmarking and evaluation time.

Teachers Blogging

There has been some discussion if teachers should be required to maintain a blog for their classroom. As I thought about this there would be some definite pros and cons. As far as communication, this would eliminate the parents who say they never know what is going on in the classroom. A con, would a teacher be responsible to respond at any hour? There are a lot of possibilities with teacher's maintaining a blog. What does everyone else think?