One of the things I have come to love about Marzano aligned teaching and planning is that as I have gotten more and more comfortable with it, my students have gotten better and better at assessments and I have gotten better and better evaluations.  This blog post will give you some tips and tricks to get a good evaluation using Marzano!

To get a great evaluation, it's a really good idea to begin by understanding the tool your evaluator will be rating you with (see, that's Marzano right there - identify your learning targets and rate your progress toward them!).  It's like knowing the strike zone in baseball. 

If your school is a "Marzano school" it is probably using the teacher evaluation tool created by Marzano.  If not, effectively using Marzano strategies will still help you get better evaluations because you will be using best practices and creating great lesson plans when you go through the steps I laid out in a previous post called Lesson Planning With Marzano.

If you are a "Marzano school" that uses the Marzano evaluation tool, this is where things start to get really easy!

• The tool is sort of a checklist of domains and strategies that evaluators simply check off and comment on, so, just be sure you clearly label which strategies you will be using in your lesson and either give your evaluator a copy or briefly speak with them beforehand.
  • This does a couple of things for you.  First, it communicates to your evaluator that you're prepared.  Second, it gives you a better chance of getting a score on the elements you want to get a score on.
• As you are teaching, especially if you do this with your students anyway, you might want to call out or have labeled on projected Google Slides the name or number of the elements you are using.  This serves the same purposes as the first step.
• Make sure you show you are monitoring the strategies you use for their desired effect.  When I overtly started doing this throughout instruction rather than just at the end during evaluations, my scores really started to soar.
• Lastly, after the observation, when it is time to meet with your administrator, be ready to explain not just which strategies you chose, but why you chose them and how you determined if they were effective or not.
  • Doing this cements in your evaluator's mind that you are a very reflective, knowledgeable teacher and will usually get you the benefit of the doubt and bump up your scores in certain areas they were not planning to.
    

The thing an evaluator wants to see more than anything is that you know what you are doing, why you are doing it and that your students are learning and engaged.  Using the strategies on the Marzano placemat ensure that you are using best practices and highlighting those practices should ensure a very positive evaluation! 

As I mentioned in my last post about lesson planning with Marzano, the first step in effective instruction is providing clear goals and to monitor student progress toward those goals.  But how?

With scales!  Marzano scales are based on the concept of "Mastery".  According to Marzano, mastery is being able to answer at least 80% of questions about a topic correctly.  A Marzano scale goes from 0-4 with each level as follows:

• 0 = Even with help, I cannot understand the content.  Or, in student friendly language, "I just don't get it."
• 1 = With a lot of teacher support, I can understand a minimal amount of the content.  Or, in student friendly language, "I get it, but only if you talk me through it every time."
• 2 = With a little teacher support, I can understand most of the content.  Or, in student friendly language, "I get it, but will need some help."
• 3 = Mastery!  I can demonstrate understanding of the content at least 80% of the time.  Or, in student friendly language, "I get it!"
• 4 + Beyond Mastery.  The student can apply the content beyond what is asked of them.  Or, in student friendly language, "I get it, and look what I can do with it!"

I have this rating system posted in my classroom and my students use it every day to rate their understanding both prior to and after instruction.  If you would like a FREE digital copy of if, CLICK HERE.

You might be thinking, "Great, but how can I make the scale they rate themselves on?"  You begin with the standard.  Most standards (at least in Social Studies) are large and complicated things that seem cobbled together like Frankenstein's monster.  The first step is to break the monster standard into smaller chunks.  These chunks become your daily lessons.  

Next, take a chunk and ask yourself, "What would a student need to be able to do to demonstrate mastery of this chunk?" Once you have your answer, that is both your daily learning target and the level 3 on your scale!  Level 4 is something beyond that, so ask yourself, "How could my students apply this knowledge another way?"

Level 0 is always the same - "Even with help, I still don't get it."  

This leaves level 1 and 2 to worry about.  The easiest way to fill these is to go back to what you came up with for level 3 and try to think of three or four things students would need to be able to do to call themselves a 3.  Once you have these, put the simpler one(s) in level 1 and the simpler and more difficult ones in level 2.  Once you've done that, you have a Marzano aligned scale for your lesson!

A few final thoughts.

• First, I have found it most effective to phrase the overall target and each of the levels as "I can" statements.  In my opinion, this helps students internalize their learning - it makes it more real to them.
• Second, while some people support creating and using scales for entire units or topics of study, I advocate (and do) making them for each individual lesson.  It helps students feel more immediately successful, helps me focus my lesson planning, and also helps both me and my students identify content that wasn't mastered in a much quicker timeframe. 

Okay, so you've seen the Marzano placemat and know how it's organized.  Now what?  The chart and language used can be very overwhelming, especially if your school or district basically says, "Here, use this," without any high quality training.  But don't worry.  In fact, there's nothing new on it!

So, if it's just old stuff (or new names for old stuff), why bother, right?  It's just a fad that will go away.

