peer reviews, data, and bears Oh My!

today we have visitors @ our school from other places and they are part of a peer review process that is going on. we have invited administrators and teachers from other schools in and have asked them to look at our school with the eyes of outsiders. we want to know how we appear to other people and we want specific input on two of the goals from the school improvement plan.
some of the people today are looking at a teacher who is doing a lesson that involves the group rubric that we developed through a grant from the gates foundation this summer. a few of us gathered back in august to come up with a group project rubric that could be used across the curriculum in our school. the visitors are watching one of our teachers use this rubric in class and are giving feedback on its use.
secondly, they are looking at our use of data when it comes to individual students. we are in the process of coming up with ways to track individual student progress. in my class, this has ended up being a tracking device that specifically looks at how an individual student has done on unit tests. these unit tests are aligned with the goals and objectives of the course. when it comes time to review i can tell my students where they need to spend the majority of their individual review time. hopefully, this enables us to individualize instruction for each student based on the particular objectives that the student needs to work on.
so finally, where are we? on our way- according to the peer review. which is really all any of us can ask for...

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