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? We spent a few days in New Hampshire over the break and before we left, my daughter had created a "Winter Break Bucket List." We made bucket lists over the summer, and I think I may have created a monster because she wants to make bucket lists all the time now! The third item on her list was to go ice skating. When we arrived at Steele Hill, I read on the activities page that they were offering ice skating time on the pond the next morning. Looked like Emerson was going to get to cross at least one thing off her bucket list! Since getting a new knee two years ago, my husband is slightly protective of me, so I was banished to the wooden benches around the fire pit (not burning unfortunately when we were there), far away from the slippery ice. I was able to watch Emerson wobble around and eventually begin to sort of skate across the pond. There were some other mothers sitting and watching their kids skate as well. Of course, as it turned out, the mom sitting next to me was from Groton-Dunstable, a school district where I was once a principal for seven years. Her kids were at the other elementary school, but now they are in middle school and high school. When she learned that I was a principal, she said, "Can I ask your opinion about something?" She explained that her middle school child's English teacher had been explaining to parents that he was going to have the kids grade themselves basically. I ended up talking to her about the importance of letting kids set goals for themselves and helping them learn how to be reflective. My opinion was that I liked that the teacher was working with students to help them own their learning, to help them set goals for themselves, to help them reflect on their learning, and ultimately evaluate their own learning. Of course, the teacher will probably need to help her child and others understand how to grade themselves, but think about how powerful those lessons will be for those students. It made me think about the action and expression part of the UDL framework. We want strategic and goal-directed learners, don't we? Check out the blue column below. Think about how we can work on building these skills with our learners. Especially the bullet point that says formulate plans for learning. Think about how we can help our students formulate their own plans for learning through goal setting. And then helping them to reflect on if those goals were achieved and if their plans worked. These are skills that we can work on with even our youngest learners. Here are a few articles I came across that talk about goal setting with students: https://www.edutopia.org/article/supporting-student-goal-setting/ https://www.edutopia.org/article/guiding-students-set-academic-goals/ After chatting with that mom, I went back to watching my daughter wobble and sometimes skate across the ice. I realized that maybe teaching her about making bucket lists wasn't such a bad idea. She had set some goals for herself and now she was working on achieving one of those goals. After the skating session was done, I know that our conversation would center around if she liked skating, how she thought she did, and if she wanted to do it again at some point. A nice, quick reflection about her goal and her learning. Think about how you can help your students set some goals for themselves over the next six weeks. Definitely love a vacation week to catch up on my reading time! My husband just shakes his head when he sees me curl up somewhere in our house with my stack of books. I am almost finished listening to You Could Make This Place Beautiful and I am excited to start listening to The Women by Kristin Hannah. So many people have recommended it to me. I am excited about a new opportunity where I will be running virtual book clubs for 5th and 6th graders one night a week. The first book we are discussing is A Wrinkle in Time, a classic that I had actually never read so I am reading that one currently. I am also reading Wild for one of my classes, definitely loved it the first time I read it, now loving reading it as a writer gives me a new perspective. And I started reading a new middle grade book, Simon Sort of Says, over the break. Good news, if you read the speech bubble in the graphic above, this week is all about switching things up! It will be quite a different week, but I am sure you all are ready for it. February is coming at us fast and furious (and fabulous)! Looking forward to an afternoon of professional development focused on writing. We will have a chance to see how our rubrics look across the grades. We will also begin to look at what we are using for graphic organizers. You will also have a chance to provide some input to our trimester 2 writing prompt that will be coming up in March. Tuesday is Inspired Learning Day! Please make sure and share with your students on Monday the slideshow that was sent to you. It will give them an idea of the possible sessions that they will be attending. Thank you to Julia and Tracee for creating name tag necklaces for all of your students. On one side there is a sticker with the POL competency that the student selected as his/her number one choice. On the other side, there is a list of the 3 sessions and the room numbers of where he/she needs to go. I will be sending out an email with more details of how the day will go. We will have several high school students here to help. I am also looking forward to the high school drama students performing a portion of "Percy Jackson" for us. They will also connect their characters to a POL Superpower. And hopefully at the end, our students will have a chance to learn part of a song in the musical. At the end of the day, you will have a chance to help lead your class through a reflection of the day. I will also ask you to reflect on the day and think about how to bring components of Inspired Learning Day into your daily lessons and activities. We will also have a group of administrators from Needham Public Schools visiting MURSD and Clough is their first stop on Inspired Learning Day. After we get through a half day and Inspired Learning Day, Wednesday is both the 100th Day of School and World Read Aloud Day! The 100th day is a good time to think about how you have been working with your students for more than half the year now. Think about where they started with you and where they are today. Think about where they will be after 80 more days with them. If you want more information about World Read Aloud Day and what you can do with your students to connect them to classrooms all over the globe celebrating World Read Aloid Day, check out this link.
