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.
- 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
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.
