Reviews for Individualizing Professional Development: A Framework for Meeting School and District Goals

The average rating for Individualizing Professional Development: A Framework for Meeting School and District Goals based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-09-14 00:00:00 Kasey McGarry I taught two sections of FYC using the Learning Record last semester, which was only one semester, but reading this book made me even more ambivalent about my LR experience. I feel that many of the things recommended in this book's scheme were missing from our UT implication. For example, we never did any grade-norming across classes, and in fact many of us were confused about grading the portfolios, and we focused exclusively on writing in our assessments, which is too bad, because I feel that collecting information about critical reading, speaking and listening could have benefited our students as well as the their teachers. And we certainly didn't make personal connections with students' parents (25)'FERPA might not approve. And how do teachers decide what's best for their students'one teacher identies "elegant" and "silted" prose, but the audience and the genre are never discussed (45).My main concern, though, is that, as these kinds of schemes are wont to do, the examples have been cherry-picked and that the LR is the sort of thing that only works with a certain kind of student. One student says her favorite book is Pride and Prejudice and "likes to read her old sister's university books" (24). This kind of student'the kind that came from a strong culture of "the education process"'performed well in my LR classes. The hard-working bilingual international engineering student and the over-achiever who had to put in a lot of hours into her out-patient treatment and athletic obligations'they might not have done well in a standard classroom that only looks at results, but they thrived in the LR. But the students who hadn't quite bought into "learning for learning's sake," but who needed a grade and a degree for economic stability, these students kept pleading, "Just tell me what to do and I can do it."

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-24 00:00:00 Jaskaran Singh The usual collection of banalities and platitudes masquerading as insightful commentary.