KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Student's of the week for

February 15 - February 19

Mackenzie Leach (Diamond)

Mackenzie has a great sense of humor. She is a quite leader in the classroom and is always making good choices.

Seth Chamberlin (Onyx)

Seth always has a positive attitude, works hard, is actively engaged, participates regularly, and works well with others.

Anthony Galgano (KCB)

Anthony is always walking around with a smile on his face. He also always has a positive "Karcher Way" attitude.

Antonio Villa (Applied Academic)

Antonio comes to class with a positive attitude and puts forth exemplary effort.

Cody Lunsmann (Silver)

Cody has a positive attitude and is always willing to help teachers and students alike.

Wendy Villigran (Hive)

Wendy continues to demonstrate all of "The Karcher Way" characteristics, but this week she was especially responsible with her work.

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Kudos

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Kris Thomsen was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Kris and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits.
Congrats to Jeri Nettesheim and all 15 of our Academic Bowl students who competed in Whitewater. This was the FIRST year we have ever had an Academic Bowl team and they placed 2nd as a team!!! Individual winners are listed below in the pictures section of the blog.
Thank you to Marian Hancock as she has entered all the students applied academic selections in record speed! Thank you Marian for your hard work with scheduling.

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Reminders

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Budgets should have been turned in to Kim by February 19th. If you have not done so please get those to Kim yesterday as I need time to look over all the budgets in order to meet my deadlines.
Forward Exam information is slowly coming out.

The exam window is between March 28 - May 20.
BASD has decided that our district will start exams after April 11th.
Practice exam questions should be available starting February 28th.
The exams we need to give are:

7th grade: ELA & Math
8th grade: ELA, Math, Science, & Social Studies.
We will be creating a schedule to accommodate students taking these exams in their specific content areas (ex: ELA with ELA teachers) we will work on that schedule soon.

Forward Exam Information from DPI

We have moved the lunch detention room to Jennifer Pelnar's room... please assist students in knowing that Ms. Waki's room is no longer the room to go to for detentions or for turning in KCBs.
Tech Tuesday this week: Molly will be assisting staff with how to change the agendas for students within their student led conference eportfolios. Take advantage of this time starting at 2:40 in Molly's room.
PLCs this week are for standards and common assessments. After the PLC please print a copy of your work and put it in my mailbox.
February 29th morning schedule is listed below. Patti Tenhagen also sent out a more detailed agenda via email. Please see Patti, Alyssa Riggs, Jack Schmidt, or Matt Behringer if you have questions about the morning of February 29th.
February 29th afternoon in-service from 1:00 - 3:00

Special Education teachers, counselors, and ELL coordinators will be with Gail for the afternoon working on the accommodations for students regarding the Forward Exam. Gail will be in contact regarding the location for this meeting.
The rest of the staff will meet in the library...

Katie Newholm and Erika Fons will be talking for about 10 minutes regarding Karcher Companions - a new program we are looking to start in the next few weeks.
Student Goal Sheets - Please bring your advisory goal sheets to the in-service as we will take some time to distribute/decide which student's goal sheets you are going to write a positive comment. The expectation is for each staff member to have approximately 15 students each. Applied Academic teachers please come to the in-service with your 15-20 students already picked out (write them on a piece of paper) in order to speed up the process. The academic teachers will then split up the students that are left after applied academics choose. Also those teachers who will not be present due to the Gail meeting please get your 15-20 names to someone on your advisory team so they can pull yours for you as well.
Quick conversation about ELA changes for the 2016-2017 school year.
Lastly... wait for it... staff will be taking the MAPS tests in order for all staff members to get a sense of what it is the students are tested on. Staff will then be partaking in some reflection activities as well in order to ensure what we are focusing on in our classrooms align with the types of questions asked in the MAP tests.

Advisory teachers - make sure you are calling your advisory student's parents/guardians to schedule their student led conference. Everyone should be entering each of your parents/guardians selected times on this Google Slide Format

Please make sure you work on making your contacts this week.

March 1st is the deadline for students to have all of their items added to their student led eportfolios. Classroom teachers please make sure you are checking the folders pertaining to your subject area and providing time within your class for students to add necessary artifacts.
Band-O-Rama is March 7th @ 7:00pm @ BHS gym.
March 7 & 14 will be an extended advisory time for students to work on their student led conferences presentation to their parents. This time should be used to practice presenting for their conferences held on either the 14th or 22nd.

Student led conferences/parent-teacher conferences are March 14 and March 22 from 4:00 - 8:00.
Student Led times are at 4:00 and 6:00
Parent/Teacher conferences held in the library will be from 4:45 - 5:45 and 6:45 - 8:00

National Junior Honors Society awards will be held on March 21st in the BHS auditorium starting at 6:30pm.

See Mike Jones or Stephanie Rummler for details.

And we can't forget that spring break starts March 25th!!! Coming up fairly quickly :)

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Pictures from the week

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We should all be very proud of our 15 students (10 Karcher, 5 Dyer) who competed in the Academic Bowl held in Whitewater. This is the FIRST TIME EVER that we have had a team representing from middle school and they took 2ND PLACE as a team!!! Jeri Nettesheim was their advising representative from Karcher.

The following students placed individually as follows:

Quentin Holle - 1st Place Social Studies

Tyler Duesing - 3rd place Science

Al Jost - 1st place Social Studies

Kaden Kafar - 2nd place Math

Jacob Lyon - 2nd place ELA

Jacob Follis - ist place Math

Katie Rummler - 2nd place ELA

Hailey Hotvedt - 3rd place Social Studies

Drew Stutzman - 3rd place ELA

The enter group for the Academic Bowl...

Students working with Ms. Fons and Ms. Schmidt within group with the focus being partner communication.

Students in Ms. Rummler and Mr. Schmidt's classes partaking in a North vs. South war simulation. Each student had a specific role (solider, general, medic, etc) Great way to bring history to life for our students.

Article of the week:

Leading to Change / Effective Grading Practices

Douglas B. Reeves

If you wanted to make just one change that would immediately reduce student failure rates, then the most effective place to start would be challenging prevailing grading practices. How can I be so sure? Try this experiment in your next faculty meeting. Ask your colleagues to calculate the final grade for a student who receives the following 10 grades during a semester: C, C, MA(Missing Assignment), D, C, B, MA, MA, B, A. I have done this experiment with thousands of teachers and administrators in the United States, Canada, and Argentina. Every time—bar none—I get the same results: The final grades range from F to A and include everything in between.

As this experiment demonstrates, the difference between failure and the honor roll often depends on the grading policies of the teacher. To reduce the failure rate, schools don't need a new curriculum, a new principal, new teachers, or new technology. They just need a better grading system.

Ineffective Grading

The results of my experiment are not surprising. Guskey and Bailey (2001) and Marzano (2000) have synthesized decades of research with similar findings. Neither the weight of scholarship nor common sense seems to have influenced grading policies in many schools. Practices vary greatly among teachers in the same school—and even worse, the practices best supported by research are rarely in evidence.

For example, the most effective grading practices provide accurate, specific, timely feedback designed to improve student performance (Marzano 2000, 2007; O'Connor, 2007). In the best classrooms, grades are only one of many types of feedback provided to students. Music teachers and athletic coaches routinely provide abundant feedback to students and only occasionally associate a grade with the feedback. Teachers in visual arts, drafting, culinary arts, or computer programming allow students to create a portfolio to show their best work, knowing that the mistakes made in the course of the semester were not failures, but lessons learned on the way to success. In each of these cases, "failures" along the way are not averaged into a calculation of the final grade.

Contrast these effective practices with three commonly used grading policies that are so ineffective they can be labeled as toxic. First is the use of zeroes for missing work. Despite evidence that grading as punishment does not work (Guskey, 2000) and the mathematical flaw in the use of the zero on a 100-point scale (Reeves, 2004), many teachers routinely maintain this policy in the mistaken belief that it will lead to improved student performance. Defenders of the zero claim that students need to have consequences for flouting the teacher's authority and failing to turn in work on time. They're right, but the appropriate consequence is not a zero; it's completing the work—before, during, or after school, during study periods, at "quiet tables" at lunch, or in other settings.

Second is the practice of using the average of all scores throughout the semester, a formula that presumes that the learning early in the semester is as important as learning at the end of the semester (Marzano, 2000; O'Connor, 2007). Interestingly, when teachers and administrators have been students in my graduate courses, they routinely insist that they should be evaluated on the basis of their understanding at the end of the semester rather than their work throughout the term.

Third is the use of the "semester killer"—the single project, test, lab, paper, or other assignment that will make or break students. This practice puts 18 weeks of work at risk based on a project that might, at most, have consumed four weeks of the semester.

A small but growing number of school systems are tackling the issue head-on with comprehensive plans for effective grading practices. (The policy developed by one such district, Grand Island Public Schools in Nebraska, is available athttp://wikiassessments.editme.com/files/GradingandReporting/G%26R%20Guiding%20Docs.pdf.)

But even in districts that have attempted to put effective grading policies in place, enforcement is often inconsistent. Grading seems to be regarded as the last frontier of individual teacher discretion. The same school leaders and community members who would be indignant if sports referees were inconsistent in their rulings continue to tolerate inconsistencies that have devastating effects on student achievement.

A continuation of this article will be in next week's blog...

Schedule for February 29th: