Between two trips to DC and the flu in between, I can't believe March is already almost over. Thank you all for continuing to hold down the fort and doing what's best for kids. I have been in DC this weekend at the ASCD Conference with Wendy Bell, Jen D'Angelo, and Colleen Terrill. I have attended some amazing sessions that I need to process and share with all of you. Some of the topics and learning that I focused on this weekend:
I am in the last sessions of the conference this morning, and then I am looking forward to flying home tonight. But even more, I am looking forward to finally being back in the building and seeing you and all of our kids. I have missed interacting with everyone and popping into your classrooms. Can't wait to be back tomorrow! I was in a session yesterday and they started the session off with one of my favorite inspirational video clips. I thought I would it share it with you. Can't remember if I shared with with you before, but it's a good one for a Monday morning of the last week of March. I have been re-reading a favorite book if mine, Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo. I love this book for so many reasons, but one of the main reasons is there is awesome vocabulary in it and it pushes upper elementary students to expand their vocabulary.
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Nipmuc and Clough have been selected by DESE for a progress monitoring visit in April as a check-in. This is a result of the many grants that we have been awarded by the state recently (Innovation Pathways, MyCAP, Co-Teaching, Cell Phones, S3 Academy, High Quality Instructional Materials). The state is looking to measure the impact of the grants in schools. As part of this process, they conducted a principal questionnaire that I am still working on, a staff survey (coming to your inboxes at some point today), and classroom observations (on April 25, 2024). I have included information about the survey and observations below.
Survey: The survey will open today (March 18). You will receive an introduction email letting you know that the survey will be coming and then another email from Alex Kistner ([email protected]) with a direct link to the survey. They are hoping for at least an 80% completion rate so I would appreciate it if you could complete the survey. I believe you have the next two weeks to complete it. Classroom observations: These observations are scheduled for April 25. They let me know that they will randomly select classrooms to see various grades and content but their focus will primarily be on ELA, math, and science. They do not expect educators to do any special preparation and hope to see typical classroom lessons when they visit. They shared this CSDP Progress Monitoring Observation Info Sheet that contains some information about the tools that will be used for observations. Following the observations, they will share a Schoolwide Instructional Observation Report (SIOR) approximately one week after the visit. It will contain overall summaries of what was seen throughout the full day of observations. It will not contain any data for individual classrooms or teachers. Let me know if you have any questions. Many of you attended one of the sessions I ran on our PD day about the science of reading. And some of the areas we talked about were oral language and vocabulary. I am in DC for the next three days, meeting with government officials and advocating for education, but on Sunday I had the chance to visit the most amazing place...Planet Word! It is a museum that describes itself as an "immersive language experience" and the world's first "voice-activated museum." If someone had told me they were creating a museum about words, my first response would have been how are you going to make that exciting and does interactive mean you have to just go around and push buttons to listen to things? Planet Word blew me away. Everyone that stepped through the doors (bonus that it is housed in an historic school) was so engaged and mesmerized by so many different parts of the museum, including me and my 7-year-old nephew. Not many places have a short story generator by the front door! You could push a button and it would print out a short story, a poem, or a classic story on what looked liked a receipt paper! Stepping into the elevator that was full of images of bookshelves with so many good titles automatically made me light up! It was one amazing experience after another as we went through the museum. We learned and practiced several different languages. Did you know the Zulu language has three different click sounds that are part of the language? We learned about endangered languages. Did you know that languages could be endangered? We learned about language and the power of persuasion and had a chance to try to create our own ad using techniques like wordplay and twisted meaning. We sang songs and learned about metaphor and simile with current lyrics from Imagine Dragons and Drake. We played with language in the joke room and used props to guess funny phrases. We used a teleprompter to give portions of famous speeches. My nephew gave a Barack Obama speech, my brother gave a speech from The Lion King, my sister-in-law gave a speech from Malala, and I gave a speech from Oprah Winfrey. Of course my favorite spot was the library. They had framed displays where you would read a line from a book and the image would light up and a recording would read the rest of a section of a book to you. You could place any book on this special counter and it would animate the book and you would hear from the author talking about their book. It was truly magical! And there was a hidden room behind one of the bookcases where you could sit and listen to some poetry. While we can't bring everyone to DC, I thought we could learn from this museum as we continue to think about how to consistently embed oral language work and vocabulary work. We could learn a lot about how to bring language to life for kids and make vocabulary interesting. Plus, I learned that this museum offers virtual workshops, free lessons, and newsletters for educators. The virtual workshops would be available for our 3rd and 4th graders. Check out their website to see if it's something that you might be interested in. And if you are ever in DC in the future, I highly recommend visiting Planet Word! As we launch into the second half of the year with mid-year assessments and the "season of testing" on the horizon, I think it's the right time for me to share this post. I have written about this topic several times before in previous districts. I want to talk about assessment. Several years ago, I had the chance to attend and present at the MassCUE/MASCD Leadership Conference. I loved the message that was shared by Julie Wilson, the keynote speaker. She was talking about the human side of changing education which she has written a whole book on this topic. (I own the book if anyone is interested in reading more on this topic!) Take a look at this slide that she shared where we could compare schools of the past to where we want schools of the present to be. We could talk about each row and comparison, but I want to focus on the last line. ↑ That one right up there above these words. In the past, assessment happened through written tests and exams and learning was only assessed by the teacher. But now, assessment should be taking many different forms. Students should be assessing themselves, each other, as well as teachers and specialists assessing them. And while it says that assessment should be more of a mastery based assessment of skills, I am wondering if we have truly moved away from content-based assessment? This would be a good time to stop reading this post and do a little self assessment of your assessment process. Are you still focused on content and does your assessment take the form of written tests? Or have you redesigned and rethought your assessment process? Here's another slide from Julie's keynote... There are many great changes that I see on this slide. Moving from knowing to learning. Being focused on asking questions as opposed to having answers. Being comfortable with embracing risk as opposed to mitigating risk. And you know I love the idea of pushing back instead of trying not to rock the boat. But since we are focused on assessment in this post, let's zoom in on the beautiful idea of "prioritize what we value and figure out how to assess it." Seems a little strange to be saying that as next month we are about to begin several weeks of standardized testing. To me, it seems like MCAS and accountability and scores and press releases and everything that is tied into standardized testing fits more in the box associated with "value and prioritize what we assess." Even if we as educators recognize that each child is more than an ELA or math MCAS score, everyone else sure seems to put a whole lot of value into what we are assessing. Changing the structure around standardized testing is certainly biting off more than any of us can chew. But shifting the assessment paradigm in our classrooms...well that is a manageable bite that we can all sink our teeth into, don't you think? We need to ask ourselves...what do we value? And then once we know that, how do we assess it? I have a story from when I was a high school biology teacher that I think might demonstrate what I am talking about. (Sorry, if I have already told you this one, but it's one that has stuck with me all these years.) I was young, fresh out of college, and found myself in a private school, assigned to teaching 10th grade biology. Most of these kids were ones who either chose not to take this class as freshman or who weren't able to because they were behind in their academics. Basically...they weren't exactly the class that was going to light the world on fire. Or at least that was what most of the faculty thought. I saw them differently. And there was one student in particular who I knew was going to be my biggest project. Chandler was a nice kid, a little goofy, but for the most part, a good kid. But there was one major problem with Chandler. He was a 10th grader who could not read. I am not really sure how he got to 10th grade with so few reading strategies and practically no confidence in himself with reading. Looking back now, I am fairly certain he was dyslexic and never diagnosed and never really given interventions. It was a private school and people paid a lot of money so I think teachers simply got him through. I was certainly not going to be able to teach him to read, but I could tell that he loved science and he was a good artist. After the first assessment that I gave him and he failed miserably, I started to think of a different way for him to show me what he was learning...because he was definitely engaged and eagerly soaking up what we were learning. But on the written test...the only way I thought I was able to assess kids...he could not read the questions and then he struggled to write out his answers. What did I value? I valued kids getting excited about science and eagerly participating in labs and discussions. Did I value exam scores and students simply spitting information back to me? Not really. So I decided that he would be assessed in a different way. We came up with a way to do a combination of him orally explaining his answers as well as him drawing diagrams and pictures to show his learning. At the end of the year, one of the most popular memories that many students reflected on was when we were studying cell organelles and Chandler had cooked blueberry pancakes and served them to the class as he discussed the function of the Golgi apparatus. After teaching biology for a few years, I moved to Massachusetts from Virginia, but I often got updates on former students. Guess what? Chandler went on to study marine biology. He had to first do some work at a local community college and I think he actually did get some tutoring help with reading, but I was so happy to learn that his learning struggles did not get in the way of him studying what he loved. That story happened over twenty years ago, and yet we still have assessments that don't fit with how we are trying to do education now. Look at the 5 success factors for change shared by Julie Wilson. Number 5: we need a complete overhaul of the assessment structure of learning and school performance. Twenty years ago, within my own classroom, I was trying to start that overhaul process. The last chart I want to share with you did not come from the keynote presentation. But I often think of it when we talk about assessment. It's from the UDL framework. It has to do with engagement and the "why" of learning. When you look at the goal at the bottom...our ultimate goal is we want learners who are purposeful and motivated. If we stick with the assessment system of the past, written exams, failing grades, only one way to assess, we are going to have a very hard time getting all of our students to reach that goal. We need to figure out how to increase mastery-oriented feedback. And we need to be helping our students develop self assessment and reflection skills. (This is also something that we as adults need a lot of work on for ourselves!)
While the small but mighty group of educators that make up our school probably cannot do much in terms of shifting the standardized testing paradigm, we do have quite a bit that we can do in terms of the rest of assessing that we do in our classrooms. How can we make assessment meaningful and something that is helping us create purposeful, motivated learners? |