This week and this month will be fast and furious... and fabulous! Make sure to enjoy every moment! I know we have Inspired Learning Day coming up next week, but this past weekend I felt like there were lots of signs reminding me that inspired learning doesn't just happen on one or two days of the year. And it definitely doesn't just happen within the classroom. The first sign came on Friday night. It was an exciting evening of heading to the grocery store in the Garden house. My husband had a gig so after a really busy week at school, I was switching gears to mom mode. (Even though all I really wanted to do was get into pajamas and crawl into bed!) Every once in a while I like to play a grocery store game with my kids. I bring them to a store, Friday night it was Stop and Shop. I give them each a reusable bag. I tell them they have 20 minutes and they can shop for whatever food items they want. But there's a catch. Friday night I told them they couldn't spend more than $22. And they had to have at least one thing in their bag that counts as "dinner." Emerson brought a notebook and pen with her. Cayce prefers to do mental math and estimation. They tried to ask if they could get other items, not food, which I said no. No to skin care, that's Emerson's favorite thing to buy and no to Pokemon cards for Cayce. I set the timer, they set off shopping, and I was left to buy the essentials like milk and bread. Not only were they excited to do some math while they shopped, but they asked good questions: "Mom, what does 3 slash 8 mean?" or "What does the unit price mean on the tag?" or "What does buy one get one mean?" The high schoolers ringing us up got a kick out of hearing about our game and they cheered with us when Cayce's total came to $20.56 and Emerson's total came to $21.56. In 20 minutes, they authentically learned about decimals, money, estimation, division, and more. They were productive, engaged, and collaborated with each other. And most important, we turned a not-so-exciting activity into a fun experience. The next sign came on Saturday night at the Harlem Wizards game. The energy in the gym was insane. Kids and adults were dancing, cheering, laughing, and spent several hours watching the event unfold on the court. They saw teachers and administrators taking risks and trying something different. They were given the chance at different times to get up and move and to show off their dance moves. They also connected with friends, staff, and the visiting basketball players. The whole event was a model of how we can come together to contribute, support and meaningfully impact our own community. The final sign came on Sunday. My own kids' school was attending the Railers game. (At this point, I was about done with sporting events, but I reluctantly agreed to bring them!) Emerson was selected to participate in a pie eating contest during the third period. Actually Cayce was selected, but he decided he didn't want to do it so Emerson stepped up and said she would take his place. For two periods, she kept saying she was nervous and worried. I kept saying to just have fun and not feel like there was any pressure on her. She ended up doing it and she had fun. She was covered in blueberry pie filling, and was finding it in her ears and in her nose on the drive home, but she was glad that she took a risk and tried something new even though she was nervous...and had never eaten pie before! All of these experiences happened outside of school, but I feel like there are components that we can take from them and bring them into our classrooms and into the school to create many opportunities for inspired learning. Yes, we are going to have an inspired learning day that will provide for new and unique learning opportunities, but we can also think about how to sprinkle those inspired learning moments throughout our lessons. Let's keep thinking of how to authentically inspire kids to have fun with math, to collaborate and communicate with each other, to connect and build experiences that make us laugh until our cheeks hurt, and to take risks, try new things and reflect on their experiences. I got some new books from Bookelicious. One is a picture book called Gibberish, all about a student coming from another language having to learn English. I have a feeling I know some friends who would love this book! And I got two chapter books that I look forward to reading: Simon Sort of Says and The Night Bus Hero. With Family Math Night coming up next week, about to start iReady mid-year assessments, and tears in our house last week over math facts, I have had math on the brain! Thanks to Julie Rondinelli, I think she was the one who recommended this math podcast that I tuned into last week: Rounding Up, A Math Learning Center podcast. The episode I listened to last week was called "The Big Place Value Episode." You can listen to it here or read the transcript. What stuck with me was the notion, or really the reminder, that math is all about relationships. Helping kids to see the connections between numbers. Helping kids see that numbers can be bundled to make a new set of numbers. Helping kids to see the connection when trying to remember the six or seven times tables. (That might have been what was bringing on tears in our house last week.) I have one child who sees those connections in his head. He has a strong number sense. Equivalent fractions are a piece of cake for him right now. I have another child who I am dreading when she is working with fractions next year. Those connections don't come as easy for her and then you compound that with a lack of confidence in her math ability. So how do help those kids? For me, it helped to find a YouTube video where someone had rewritten a Taylor Swift song to help practice 6s and to hopefully start getting the pattern to sink in. I also went and asked chatGPT to give me some good points to share about math and number relationships:
We talk a lot about the importance of connecting with our students. Our theme for this year is "Constructing Stories, Building Connections." Just as we strive to build strong connections with our students, fostering relationships between mathematical concepts such as numbers, patterns, and operations can significantly enhance our students' understanding of math. Think about how you can continue to connect the mathematical dots for our students, how you can help them see the bigger picture of math, how we can help them appreciate the beauty that can be found in the relationships and patterns. How can we empower them, all of them, the ones who easily see the connections and the ones who don't, to become confident, capable mathematicians? I read some more of the new picture books that we received from Bookelicious. These were all part of the kindness collection I ordered. Here are the titles: Something, Someday, All Kinds of Special, A Good Deed Can Grow, and The Heart of a Whale. I am also reading a novel in verse with my daughter, Rez Dogs, a book about a girl stuck with her grandparents on the reservation during the pandemic. I love this thought above from Donalyn Miller. Reading is a social experience on so many different levels. Even though we, and our students, often spend time reading to self, as Donalyn says, reading "begins and ends with other people." The authors, the illustrators, the characters...all kinds of people that we get to interact with through books. Some of the most important people are the ones who recommend books to us. As educators, we need to be the ones recommending books to our students. We need to be modeling book recommendations so that they will then become book recommenders to their peers. And in order to recommend books to our students we need to do two important things. Number one: we need to know our readers. We need to connect with them, know their interests, know their reading skills strengths and weaknesses, and know what background knowledge they are coming to us with. Number two: we need to be reading books ourselves. We need to be reading the new picture books. We need to be reading the new chapter books and graphic novels. I know you might be thinking that you don't have time to read. Trust me, I know all about there being not enough time in a day to do all the things. But if we want to grow our readers, and I know all of you want that, then we need to make the time to read and then recommend books to our students. Sometimes it helps to set some reading goals for yourself. Sometimes it helps to put it on your calendar and hold yourself accountable. Sometimes it helps to either start your day or end your day reading some books. I love to spend an hour at the public library, reading through some picture books or browsing the chapter books to see if there is a new title that I know would be a good one to recommend to some students. You can also follow posts by different teachers and librarians who read early copies of books and share reviews. It's always fun to read an early copy of a book and then be able to hype up the book to kids so they are extra excited for the publishing date! Brianna is going to help us create a display in the main lobby display case where staff can recommend books to students. Be thinking about a chapter book or a picture book that you want to recommend to students. There will be an easy half sheet of paper that you can fill out and we will come take a picture of you holding the book. The kids love to see Clough staff in pictures! I can't wait to see what books you recommend! I ordered several book collections from Bookelicious including one that was all books related to kindness. Perfect timing since that is the core value we are focusing on during KCR right now. I wanted to share with you three of the books from the collection. You are welcome to borrow them to read to your class. The first one is called Just Help! How To Build a Better World written by Sonia Sotomayor. Definitely a good read aloud as we begin to prepare for Inspired Learning Day where some of our students have selected Global Citizen as their super power. The second book is called The Blue Umbrella written by Emily Ann Davison. The blue umbrella in the story starts off as very small, but it magically grows in size to help the community and help bring the community together. And the third book is called The Notebook Keeper: A Story of Kindness from the Border written by Stephen Briseño. This book was inspired by true events and tells a story of humanity and kindness even during difficult times. I am starting two new writing classes this term and for one of my classes I am reading the book Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma. The author is actually my professor! Looking forward to learning from her. |