April 4th

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

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Kudos

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• Thank you to all of our teachers for two great student led conference days!  For this being my first time I was impressed with the students effort and parents attentiveness towards their students academics.  
• Thank you Mike Jones and Stephanie Rummler for an awesome National Junior Honor Society induction on Monday night at BHS.  I thought the whole program was very well done, thought out, and organized.  What a great way to celebrate our students academic successes!
• A shout out to Nick Buendia for truly embracing the literacy tools and incorporating the synthesizing strategy right away with your students!  The infusion of literacy across the disciplines is so important as we assist to ensure all students are college and career ready - so thank you!

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Reminders

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• iTime - new rotations start this week.  This week advisory curriculum will be on Wednesday (as it was).  
• Starting the week of April 11 advisory curriculum will be on Mondays with intervention/enrichment for English/Math on Tuesdays - Friday each week.  We will try the schedule this way for the rest of the year to see which way we prefer the schedule to be. 
• SPEN will be during iTime on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
• April 6 & 8 a group of our 8th grade special education students will be going to the high school to assist with their transition next year.  See Erika Fons with any questions.
• PLC this week is for Standards and Common Assessments.
• April 7th is the end of 3rd quarter:
• The grading window opens on April 4 and closes on April 11 at 3:30pm.  
• April 7th - Applied Academic, Social Studies, and Science - ELA day in room 26.
• Applied Academic from 8:00 - 11:15
• Lunch 11:15 - 11:45
• Social Studies/Science from 11:45 - 3:00
• 8th grade student's red folders:
• The folders are on the counter in the main office by advisory.  Please take them and hand them out this week. 
• Kim will send out an email on April 4 to inform parents that they should be looking for the red folders to be brought home by their student if they did not attend student led conferences.  
• Teachers:  Please respond back to be with your teams decision regarding 8th Grade Recognition and the staff idea by April 8th so that we can get rolling on the plan.
• April 18 - April 22 - Forward Exam Week - we will be utilizing the following schedules for testing:
• Modified Schedule for April 18, 19, and 20.  
• April 21 & 22 is for 8th grade testing only and our make-up schedule will be on April 26.  
• Please assist with letting students know that they will all need headphones for this test.  We do not have enough within the building for every student so we will need students to bring a pair in for this exam.  

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Pictures from the week

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On Display @ Public Library now till April 8th, then April 10th @ BHS for Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast. April 11th Kiwanis hosts a dinner for award winners at Cotton Exchange.

Out of 29 spots, KMS took 26. 

JC Summer Amann - Clay Monster

1st Victoria Vandan - Symmetrical Papercut

2nd Jaedyn Bieniewski - Tempra Batik Door

3rd Selena Casiano Ming - Vase Scratch Art

Chosen for Participation & Display

Saige Helen - Balance Collage

Ashley Rudolf - Reduction Print

Tessa Teberg - Reduction Print

Courtney Hegemann - Balance Collage

Quinn Turke Ming - Vase Scratch Art

Jessica Kauth - Picasso Pet

Jessica Kauth - Textured Hand Drawing

Addie Mangold - Watercolor Landscape

Hannah McMartin - Watercolor Landscape

Leah Beardsley - MC Escher Room

CeCe Donegan - MC Escher Room

Katie Rebollar - Balance Collage

Payton Kretschmer -  2 Pt Perspective City

Jadyn Nadboralski  - Still Life Drawing

Minna Brown  - Clay Monster

Cheyenne Matson  - Clay Monster

Alex Gauger - Lemon Drawing

Alex Gauger - Still Life

Meghan Harris - Balance Collage

Meghan Harris - Op Art Composition

Victoria Vandan - Still Life

Victoria Vandan - Clay Monster

Article of the week:  Continuation from last week's article (next week will be as well)

Know Thy Impact

John Hattie

Teachers give a lot of feedback, and not all of it is good. Here's how to ensure you're giving students powerful feedback they can use.

The Three Levels of Feedback

It's important to realize that feedback will look somewhat different at three separate levels:

Task Feedback

Feedback at this level describes how well the student performs a given task—such as distinguishing correct from incorrect answers, acquiring specific information, or building surface knowledge. The feedback clarifies what the student needs to do to improve his or her performance of that task.

