KARCHER STAFF BLOG
Karcher Character Students of the Week
All 6 of these students displayed positive character behaviors within our 8 focused traits:
Be... responsible, respectful, kind, safe, honest, loyal, compassionate, courageous.
Students: (left to right) Cody Benzow (Diamond), Romelia Machuca-Puebla (Hive), Allison Ament (Onyx), Molly Fox (Applied Academics), Alexis Yambor (Karcher Character Bucks), Dora Rios (Silver)
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Kudos
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- Barb Berezowitz was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Ellen and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits. Ellen, please come to the main office to receive your prize!
- Thank you to Andrea Hancock and Barb Berezowitz for organizing the school forest field trip. The students really enjoyed it!
- Thank you Kim Moss for setting up the start of the Biggest Loser competition. 18 staff members are involved. Bring it on everyone!!!
- The advisory team (Jack Schmidt, Alyssa Riggs, and Patti Tenhagen) along with Matt Behringer did a nice job organizing the advisory day with the Danish students. Thank you also to Stephanie Rummler for allowing me to participate with your advisory that day.
- Thank you Chuck Runge for your work with our students in the Burlington Area School District. Good luck with your new endeavors.
- Thank you to Kurt Rummler, Kathryn Botsford, Rod Stoughton and Jack Schmidt for having Connie Zinnen (and Jackey Syens in Jack's and Rod's room) and myself in your classrooms to work on the district literacy walkthrough tool. Though you didn't know we were coming, I appreciated your continuation of your lessons and the ability for us to improve our walkthrough template.
- Our first reward day for KCBs was a good start to the use of our KCBs. 45 students took advantage of the free items they could receive with KCBs at lunch time last week.
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Reminders/Information
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- I will not be in the building until 2:15 on Monday as I will be at Dyer for the special education aide interviews - Matt will be in the building all day on Monday. I will be back for our staff meeting.
- Make sure you schedule students for Flexisched on Monday and/or Tuesday for this Thursday/Friday. The remaining students will then be moved to SSR on Wednesday. After iTime on Friday the schedule will be reset for the following three weeks. Please start thinking about what you plan on doing for the enrichment week...
- Either curriculum based (with what you are teaching right now) or The Karcher Way based - needs to be approved by Matt or myself.
- Monday, tomorrow, we have a staff meeting. We will be going over parent-teacher conferences and Educator Effectiveness - start time is 2:40 in the library.
- Wednesday's PLC is for Standards/Common Assessments - these PLCs are in your classrooms.
- FNL is this Friday from 5:00 to 7:00. We have over 15 staff members assisting... awesome!
- See Mike Jones or Matt Behringer if you would still like to help.
- (I will not be able to attend as it is my PhD weekend)
- October 12th is parent/teacher conferences from 4:00 to 7:00.
- Picture retakes will be on October 21st.
- Madison State/Capital/Vets Museum field trip is schedule for:
- October 20th - Silver House
- October 22nd - Hive House
- Spaghetti Dinner fundraiser is on October 25th from 4:00-7:00.
- 8 dollars per ticket, 5 year-olds and under are free, 50/50 raffle, silent auction, carry-outs and walk-ins are encouraged.
- Pre-ticket sales - see an 8th grade student or Mike Jones.
- Cross-Country meet Monday @ 3:30 @ BHS.
- Girls basketball game on Tuesday @ 3:30 @ Karcher.
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Pictures from the week
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The following pictures are from the 7th grade trip to the school forest... it was a perfect day!
Knowing Your Learning Target
The first thing students need to learn is what they're supposed to be learning.
One of Toni Taladay's students walked into Lenape Elementary School wearing a colorful tie-dyed shirt with a tiny bull's-eye shape in the lower front corner. That small design caught the eye of his classmate, who exclaimed, "Look, Joey, you're wearing a learning target!" In the Armstrong School District in southwestern Pennsylvania, learning targets are everywhere: in lesson plans, on bulletin boards, in hallways—and as this story illustrates—firmly on students' minds.
What Is a Shared Learning Target?
If you own a global positioning system (GPS), you probably can't imagine taking a trip without it. Unlike a printed map, a GPS provides up-to-the-minute information about where you are, the distance to your destination, how long until you get there, and exactly what to do when you make a wrong turn. But a GPS can't do any of that without a precise description of where you want to go.
Think of shared learning targets in the same way. They convey to students the destination for the lesson—what to learn, how deeply to learn it, and exactly how to demonstrate their new learning. In our estimation (Moss & Brookhart, 2009) and that of others (Seidle, Rimmele, & Prenzel, 2005; Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2009), the intention for the lesson is one of the most important things students should learn. Without a precise description of where they are headed, too many students are "flying blind."
The Dangers of Flying Blind
No matter what we decide students need to learn, not much will happen until students understand what they are supposed to learn during a lesson and set their sights on learning it. Regardless of how important the content, how engaging the activity, how formative the assessment, or how differentiated the instruction, unless all students see, recognize, and understand the learning target from the very beginning of the lesson, one factor will remain constant: The teacher will always be the only one providing the direction, focusing on getting students to meet the instructional objectives. The students, on the other hand, will focus on doing what the teacher says, rather than on learning. This flies in the face of what we know about nurturing motivated, self-regulated, and intentional learners (Zimmerman, 2001).
Students who don't know the intention of a lesson expend precious time and energy trying to figure out what their teachers expect them to learn. And many students, exhausted by the process, wonder why they should even care.
Consider the following high school lesson on Jane Eyre. The teacher begins by saying,
Today, as you read the next chapter, carefully complete your study guide. Pay close attention to the questions about Bertha— Mr. Rochester's first wife. Questions 16 through 35 deal with lunacy and the five categories of mental illness. The next 15 questions focus on facts about Charlotte Brontë's own isolated childhood. The last 10 items ask you to define terms in the novel that we seldom use today—your dictionaries will help you define those words. All questions on Friday's test will come directly from the study guide.
What is important for students to learn in this lesson? Is it how to carefully complete a study guide, the five types of mental illness, facts about Brontë's childhood, meanings of seldom-used words, or facts about Mr. Rochester's first wife? Your guess is as good as ours.
Constructing a Learning Target
A shared learning target unpacks a "lesson-sized" amount of learning—the precise "chunk" of the particular content students are to master (Leahy, Lyon, Thompson, & Wiliam, 2005). It describes exactly how well we expect them to learn it and how we will ask them to demonstrate that learning. And although teachers derive them from instructional objectives, learning targets differ from instructional objectives in both design and function.
Instructional objectives are about instruction, derived from content standards, written in teacher language, and used to guide teaching during a lesson or across a series of lessons. They are not designed for students but for the teacher. A shared learning target, on the other hand, frames the lesson from the students' point of view. A shared learning target helps students grasp the lesson's purpose—why it is crucial to learn this chunk of information, on this day, and in this way.
Students can't see, recognize, and understand what they need to learn until we translate the learning intention into developmentally appropriate, student-friendly, and culturally respectful language. One way to do that is to answer the following three questions from the student's point of view:
- What will I be able to do when I've finished this lesson?
- What idea, topic, or subject is important for me to learn and understand so that I can do this?
- How will I show that I can do this, and how well will I have to do it?
The online-only figure at www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/books/el_201103_brookhart_figure1.pdf illustrates this process with examples for younger and older students. Carefully tailor your descriptions to your students' unique developmental levels, cultures, and experiences. A learning target should convey to your students what today's lesson should mean for them.
Calendar for October:
