End of the Year...

As we all know, the last few days of school can be difficult as students and teachers alike are getting impatient for summer days! I am working hard this year to be sure each of these last days is used to its fullest intstructional potential by working with my co-teachers to plan final projects and by reminding my students to "finish well". Even with these things in mind, students are already checking out for the year! It is an age-old question that will forever haunt educators as long as we have a summer, but I am wondering...

What are some strategies you use to make your year-end meaningful for your students? What are some activities or other strategies you use to keep students focused and to keep your sanity? :-)

(Not that I'm counting, but there are only 6 school days after today...)

Top Five Learnings from the PLC Book Learning By Doing by the DuFours...
(In no particular order)

5. PLC refers to a way of thinking, a way of life, for an entire school, not just teams of teachers.

4. Teams within a PLC school must be backed by administration who must be on the same page as the district.

3. In order to be effective, PLCs need to dive into data to find patterns and answer the questions of "now what" in their curriculum.

2. In order to dive into data, PLC teams need to create and administer common assessments.

1. Above all the initiatives a school can engage in, the quality educator in a classroom is consistently the most effective resource in student achievement.

I do love blogs.

I know I haven't posted too much on here but I've been stalking foodie and textile blogs to get new ideas for my classroom and help my mentee! Also, I've been digging into Pinterest for new ideas (which often link to more blogs!). It's lead to experimentations in my kitchen, a dining room table filled with crafts every weekend and new books on my bookshelves. :)

In any case, this blogging thing is something I'm going integrate into my teaching next fall. In the past, students have been required to complete one home cooking assignment a month. It was a pencil and paper type thing. Why am I still allowing such an archaic practice to occur when students can more readily track their culinary adventures on the internet? And, why limit their opportunity to explore to just family recipes or cookbooks at their house? Well, I decided - NO MORE! I've decided that next year I'm going to have all of my Baking & Pastry students blog at least one time a month and either post a link/comments to other blogs they follow on our site. This way, they can try new recipes and share their adventures with their classmates! They can more readily critique their experience and tell their classmates what was great and not so great! I'm going to have to connect with kara and other blogger people to see how this works in the classroom. I want it to be as successful as possible so talking with those folks first might provide me with insight I hadn't already thought of!

Testing.... So much testing

It is quarter 4 and as an eighth grade teacher, I am starting to feel the pressure of state testing. I can also see the exhaustion that is it causing to each of my students. Eighth graders are taking their math, science and reading MCA's all during quarter 4 and that doesn't even include the MAP tests for math and reading which they will also be taking during quarter 4. My students will have some sort of state test almost every week for the remainder of the school year. While state tests are very important to measure a students growth and comparison, I feel they cause many students shut down and not work to their full potential if they are overwhelmed with tests week after week. I would like to pose the question: How much testing is too much? Do students benefit from taking multiple State tests during a quarter?

KWL: PLC Style

As a never-ending learner, I know that I often learn best when I am able to talk through the ideas and concepts I am attempting to understand. It is for this reason that I enjoy the opportunity each year to participate in a book study discussion group with a few colleagues. We just received our books yesterday and are planning out meeting times to delve into the wisdom of the DuFours on effective PLCs.

(K) Some of my notions and experiences with PLCs before reading:
* PLCs exist to create cohesive and effective learning situations for students
* Good PLCs use data to drive their discussions
* Good PLCs agree to and follow a set of norms
* PLCs allow teachers to collaborate rather than make things up on their own.
* Sometimes PLC discussions are tough because everybody has different ideas.
* It is important for everybody to be committed to the vision of a PLC or it is hard to work as one.

(W) Some things I hope to gain from this book study, or things I want to know:
* How does one effectively lead a PLC group?
* What are some things my PLC is not doing that could help us be more effective?
* What is the recommendation for number of people involved in a PLC?
* What are some strategies PLCs use to create curriculum together?
* How should/are PLCs held accountable?

(L) I am sure I will be learning many things as I read through this book and discuss it with others; I will post when I learn something new!


* Have you ever done a book study with your colleagues? What was the experience like?
* Have you read the DuFour book Learning By Doing before? What did you think?
* What are your thoughts/want-to-knows about PLCs?

Standardized...

This will be quick.

During our PLC meeting today, we were considering the best way to assess our students on some non-fiction writing standards. As we discussed this, we realized that even within one standard, there were about fifty different vocabulary words, skills, etc. to which students (and teachers!) are held accountable. Since the new standards come in a smaller package, it seems as though any talk of deciding on your "power standards" and providing focus has completely disappeared. There are a lot of things our students need to know and quickly.

Do you ever feel like it is just too much??

Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of standards. I absolutely agree with standards-based teaching and assessment. There would indeed be chaos without it.

There are just some days when it feels like our students are asked to learn a lot in one year, and the task of teaching and assessing each standard we are given feels like attempting to do the impossible.

There. A quick snapshot of what I am currently pondering.


Any suggestions?

• How do you find focus in the new standards within your department?
• What are some ways you have found to minimize the stress of assessing all standards? 
• In what ways do you hold students and teachers accountable to your standards?
• Other ideas?

Reflective Rambling Autobiography...

Okay. It's been a while.

We have been writing memoirs with our students and it has been inspiring to watch our sixth graders realize they have a story to tell and to watch their eyes light up as they watch their stories be put into print. Some teachers have their students do a "rambling autobiography" to brainstorm some ideas for their memoirs; I have been out of the blogging world for a few months, so I thought I would get back in the swing of things with a "reflective rambling autobiography"...

I have been developing professionally by working on my final capstone project on co-teaching for my Master's degree. The literature review was one of the most difficult projects I have come across to date (and the reason I have been out of blogging world...), but I was fascinated to learn how my EL students acquire language and how to collaborate with another teacher to help facilitate this process. During second quarter, we added many sections of co-teaching and I found myself with a new co-teaching partner, so we have been working to blend our teaching styles into one classroom. I am learning a lot about leading a PLC and facilitating discussions so they are productive and meaningful for everyone in the department. We have completed many data protocol discussions this year, which have been eye-opening as we continue to struggle toward common assessments and grading practices. Along with my Master's, leading a PLC and co-teaching, or perhaps because of all this, I am learning a lot about myself as a teacher and have been forced to learn the importance of balance and of building good relationships with my colleagues. Side note: my colleagues are truly a blessing. This quarter, I am looking forward to a professional book club, new read alouds with my students, and heading to Seattle and Vancouver over spring break where I am excited to explore Pike's Place Market and do a zipline tour of the mountains of Canada.

Phew.

Now, you ramble...

*What are your thoughts on productive PLCs? What do they look like? What do they accomplish? What is awesome or difficult about them?

*How do you implement balance in your life as an educator?

*What do you appreciate most about your colleagues?

Reflections on Interventions.....

Back in November, many IC’s, LC’s and intervention teachers had the opportunity to attend the LiRN (Leadership in Reading Network) conference in Shoreview, MN. The afternoon sessions provided many pieces of insight upon which to reflect and below are my thoughts...

Matt Burns, PhD, from the University of Minnesota gave a presentation on “Using Data to Navigate the Ocean of Interventions”. As you all know, there are MANY interventions available on the market. He ascertains that it is critical to individualize the intervention for each student and to stray from “one stop intervention”. For example, use MAP, MCA, or TOSCRF scores to identify students who need interventions. From those who need interventions, provide additional testing to identify specific areas (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocab/comprehension). Then, if a student needs support in Fluency, to select a research-based program that focuses on Fluency. Likewise, if a student needs support on comprehension to select a research-based program that focuses on developing comprehension.

Dr.Vicki Weinberg from the Department of Education also gave a brief session on “Multi-tiered Systems of Support”. She talked about how to change the system of assessments, interventions and practices to better meet the needs of all students. She focused on how sometimes there are pools of money from different areas (Title I, ELL, Special Ed) and often, in many districts, it is practice to exclude certain students from certain interventions because of these pools of money (he/she can’t enroll in the reading support class because he/she is already getting special ed services). She offered the idea to first identify the needs of the students, then to identify the staff’s capacity to meet those needs regardless of job title or label (i.e. if there is a staff member who is stellar at reading interventions, he/she should administer interventions to whomever needs reading interventions). I will be the first to admit, that I have NO IDEA how funding works in our district with regards to this topic but the presentation really made me reflect on how we best meet the needs of our students regardless of which category they may fall into and the idea of better aligning our interventions based on the identified needs and not “robbing Peter to pay Paul” (she used that quote a few times).