First, it's not a fad.  It's an organized list of best practices.  And second, it actually saves time and makes lesson planning easier.

ORGANIZED

• ​Like I shared in my last blog post, the Marzano placemat breaks best practices into three categories: 1) Goal Setting and Monitoring, 2) Planned Learning Activities, and, 3) Enacted On the Spot Strategies.  One of my biggest ah-ha moments with Marzano was that these three categories translated to my three steps of lesson planning which I will share below:

LESSON PLANNING​

1. I always start by asking myself this question, "What do I want my students to know, and how will I know when they learned it?"  this question is category #1 in a nutshell.
2. Once I am satisfied with my answer to the first question, I craft a scale for that lesson, then turn my attention to my second lesson planning question, "What are the best strategies or techniques to help the greatest number of my students reach mastery, and how will I help the rest?"  A wide range of possible strategies are listed in the second category of the Marzano placemat to chose from.  I tend to keep in mind the question of best strategies and balance it with repetition - I try to avoid student boredom by selecting a variety of activities and approaches within each week or unit of study.
3. The last step is probably the easiest.  I ask myself, "How will I keep them engaged and excited throughout?"  Which, of course, is the third category on the Marzano placemat - those "unplanned, enacted on the spot" things that are really pre-planned and well thought out in most cases.  I decide what quick games or thought provoking questions I can sprinkle in or play at the end to both keep students engaged and solidify their learning.  Another thing I like to do on this step is to find funny (or what I consider funny - my students might (and probably would) disagree) on topic "dad jokes" to tell.

And that's it.  If you go through these three questions and use the placemat as a guide for selecting categories, you can't help but to create a well thought out Marzano aligned lesson plan.

So, maybe you just found out your district is transitioning to Marzano, or maybe you just had Marzano training and your head is spinning, or maybe you've heard of it and are just curious to learn what it's all about.  Whichever is true for you, the Marzano placemat is a great place to start.  Here is a modified version of it:

The placemat breaks best teaching practices into three general categories.  I call the first category "Things To Do Every Day".  The most important things in this category are deciding what you want students to learn and how you will measure what they learn.  I use a daily scale in conjunction with a daily learning log students rate themselves on at the beginning and end of class.  CLICK HERE FOR A FREE DIGITAL COPY OF MY DAILY LEARNING LOG.

I call the second part "Planned Activities".  This section more or less lists a lot of best practice strategies you can implement.  This is my favorite part because it helps you think about you want students to learn (what you identified in the first category), and select which strategy or activities will best help your students learn it.

I call the last part "Off the Cuff" strategies, but, really, some of them are things that can (and should) be planned for that just look like they are off the top of your head - things like playing quick games.  Others are just things good teachers do like "Maintain a Lively Pace" or "Engage Low Expectancy Students."

I really think the way Dr. Marzano categorized and presented things on his placemat make it much easier to understand how all these best practices can go together to get the best results possible, and am excited to share with you what I have learned about Marzano goals, scales and best practices!

Roll that Die!, Histopardy!, Vocabo, Vocab Spoons, etc., etc. is a partial list of the group-based games I've become known for in my classroom over the years.  They are all great, all get kids excited, competitive, and focused on content.  Best of all, all of them produce results.  The vast majority of my students tend to score in the 80's or 90's on my assessments!

Another thing they all have in common is that in my "COVID Classroom" I can't play any of them without significant modification. 

Fortunately, I have found or created new games to fill the gap!  Below are some of my favorites:

• For Any Topic
  • ​Kahoot!
    • I had heard of this before, but never used it as I really liked the review games I was using.  However, this year, one of my students suggested I try it and even made one to show me how it works, and once I HOOKED!  It's really easy to sign up and even easier to use.  There are also a lot of pre-made ones!  Anyway, the questions are projected on the board and kids answer on their individual devices.  It keeps score, tracks data, can provide reports and the random nickname generator is really fun too.
• Geography Games
  • 5 Themes of Geography Digital Review Game
    • Your students can practice/review identifying and applying the 5 Themes of Geography to various written or visual examples with this resource that uses Google Slides and is perfect to share via Google Classroom for enrichment or distance learning! Both a digital and traditional print student record sheet are included!
  • ​Landforms Digital Review Game
    • ​​Your students can review types of landforms with this resource that uses Google Slides and is perfect to share via Google Classroom for review, enrichment or distance learning!
  • ​Continents and Bodies of Water Digital Review Game
    • ​Your students can review continents and major bodies of water with this resource that uses Google Slides and is perfect to share via Google Classroom for review, enrichment or distance learning!
  • ​Basic Geography Digital Review Game
    • Your students can practice/review basic geography skills with this resource that uses Google Slides and is perfect to share via Google Classroom for enrichment or distance learning!

So, click the links above to take a closer look at the games, and don't forget to visit my story for more great Social Studies resources.  Oh, and if you have any other ideas, please leave them in the comments section.

• My Store
• Kahoot