As I entered my 15th year of teaching young children and supporting adult learners, I found myself searching for answers. Answers to why CLASS implementation was so difficult, why teacher buy-in was such a challenge, and why long-term improvement seemed impossible. In my role as the Director of Curriculum and Instruction, I’m constantly checking the data. Data drives instruction, instruction drives learning, learning drives comprehension, and comprehension equals success!
Young children are naturals at analysis and reasoning. They want to understand. They want to solve problems, experiment, and compare. And we can help them!
First, let’s look at what Analysis and Reasoning means. To analyze is to look closely or examine, and to reason means to form conclusions or inferences based on what we know or experience. Every time a preschooler asks questions, predicts, classifies, compares, or evaluates, they are practicing analysis and reasoning skills.
If you've been training or coaching on CLASS recently, you've probably started to notice that CLASS domains and dimensions are applicable to life even outside the classroom. Perhaps you've started wondering why your partner doesn't have more regard, you've started asking your mother more open-ended questions, or you've caught yourself attending to your dog's positive behaviors.
Concept Development and Quality of Feedback. These dimensions fall under the Instructional Support domain in the Pre-K CLASS measure. They have some similarities, of course—but they are truly distinctive in the ways they play out in the classroom.
Are you a teacher who recently had a CLASS observer come to your classroom? Maybe the observer mentioned something about giving you your CLASS scores—or maybe you aren’t sure when or how you’ll get feedback from the observation. If that recently happened to you, you might have typed something into Google like, “What are CLASS scores?” Not to fear. I hope this blog post clears it up for you!
Note: It’s the start of another new school year and once again, my thoughts turn to all of the children who are starting school for the first time. But I also can’t help but think about those children who are making the big transition from preschool to kindergarten. As we all know, it can be a big adjustment for many kids.
In this day and age, the likelihood of finding an opinion or theory that everyone agrees on seems impossible. The world of early education is no different. Though most educators and parents agree that Pre-K serves as the foundation for increasing the likelihood of a child’s success later in life, there is still dissent surrounding how Pre-K programs should be managed to maximize this success.
Mary Margaret-Gardiner and Sarah Hadden discuss Student Expression from the Pre-K dimension Regard for Student Perspectives. You'll learn how to recognize Student Expression in a classroom, the importance of looking at dimensions as a whole when you're coding, and more.
It’s hard to deny that the CLASS Observation Training is effective in its primary goal: developing reliable CLASS Observers. Our impressive pass rates are proof of this. However, there is a lot more to conducting CLASS observations than just “being reliable” (AKA choosing valid scores). Field assessors must also learn the observation protocol that is outlined in Chapter 2 of the CLASS Manual. The manual provides guidance on field protocol; however, it is often up to organizations to develop their own standards for data collection.