Questions I walked away from the conference with:

• What does intervention look like in Shakopee schools?


• How does it support all students regardless of labels/categories?


• How do we offer interventions systematically across schools?


• And, as we grow into a larger district, how to do we ensure all staff (especially the intervention/reading specialists) are on the same page with the process of offering interventions?

So many big questions are in front of us and even bigger opportunities for growth and change.

Good Teaching

I was doing a little research on effective ways to support educators. On his website, Marzano wrote "...not too many years ago, when they were looking for the highest performing systems/districts in the world, and they looked at the top ten. And, unfortunately, I believe, there were none of the top ten from the United States. But of the top ten, every single one had a focus on good teaching. They were designed to help teachers get better".

So my question to you is....
What is "good" teaching?
and
What experiences or support teacher growth and development?

Differentiated Instruction

1. What does differentiated instruction mean to you?


2. How have you successfully used differentiated instruction in your classroom?


3. What roadblocks might you have experienced with implementing differentiation?

Lately....

I've been spending my "free" (professional development) time dipping into numerous volumes of information - from differentiation to socratic seminars and homework/grading philosophies. Posts will be forth coming on most of those topics but most recently, I've been digging into information and background of courses like Baking and Pastry. Why? Well, our department noticed an overlap in what we were teaching students so we combined two courses into one so we could offer a new, college-articulated course called Baking and Pastry.

This has been a journey, like most things not simple, that ended in a fruitful bounty! I began by researching other schools in the state that had similar courses, concentrating on districts most closely situated to Shakopee. I created a survey for our current Foods 1 and 2 students, asking how many would actually take a course like that and if so, what course they would replace in their current schedule. before we went ahead, we needed to identify if this was even something students would take. Being an elective, our course offerings and their interest and relevance to the students (and to college credit opportunities) are critical to our survival. After surveying our students, we found that most said they would take it instead of a study hall! This was good news as we didn't want to necessarily pull from other courses.

I created this beautiful packet for presentation on what the course would entail and our research findings. At the time, it didn't move forward - for various reasons. This year, the department head suggested we try again and we were met with SUCCESS!

This is incredibly exciting and something I really like to learn about! I'm hoping I can find grant money (Perkins) to allow me to take the actual college course this summer and learn all the great techniques to being a successful wizard in the baking and pastry kitchen. Until then, I'm identifying other districts who offer this course and pulling resources that may become very helpful for curriculum writing. I'm reading textbooks and very detailed cooking books to pull key information.

Obviously, the content is very exciting but I truly do believe that curriculum writing is a HUGE passion of mine. To start with a vision and articulate all the various details on how to precisely get to that vision is fun to me and I'm so eager to get started. I've even started my bank of essential questions.............

Until the next time!

End of Semester 1

I am finding it hard to believe that semester 1 is over after today. Over the years that I have worked for Shakopee, this year has gone by the quickest. I can think back to last year at this time and remember how excited I was that my classes would be changing with different groups of students. This year I am slightly sad, as I really enjoyed the groups of students I had for all of my classes.

One thing I am looking forward to for 2nd semester is the credit recovery class that I am picking up. I will be working with a lot of our struggling students who failed 1st semester algebra. I know they are going to be a harder group to work with, but the feeling of accomplishment when they do pass and earn their credit will pay off.

What is everyone looking forward to for the 2nd half of the school year? Can you believe its already here?

What Teachers Make

I wanted to share a poem with all of you that my mom had sent me this week showing her apprecation for all that we do. Enjoy!!!!

http://www.taylormali.com/index.cfm?webid=13

How do you feel about mandatory online classes?

Just saw this article......very interesting.

• What might be some benefits on requiring students to take at least one online class before graduating high school?




• What might be some negative implications of this mandatory requirement?