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BASH Weekly #5
November 1,2010

New Student Removal Form

New Student Removal Form.

Donations for Good Shepherd Attendance Incentives

Please see Naida Pastrana or Ms. Murdaugh if you have anything to donate. Thanks!

November 2nd Professional Development

Please bring:
  • a lesson plan that you have delivered in the past that you thought was adequate, but was lacking based on student engagement and/or learning. No judgments. This is a day to learn together.
  • Whatever pacing calendar or curriculum you are currently using to guide your instruction this marking period.
Our goal for day is to grow in our understanding of lesson plan and curriculum plan development.

The day's schedule will unfold as follows
7:30 - 8:00

8:00-10:00

10:00-10:15

10:00-10:15

11:00-12:00

12:00-1:00

1:00-2:00

2:00-3:00
Breakfast- Coffee and Donuts

Lesson Plan Development

Break

CORE Team- unit creation in Atlas

Teachers create mock unit in Atlas

Lunch (in-house Italian buffet)

Atlas Rubicon webinar

Lesson Plan share-out and discussion

News We All Can Use

The Importance of Writing in the Curriculum

"There are no silver bullets in education," says author/consultant Douglas Reeves in this American School Board Journal article. "But writing - particularly nonfiction writing - is about as close as you can get to a single strategy that has significant and positive effects in nearly every other area of the curriculum. Nonfiction writing is the backbone of a successful literacy and student achievement strategy." That's because improvements in writing lead to gains in reading comprehension, math, science, and social studies.

The results of an insufficient focus on writing K-12 are well known in colleges (large numbers of students need remedial courses) and the workplace ($3 billion a year is spent bucking up the writing skills of new employees). The writing gap can be traced back to the early grades, where phonics-based reading programs build fluency but not deeper comprehension. "Reading quickly and clearly is nice," says Reeves, "but hardly an accomplishment when students do not understand the information they are reading."

Why aren't students being asked to do more writing? It's partly because some state tests aren't assessing writing, and partly because of a myopic focus on reading skills during the literacy block. "This wrongheaded approach denies research that shows that, when students improve their ability to describe, explain, and persuade in writing, they also improve their reading comprehension," says Reeves. "And when they improve their skills in writing and reading, they also improve their performance - even on multiple-choice tests - in math, science, social studies, and other subjects."

The Lake Villa K-8 school district in Illinois has made writing a core part of its improvement strategy. Teachers have students write to a prompt every six weeks and use home-grown rubrics to analyze the writing, spot areas of weakness, give immediate feedback to students, and share successful practices among themselves. "We start early and never quit," says superintendent John Van Pelt, "emphasizing writing in every class from kindergarten through eighth grade." The district has posted impressive gains in student achievement, even as poverty levels in the district have increased.

\Budget cuts have led the state of Illinois to eliminate writing from state assessments, but this hasn't changed Lake Villa's strategy. "We're doing the right thing," says Van Pelt, "and that's all there is to it. Writing helps kids get ready for high school, college, and life, and we're not going to stop just because it's not on the test."

"The Write Way" by Douglas Reeves in American School Board Journal, November 2010 (Vol. 197, #11, p. 46-47), no e-link available.

Ingredients of Successful Advisory Programs

In this Teachers College Record article, Loyola University/Chicago researcher Kate Phillippo reports on a study of 44 teachers who worked in advisory programs in their small high schools. She analyzed two dimensions:           

Resources - These included years of teaching experience, work experience outside their current position, experience working with children, experience working with low-income youth, experience with challenging personal circumstances, experience parenting or caring for a dependent child or adult, adult support from colleagues, administrators, or mentors, and formal education. Teachers with limited resources struggled as advisory group leaders and were critical of their own performance. "Advisors who brought experience, support, and other resources to the position, however, did not necessarily enjoy a clear path to the effective, seamless management of their role demands," says Phillippo.

Schemas - These included a vision for providing social-emotional support to students, a vision for advising students, their own ideas about how to conduct the advisory period, a sense of how to respond to emergent student situations, role boundaries with respect to student needs, and role boundaries with respect to their own professional needs. Teachers with well-developed schemas tended to be more successful, even if they brought fewer resources to the table.

