GAPS Review

     At our school, we practiced for the GAPS review today. During our planning period, we met with administration, got checklists, and then split into teams to go and evaluate the third grade teachers.  The main focus of the GAPS review seems to be to check and see if the classroom and lessons are standards based.  Pretty much every question was asking if a standard is used in a certain way, if a standards based work is posted, if the child can give you an answer that sounds like the standard when you ask him what they are doing during their lesson, or simply if the standard is posted.  There wasn’t really any rating of delivery or appropriateness of activities; pretty much just checking for a standards centered environment.  After doing the walkthroughs, which took about fifteen minutes, we met back in the conference room and discussed what we saw, and how we scored our rubrics.  The rating options were: apparent, not obvious, or not available. Most of the ratings were either “apparent” or “not available.”  Later on, we were on the other end of the process. Two administrators came into our room during our reading period, which is one of my subjects.  We had entered into the “student work period,” so there wasn’t really any teaching to score, but I had prepared my students during the activation/mini-lesson as usual by cueing them with the standard and essential question. I also had the standard and essential question posted, and when we gave students individual work, we made sure to refer back to the standard that is being addressed. It was pretty normal, everyday stuff for us so I believe everything went well.

    We entered into a pretty deep discussion in social studies today. I posed an activation question (which ended up encompassing the student work period and summary) of whether or not there are certain things that shouldn’t be done during a war. The student’s opinions and discussion funneled almost perfectly into the issue that I wanted to raise of which wins when in war, “good strategy vs. good morals.”  The kids were having a great debate, and were giving plenty of supporting reasons for their arguments. I believe when we get into more details about the Atlanta Campaign and Sherman’s March to the Sea tomorrow, they will be ready to evaluate the strategic vs. moral decision that was made by General Sherman at that point in the war.