Educator Dr. Robert J. Marzano recently visited four Palm Beach County schools to observe and provide feedback on how his methods are being implemented.
Marzano visited Acreage Pines Elementary School, the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Jr. School of the Arts, Calusa Elementary School and Palm Springs Middle School to observe, coach and offer feedback to teachers and administrators. The four schools are among the five demonstration schools in Palm Beach County for the Marzano Center Essentials for Achieving Rigor, co-developed by Learning Sciences International.
“Because Palm Beach County’s demonstration schools have had such success participating in and implementing the strategies introduced during the demonstration school site trainings and coaching sessions, Dr. Marzano decided to see their progress first-hand,” said Keith Oswald, the district’s interim chief academic officer. “This is significant to our teachers because they have the opportunity to obtain feedback on their instructional practice by Dr. Marzano himself.”
The district has been implementing the Marzano framework as its system to observe teachers in the classroom since 2011.
“What these schools are doing is really revolutionary,” Marzano said after two days of classroom visits. “It’s inspiring and powerful in terms of the depth of student thought and the classroom interactions we’ve seen. The teachers in the demonstration schools have an awareness of what rigor looks like — students justifying and explaining things, providing evidence. They are developing the ability to analyze their own conclusions and those of others, and to revise their knowledge. This ability is at the heart of deep learning.”
Marzano is executive director of the Marzano Center at Learning Sciences International in West Palm Beach. A leading researcher in education, he is a speaker, trainer and author of more than 30 books and 150 articles on topics such as instruction, assessment, writing and implementing standards, cognition, effective leadership and school intervention.
Marzano is co-creator, with the Learning Sciences Marzano Center, of the Marzano Hierarchical Evaluation System, which includes evaluation models for teacher, school leader, non-classroom instructor and district leader evaluation.