Phillippo placed teachers into four quadrants according to their scores on resources and schemas:

            Quadrant A - Low resources, low schema

            Quadrant B - Low resources, high schema

            Quadrant C - High resources, low schema

            Quadrant D - High resources, high schema

Teachers in Quadrant A were the least effective as advisors and teachers in Quadrant D were the most effective. Quadrant B teachers were next in line, with Quadrant C teachers next-to-bottom. "A combination of developed schemas and higher levels of personal resources seemed not only to help advisors do the work effectively and clearly, but also to help immunize them against becoming overwhelmed by the intensity and volume of demands placed upon them," concludes Phillippo. She also notes that support within the school makes a difference - house teacher meetings, job-embedded professional development, and one-on-one advice from colleagues.

"Teachers Providing Social and Emotional Support: A Study of Advisor Role Enactment in Small High Schools" by Kate Phillippo in Teachers College Record, August 2010 (Vol. 112, #8, p. 2258-2293), no e-link available

Keys to Improving Teaching and Learning

In this Kappan article, Illinois educators Thomas McCann, Alan Jones, and Gail Aronoff say that in our current obsession with accountability and testing, we sometimes lose sight of the basics. "While administrators busy themselves with an array of responsibilities and teachers faithfully attend institutes and afterschool workshops to learn the newest techniques, the century-old assign-and-assess method of instruction remains intact: Teachers talk a lot, students listen a lot, teachers grade a lot."

After visiting hundreds of classrooms in a variety of schools, the authors have the following suggestions:

  • Stop using business terminology like accountability, quality dashboards, and metrics to describe what we do in schools. "Unlike our counterparts in the business sector," say McCann, Jones, and Aronoff, "we cannot be certain that stable inputs, outputs, and means of production are a part - nor will ever be a part - of teaching 25 or more students how to read, write, compute, and think well." Instead of accountability, they suggest that we use the word responsibility - responsibility for knowing how children learn best, what knowledge is most worthwhile, how subject matter should be organized, how to teach most effectively, how to assess what students understand, and how to organize schools to support teaching and learning.

  • The whole staff must have a shared understanding of what high-quality teaching looks like, and this needs to be the centerpiece of recruitment, hiring, induction, mentoring, evaluation, and professional development.

  • School leaders need to get into classrooms on a regular basis. "The goal of these observations is to identify the extent of the gaps between the teaching that actually occurs in the classrooms and the agreed-on vision of what good teaching should be," say McCann, Jones, and Aronoff.

  • Put in place a supportive teacher evaluation system that sets clear standards of performance and promotes teachers' development.

  • Work together to narrow the gap between the school's instructional vision and what's happening in classrooms. This involves orchestrating the following: teachers working with mentor/experts who model, observe, and provide feedback; time for collegial teamwork; teaching teachers how to structure high-quality interactions between themselves, students, and peers; making sure all teachers master basic routines, such as focusing students on the essential concepts, reminding them what they have experienced so far, and helping them see how the curriculum is preparing them for the future; and flexibility for teachers to adapt theories and practices in their classrooms.
  • Make the curriculum more coherent. "The American curriculum covers too much with too little emphasis on understanding," say McCann, Jones, and Aronoff. "Students are expected to make sense out of catalogs of names, definitions, and routines. The only students who thrive in this instructional chaos are ones who already have a background that provides a context for these catalogs or ones who have a proclivity for imposing order on abstract symbol systems. Few students fall into either category." Teachers need to organize subjects so students are involved in disciplined approaches to solving contemporary problems and design assignments that ask students to replicate authentic responses to real-world tasks.
  • Increase academic learning time. Instruction is constantly being interrupted by PA announcements, student chit-chat, teachers conferring with colleagues in the hallway, and so forth. "The more diversions there are," say McCann, Jones, and Aronoff, "the less students learn."

"Truths Hidden in Plain View" by Thomas McCann, Alan Jones, and Gail Aronoff in Phi Delta Kappan, October 2010 (Vol. 92, #2, p. 65-67), available for purchase at http://www.kappanmagazline.org
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