For example, let's suppose a teacher is teaching students how to narrate events in a story in chronological order. The feedback to one student might be as follows:

Your learning goal was to structure your account in a way that the first action you described was the first thing you did. Then you were to write about the other things you did in the same order in which they happened.

You did write the first thing first—but after that it becomes muddled. You need to go through what you've written and number the order in which events happened and then rewrite them in that order.

Process Feedback

Feedback at this level describes the processes underlying or related to tasks, such as strategies students might use to detect or learn from errors, cues for seeking information, or ways to establish relationships among ideas.

For example, a teacher might suggest the following to a reader who stumbles on an unfamiliar word:

You're stuck on this word, and you've looked at me instead of trying to work it out. Can you see why you may have gotten it wrong? Perhaps you could sound out the word, look it up on your tablet, or infer its meaning from the other words in the paragraph.

Alternatively, a teacher might guide a student who is having difficulty relating ideas in a text by saying, "I've asked you to compare these ideas—for example, you could start out by listing ways they're similar or different. This would give you information about how they relate to one another."

Self-Regulation Feedback

This level of feedback describes how learners can monitor, direct, and regulate their own actions as they work toward the learning goal. Feedback at this level fosters the willingness and capability to seek and effectively deal with feedback, to self-assess and self-correct, to attribute success to effort more than to ability, and to develop effective help-seeking skills.

For example, when giving feedback to a proficient reader who is stumped by a vocabulary word, the teacher might say,

I'm impressed you went back to the beginning of the sentence when you became stuck on this word. But in this case, this strategy didn't help. What else could you do? When you decide on what the word means, tell me how and why you know.

A teacher might promote a student's help-seeking and error-detection skills by saying the following:

You checked your answer with the resource book and found you got it wrong. Any idea why you got it wrong? What strategy did you use? Can you think of a different strategy to try? How will you know if your answer is correct?

The power of feedback involves invoking the right level of feedback relative to whether the learner is a novice, somewhat proficient, or competent. Novices mostly need task feedback; those who are somewhat proficient mostly need process feedback; and competent students mostly need regulation or conceptual feedback.

In addition to maximizing feedback at the appropriate level, teachers also need to be attentive to moving the student forward from mastery of content to mastery of strategies to mastery of conceptual understandings. For this to occur, teachers need to give students feedback that is at and just above their current level of learning.

(Article will continue on April 11th's blog.)

Calendar for April:

March 21st

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Student's of the week for 

March 14 - March 18

• Ben Rummler (Karcher Bucks) 
• Ben is a leader that is consistently willing to help others. He is always responsible and a great role model to others.
• Grant Zelechowski (Applied Academics)
• Grant is always friendly towards others and very respectful to his teachers. He worked very hard in our last Spanish unit that involved stem-changing verbs and did a really good job of tackling a very difficult concept.
• Isvyn Martinez (Hive)
• Isvyn displayed courage this week in advocating for herself and for others.
• Annathea Brenneman (Silver)
• Annathea is helpful, encouraging, and brightens every class she is in with her positive attitude.
• Elizabeth Leon Cruz (Diamond)
• Elizabeth does a great job participating in group work. She truly displays "The Karcher Way."
• Carlie Tipple (Onyx)
• Carlie has shown improved effort, is always willing to help others, and consistently works hard and is polite to others.  

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Kudos

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• Katie Newholm was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK!  Congrats Katie and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits. 
• Thank you to all who brought items in to send Wynne Slusar off on Wednesday for her new adventure!  Wynne will be missed :(  
• Congrats to Rod Stoughton and his choir students for a great performance this past Tuesday night for Sing-A-Bration!  What a talented group of students - pictures are below.
• Thank you Marilee Hoffman and Stephanie Rummler for organizing the presentation/discussion for our students with Robin Vos on Friday morning!  Our students did a great job participating and asked great questions!!!

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Reminders

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• March 21 - BLT meeting on Monday starting at 2:40 in the library.
• March 21 - National Junior Honor Society induction program @ 6:30pm in the BHS auditorium.
• March 21 - Board Meeting Nick from PRA will be sharing options for the district in regards to future architectural choices K-12 for our buildings.  This meeting will start at 7:00pm and is being held in the BHS library.
• March 22 - Student Led Conferences from 4:00 - 8:00.
• Google Slide Show 
• Advisory Google Parent Sign-up
• No Tech Tuesday this week due to conferences. 
• March 23 - Literacy PLC - Molly Ebbers, Jenny Geyso, and Patti Tenhagen will continue the "S" of SQIDVPAC with sequencing and synthesizing in the library.  
• The last TEN minutes of PLC will be used for advisory groups to discuss iTime needs once we return from spring break.  
• Forward Exams Training Tools
• 8th grade advisory teachers:  Please take 2-3 pictures of your advisory students for a slide show we will be creating for 8th grade recognition.  Once you have taken your pictures please send them to me via email.  Due date:  April 8th.  
• Huddle Week on March 21, 22, and 24th so that students can make sure they are caught up prior to spring break.
• March 24 - 8th grade Hive House field trip to Discovery World. 
• And we can't forget that spring break starts March 25th!!!  
• Teachers - this is just a reminder to email or call Kim and Jane about your location for class if you move for the day - this is very important as it is difficult to locate students if you have moved your class.
• Also if you are expecting a parent to call you back it is helpful for Kim and Jane to know so they are in the loop when the parents call back and know if they can transfer calls to your classrooms.   

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Pictures from the week

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Student Led / Parent-Teacher Conferences on Monday night.

Mr. Stoughton and Sing-A-Bration on Tuesday night in the BHS gym - what a great performance!

Mrs. Rummler's students participating in an Ellis Island simulation as a culminating activity for the understanding of immigration and past immigration processes.  

Ms. Geyso’s students analyzing The Cast of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe and discovering the deeper meaning within the text.  The discussion leads the students to develop a theory about the theme of the story which they will support with evidence in a literary analysis.

Ms. Hoffman and Ms. Rummler organized a discussion opportunity for our students to talk with Robin Vos this past week.  The focus was with the Silver House students involved in the Election 2016 focus group that has been meeting during iTime. He shared his unique perspective on the election process, including building a platform, running a campaign, and the upcoming Wisconsin primary.

 

Article of the week:

Know Thy Impact

John Hattie

Teachers give a lot of feedback, and not all of it is good. Here's how to ensure you're giving students powerful feedback they can use.

Many years ago, I made a claim about the importance of giving students "dollops of feedback" (1999). This endorsement of giving great amounts of feedback was based on the finding that feedback is among the most powerful influences on how people learn.

The evidence comes from many sources. My synthesis of more than 900 meta-analyses (2009, 2012) shows that feedback has one of the highest effects on student learning. These meta-analyses focused on many different influences on learning—home, school, teacher, and curriculum—and were based on more than 50,000 individual studies, comprising more than 200 million students, from 4- to 20-year-olds, across all subjects. As an education researcher, I was seeking the underlying story about what separated those influences that had a greater effect on student learning from those that had a below-average effect. Feedback was a common denominator in many of the top influences. Moreover, Dylan Wiliam (2011) has argued that feedback can double the rate of learning, and an increasing number of scholars are researching this important notion (see Sutton, Hornsey, & Douglas, 2012).

I've come to regret my "dollops" claim because it ignores an important associated finding: The effects of feedback, although positive overall, are remarkably variable. There is as much ineffective as effective feedback. My work over the past years has concentrated on better understanding this variability and on clarifying what makes feedback effective—or not.

Some Questions to Start With

When we ask teachers and students what feedback looks and sounds like, we need to consider three important questions. The first question is, Where is the student going? Feedback that answers this question describes what success would look like in the area in which the student is working and what it would look like when he or she masters the current objective. Such feedback also tells us what the student would need to improve to get from here to there. For example, in a science class, the answer to, Where am I going?might be to "understand that light and sound are types of energy that are detected by ears and eyes"; students know they're there when they can discuss how light and sound enable people to communicate.

The second question is, How is the student going? Feedback that answers this question tells where the student is on the voyage of learning. What are the student's gaps, strengths, and current achievement? During the unit on light and sound, the teacher might give pop quizzes and encourage student questions and class discussion to show both students and teacher how they're going.

The third question—Where to next?—is particularly important. When we ask teachers to describe feedback, they typically reply that it's about constructive comments, criticisms, corrections, content, and elaboration. Students, however, value feedback that helps them know where they're supposed to go. The science teacher might point out, "Now that you understand types of energy, you can start to see how each affects our listening skills." If this Where to next part is missing, students are likely to ignore, misinterpret, or fail to act on the feedback they hear. They need to know where to put their effort and attention.

Of course, we want students to actively seek this feedback, but often a teacher's role is to provide resources, help, and direction when students don't know what to do. Simply put, students welcome feedback that is just in time, just for them, just for where they are in their learning process, and just what they need to move forward.

How to Make Feedback More Effective

For feedback to be effective, teachers need to clarify the goal of the lesson or activity, ensure that students understand the feedback, and seek feedback from students about the effectiveness of their instruction.

Clarify the Goal

The aim of feedback is to reduce the gap between where students are and where they should be. The teacher, therefore, needs to know what students bring to each lesson at the start and to articulate what success looks like. The teacher might demonstrate success with a worked example, scoring rubrics, demonstrations of steps toward a successful product, or progress charts. With a clear goal in mind, students are more likely to actively seek and listen to feedback.

A good comparison is to video games. The game keeps tabs on the player's prior learning (past performance); sets a challenge sufficiently above this prior learning to encourage the user to work out how to achieve the challenge; and provides many forms of feedback (positive and negative) to help the learner get to the target. The learner typically finds this process attractive enough to continue moving through increasingly challenging levels of the game.

In the same manner, effective teaching requires having a clear understanding of what each student brings to the lesson (his or her prior understanding, strategies for engaging in the lesson, and expectations of success); setting appropriate challenges that exceed this prior knowledge; and providing much feedback to assist the learner in moving from the prior to the desired set of understandings.

Ensure That Students Understand the Feedback

Teachers and leaders often give a lot of feedback, but much of this feedback isn't received. For example, when a teacher gives feedback to the whole class, many students think it's not meant for them but for someone else. Or sometimes we ask students to react a day later to feedback that a teacher has provided on an assignment. Students typically miss the teacher messages, don't understand them, or can't recall the salient points.

When we monitor how much academic feedback students actually receive in a typical class, it's a small amount indeed. Students hear the social, management, and behavior feedback, but they hear little feedback about tasks and strategies. Teachers would be far more effective if they could confirm whether students received and understood the feedback. This may mean listening to students outline how they interpret teachers' written comments on their work and what they intend to do next.

Seek Feedback from Students

When teachers enter their classrooms intending to seek and receive feedback from students about the effect of their teaching—both about their instruction, messages, and demands and about whether students need specific assistance, different strategies, or more or repetitions of particular information—the students are the major beneficiaries. These forms of feedback enable the teacher to adapt the flow of the lesson; to give needed directions or information to maximize students' chances of success; and to know whether it's necessary to reteach or offer different tasks, content, or strategies.

Calendar for March & April:

March 14th

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Student's of the week for 

March 7 - March 11

• Sara Boarini: (Karcher Bucks) 
• Sara puts forth great enthusiasm into her day often showing kindness to her friends.
• Ollie Hoffman: (Applied Academics) 
• Ollie is an asset to our PE class! She comes ready to participate and gives her best effort and models all 8 character traits we encourage students to practice!
• Breanna Grissmeyer: (Onyx) 
• Breanna displays "The Karcher Way" in everything she does. She shows respect and kindness to everyone she comes in contact with and she shows a great deal of responsibility in regards to her school work by staying caught up, by being organized and by putting her best effort forward. 
• David Smitz: (Diamond) 
• David has exhibited "The Karcher Way" through his behavior towards his classmates and respect for his teachers. He has been working hard to improve in the area of work completion and has shown a lot of growth this year.
• Katherine Schoop: (Hive) 
• Katherine's is very loyal and kind within her contributions in advisory.  She also displays responsibility in helping her teachers and her peers.
• Serra Brehm: (Silver) 
• Serra's sense of humor and enthusiasm for learning is appreciated by all her teachers!

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Kudos

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• Jeri Nettesheim was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK!  Congrats Jeri and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits. 
• Congrats to Rod Stoughton, Ron Pedersen, Nick Buendia, and all the students involved in Orange Crush.  A great little documentary was made Orange Crush - Wisconsin Life if you haven't watched this video yet you should as it is a GREAT tribute to what they have been working so hard on.  Congrats again and AWESOME job on Thursday at Wilmot High School for the sectional boys basketball game.  
• Great season for the varsity basketball game and to Steve Berezowitz - tough loss but they played hard!
• Wynne Slusar will be leaving us to take on a new position within a different field all together in Beloit.  Wynne's last day is this Wednesday so there will be a farewell breakfast in her honor in the staff lounge starting at 6:45 am.  An email went out regarding items for breakfast, if you are willing and able to bring an item the more the merrier!  
• We will all miss you Wynne - you have been a great addition to the Karcher Staff :(  
• We all wish you well in your new position!  
• Thank you Mike Jones, Donna Sturdevant and all the volunteer staff that assisted with FNL this past Friday - smaller turn out but still great for our students!
• Congrats to Nick Buendia, Colin Galitz, and Sue Pedersen for a great night of Band-O-Rama on Monday night!  Very nice performance - pictures are below.

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Reminders

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• Student Led Conferences Monday night from 4:00 to 8:00.  
• Teachers you are free to leave the building once the bell rings and after school duties are taken care of so you have a break between school and conferences.  
• Student Led portion will be in your room.  Please use this Google Slide Show for your initial discussion with parents.  
• Each advisory should be showing your iMovie showcasing the 8 character traits.  How you decided to do that is up to you but everyone should be sharing - some are doing so within their student's portfolios and others are showing the full group at one time.  
• Once your conferences are done please come to the library for open conferences.  Each teacher will have their own table with their name attached to the table.  
• Other items that will be located in the library:
• Freshmen year scheduling questions.
• Red folders for pick up - cumulative writing folder
• High School Club information
• Tech Tuesday focus this week is on Google Drawings.  
• Molly Ebbers room this Tuesday starting at 2:40.
• PLC this week:  Literacy Lesson this week with Molly Ebbers, Patti Tenhagen, and Jenny Geyso.  The SQIDVPAC focus will be:  Sequencing, Summarizing, and Synthesizing.
• KCB Lunch Menu - March 18 - students can use their KCBs this Friday during lunch.  Matt and I will be in the lunchroom with the menu to assist with the process.  Please help remind students!  
• Forward Exam Updates:
• Steve Berezowitz and I have been working on the schedule for the Forward Exam.  Testing will take place on April 18- 22 with make-ups being done on April 26th.  The modified schedule for April 18, 19, and 20th will be out soon.  April 21 and 22 we will not need to modify the schedule as the testing only affects 8th grade and we will utilize the 2nd/3rd hour block of time for the science and social studies exams.  
• Forward Exams Training Tools
• See below the Forward Exam Testing schedule we are going off of to determine the length of time needed to create a schedule.  
• Student Led Conferences day 2 - March 22nd from 4:00 - 8:00.
• Just looking ahead for planning purposes... the PLC on March 23 will be split between:
• Content area conversations regarding the infusion of sequencing, summarizing, and synthesizing.  Discussing what and when you will be infusing these strategies and what tools will you use within your classroom.
• Advisory Team conversation about the next iTime rotation that will start when we return from spring break on April 4th.
• 8th grade advisory teachers:  Please take 2-3 pictures of your advisory students for a slide show we will be creating for 8th grade recognition.  Once you have taken your pictures please send them to me via email.  Due date:  April 8th.  
• Huddle Week on March 21, 22, and 24th so that students can make sure they are caught up prior to spring break.
• 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.
• March 24 - 8th grade Hive House field trip to Discovery World. 
• And we can't forget that spring break starts March 25th!!!  

Looking WAY ahead:

• Special Education Aides - I would like to have a meeting with all of you to go over some innovative scheduling ideas for next school year.  
• This meeting will be on April 26 (early release day) from 12:00 - 12:30 in the library.  Please let Kim know if you are able to attend.  
• I will supply pizza for lunch.  

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Pictures from the week

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Band-O-Rama pictures from their performance this past Monday night.  What a great performance it was!  Nice job to Nick Buendia, Sue Pedersen, and Colin Galitz AND of course the students!!!

Article of the week:

Four Predictions for Students' Tomorrows

Erik Palmer

To make students' futures better, we need to consider what skills they will need—and teach them.

If we really want to prepare students for life beyond school, we could begin by asking ourselves what pieces of our own education we are using now as adults. That is an edgy question, and many teachers will take offense if anyone suggests that, in spite of their personal, deep love of haiku/Shakespeare/geodes/the Articles of Confederation/cosine, most adults have never needed deep knowledge of any of those to succeed.

The truth is, many highly successful people gain success without remembering large amounts of material that they learned in school. When the Colorado Student Assessment Program was introduced, Bill Owens, the governor at the time, refused to take the test, despite being a proponent of standards and testing.¹  The legislators who did take a version of the test did not do well. This can be read as criticism of the politicians behind big tests, but it is possibly more of a criticism of our curriculums.

All of us would fail most of the tests we took in school. The information we were tested on has not been relevant to our lives and has been forgotten.

Does that mean we've been teaching the wrong things? Is it possible that TheScarlet Letter and the dates of the Hundred Years War are not crucial to life after school? Heresy, right?

What parts of your education have been critical to your adult success? What do you wish you had been taught? Many adults say they wish they were better at public speaking, so let's teach more oral communication. What else? These are tough questions that, answered truthfully, could radically change what we teach.

The relevant, long-lasting lessons from our own education will likely be relevant and long-lasting for our current students. But the world our students graduate into will not look exactly like the world of 2016. We want to prepare students for their futures, which leads us to make predictions. This is a tricky business and not one with which educators have had a lot of success. I remember learning to make computer punch cards because it was the skill of the future. I was also taught BASIC programming because that would be the key to getting jobs. There was a "Golly, kids, look at the new-fangled gadgets!" mentality behind these efforts, which, unfortunately, still exists.

When we are asked to think of the future, our minds go to hovering cars, 4D printers, teleportation, and knowledge chips implanted into the brain. I don't want to make guesses about the likelihood of these technologies coming to fruition. I can't tell you what the classroom of the future will look like or whether there will even be classrooms. I'm not going to bet one way or the other on the maker movement or flipped instruction or coding or anything else. But I will make four bold predictions.

Prediction 1. There will still be an Internet.

It will still be possible to pick up a device, ask a question, and get several million results in less than one second. Although I may not be going out on a limb here, the implications of this prediction are profound. Students will need to be able to make sense of the massive amounts of information they will find. These are just a few of the skills an Internet-literate student needs:

• An understanding of what the Internet is. "I found it on the Internet" is not an accurate statement. You found it on a computer connected to the World Wide Web.
• Ways to formulate queries. Typing "childhood obesity" into a search engine is not the best way to discover what health problems are associated with being overweight. Students need to know about Boolean searches, adding prefixes such as SITE and FILETYPE, and more. For example, "site:.edu childhood obesity" will yield search results from educational sites only and eliminate the massive amount of results from .com sites and others.
• An awareness of various types of search engines. Google is not the only option. Specialized search engines can be much more fruitful. Kidrex is excellent for young students; Google Scholar only retrieves information from research articles, professional journals, university websites, and other scholarly resources.
• An awareness of how search engine results are ranked. Teach students that being at the top of the list does not mean a result is the best source and that results are rigged to be most pleasing to your tastes.
• An understanding of domain types. Teach the meanings of .com, .gov, .guru, .hr, and .org.
• Tools to evaluate the people behind the website. Teach students how to find the credentials of content creators and evaluate their expertise.
• An ability to analyze a website's purpose. Teach students ways to discover whether the site is designed to inform, amuse, persuade, or sell.
• An awareness of bias. How is www.foxnews.com different from www.huffingtonpost.com? Teach students to look for slanted information.

These skills will continue to be important for evaluating the information the Internet provides, yet many teachers still send students online to research without direct instruction in these skills. The problems of information overload will get worse, and many students are leaving school without the critical-thinking skills needed to make sense of this information tsunami.

Prediction 2. Salespeople will still exist.

Whether selling standardized tests to the board of education (yes, there will still be Big Tests), holodecks to homeowners, new-generation "geniusphones," candidates for the Interplanetary Council, or virtual reality glasses, the sales profession will remain. Commercials will bombard us from everywhere. The arts of argument, persuasion, and rhetoric will be in high demand.

To evaluate these sales pitches, students will need an understanding of logic, reasoning, argument, and persuasive techniques. We have to teach students the definition of argument (statements leading to a conclusion); how to evaluate arguments (Do the statements force us to accept the conclusion? Are the statements true?); and how to support statements (the five types of evidence: facts, numbers, quotes, examples, and analogies). We have to teach them how to recognize and avoid reasoning errors, such as confusing causality and correlation, generalizing, making ad hominem attacks, derailing the train of thought, and stereotyping. We have to make students aware of persuasive tricks such as transference, bandwagon appeals, and loaded words, as well as rhetorical tricks such as hyperbole, allusion, and euphemism.

We ask students to do argumentative writing, but do we teach the skills involved? Teachers I've surveyed say they've never been trained to teach argument, reasoning, persuasion, and rhetoric, but students will need to understand these techniques as adults.

Prediction 3. Listening will still be important.

That's not an exciting, sci-fi, high-tech prediction. But listening in the future will be high-tech. When we think of listening, we tend to think of verbal messages. If you pay attention to what I'm saying, that completes the listening task, right? Actually, listening is more complex than that, and it's getting even more complex. Messages are not merely oral communications but rather an elaborate mix of words, sounds, music, and images. This means that all students will need to be media literate so they can listen well to different kinds of media.

I guarantee that a team of students with a camera can make your school look terrible today. They will find garbage that missed the trash can, a student upset about something that happened at recess, a torn poster on the wall. Another team can make your school look great today. They will photograph a teacher and student engaged in conversation, a well-organized classroom, and a trophy case. Both teams told the "truth," but they made a point by selecting one image over another. Teach students about the power of images.

Good videos are carefully constructed. Have you seen "A Pep Talk from Kid President to You?" In the video, YouTube personality Kid President offers some words of inspiration and encouragement. Why is Kid President in a locker room? On a football field? In front of a board covered with Xs and Os? Each scene is chosen for a reason. Are students aware of this? And why are there so many scene changes? How does that affect viewers? Teach students about the construction of videos.

Sound and music are selected for a reason. Teach students how to alter a message with sound. You can find several fun examples on YouTube of movie scenes that have been given alternate soundtracks. Find the video that makes the movie Frozen seem like a horror film or the silly video of a snail, in which different types of music make the same scene scary, funny, and even somber. All of us are susceptible to manipulation by music, and every day we experience it. Teach students specific lessons about sound and its powers.

Prediction 4. People will still be speaking.

The last several years have seen an explosion of ways to display verbal messages: Facetime, Skype, Periscope for Twitter, and cell phone apps, plus tools for video conferences, webinars, podcasts, narrated slideshows, and many more.

Unfortunately, schools have often ignored speaking skills. My son works for a company that connects people who have ideas for high-tech financial innovations with potential investors and users. He reports that there is no shortage of brilliant people with brilliant ideas but a serious shortage of people who can verbally communicate those ideas. Turning ideas into reality involves collaboration and communication. Prerequisites for collaboration and communication? Listening and speaking skills.

For students to thrive in a world of oral communication, we have to teach students how to build and present a message. Teaching students to create a valuable message means teaching them

• How to analyze an audience and craft a message for that audience.
• How to include interesting and important information that connects with the audience.
• How to organize the talk with a grabber opening, clear transitions, and a powerful closing.
• How to create effective visual aids.
• How to adjust their personal appearance for the audience and occasion.

Teaching students how to present the message means teaching them

• How to appear poised and avoid distracting behaviors.
• How to make sure every word is clearly heard.
• How to add life to the voice so listeners can hear passion and emotion.
• How to make eye contact.
• How to use hand, face, and body gestures effectively.
• How to adjust speed for effect.

Just as we teach lessons about capitalization before asking students to write an essay, we need lessons about use of pacing when speaking. Just as we have lessons about finding common denominators before asking students to add fractions, we need lessons about designing slides for visual aids. In a future with oral communication on display to an even greater extent than it is today, students' shortcomings in these areas will hurt them. Teach students to be well spoken.² 

Classic Skills for a New Age

Not very sci-fi. No new devices offered. No massive restructuring of schools. No wildly new areas of instruction. Indeed, two of my predictions lead to an increased emphasis on classic arts: Argument, rhetoric, and oral communication have been important since ancient Greece. Still, I feel confident that if you ask students 40 years after graduation what they needed to know and be able to do, many would verify my choices. Internet literacy, media literacy, good thinking, and good speaking will be valued every day of their lives. Let's do more teaching about them.

Calendar for March & April: