KARCHER STAFF BLOG
Students of the week for
April 25 - April 29
- Kale Dietz: (Applied Academics)
- Kale is a hard worker and a positive influence in class. This week he has been extremely helpful by assisting his classmates with their Scratch projects.
- Morgan McNamara: (Hive)
- Morgan's continued respectful and kind behavior in and out of the classroom is appreciated by her teachers and peers. She is an outstanding role model for all.
- Emma Lashbrook: (Onyx)
- Emma is extremely polite, exhibits a positive attitude, is persistent in her work, and always responsible.
- Jessica Salaja: (Diamond)
- Jessica always has a positive attitude and is kind to her peers. She always gives her best effort in class and is a great student.
- Gabrielle Leesemann: (Silver)
- Gabrielle has shown a willingness to challenge herself and has made excellent progress with goals that she has set for herself.
- Lauren Fitch: (Karcher Bucks)
- Lauren puts her all into every endeavor she undertakes! She also makes amazing chocolate chip cookies :)
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Kudos
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- Amanda Meiers was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Amanda and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits.
- Thank you to Marian Hancock, Donna Keown, Kim Moss, and Jane Peterson for all you do for everyone here at Karcher! We all hope you enjoyed your administrative assistants/secretaries day last week! Thank you again for all you do!!!!!!!!
- It is TEACHER APPRECIATION WEEK!!! To appreciate all that you all do for our students, parents, and each other we will be celebrating by doing the following this week:
- Monday: We will have bagels, muffins, and donuts available on Monday morning in the main office.
- Wednesday: There will be subway sandwiches and chips available for everyone in the teachers lounge during lunch time!
- Friday: Make your own sundaes with an assorted array of toppings during lunch time in the teachers lounge!
- Thank you to all the teachers and aides who have assisted so far with the Walking Lunches to Dairy Queen. This is a great opportunity for our students and we want to thank you for giving your lunch time to assist with this activity for students. Thank you!
- Thank you Stephanie Rummler, Patti Tenhagen, and Mike Jones for all your work setting up the Book Fair for this week!
- Kudos to Katie Newholm, Sue Bekken, Erika Fons, and Donna Sturdevant for your work with getting Karcher Companions off the ground! Some of our regular education students assisted with the popcorn business this past week and the students interacted beautifully with each other - nice work everyone!
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Reminders
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- The book fair is up and ready for students in room 124.
- The book fair will be open May 2 - May 6. ELA teachers will be bringing their classes to room 124 to view what is all available to the students and then students can purchase items during lunch or library time throughout the week. They can pay with cash, check, or credit card.
- Tech Tuesday this week: using forms and Google Classroom to create a foolproof sub plan.
- To learn more about this topic you can meet in Molly Ebbers room after school this Tuesday starting at 2:40.
- PLC this week: Standards and Common Assessments.
- 8th grade advisory teachers...
- I really need your help with inputing pictures of your advisory into this google slide show. You can have pictures of just a few students to the whole group... just needing some pictures for each advisory to be added to this slide show!
- MAP Testing will begin on May 9, next Monday - see Marian with any questions regarding computer usage, etc.
- The "button has been pushed" for scheduling and we are beginning to look over all student's schedules for the 2016-2017 school year.
- May 17 is a half day inservice with an early release. This inservice will be dedicated to Technology - more details will follow in the next two weeks.
- Upcoming field trips:
- Safety Patrol: May 19 - May 20 in the Dells
- Natiaon Junior Honor Society: May 23 in Madison
- 8th grade: Holocaust Museum - a selected 100 total students will be going.
- 7th grade: May 27 to the Milwaukee Zoo
- Final Band Concert will be in the Karcher gym on May 31 @ 7:00pm - come support Nick Buendia and our band students!
- Final Choir Pops Concert will be in the Karcher gym on June 6 @ 7:00pm - come support Rod Stoughton and our choir students!
- Last day of school is June 9th - students are dismissed at 12:00.
- We are working through all the details for 8th grade recognition.
- The doors will open at 9:15 for the parents with the start time for recognition at 10:00.
- Matt and I are working with the 8th grade teachers to finalize timelines, etc. We are also working on finalizing the 7th grade schedule for the 9th as well. More details about the final day will be available when we get closer to the date!
- Don’t forget to register for InterActiv 2016 June 15th and 16th.
BASD covers your registration fees.This is the perfect opportunity to get ready for our upcoming Chromebook 1to1.
We will have many sessions on Google Apps, using them in the classroom, and even a pre-conference on Google Basics.
Check out the website for more on the sessions and pre-conference offerings.
Pictures from the week
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Ms. Waki's 6th hour STEM students working on their partner roller coasters.
Ms. Pelnar's students working on the perspective unit...
National Junior Honor Society Highway Clean Up this past Saturday morning. Great job everyone and what a GREAT turn out! Even found a full bike!!!
Article of the week:
Grading What Matters
No matter how lofty our espoused education goals, our grading practices reveal what we truly value.
When I began analyzing my grading practices several years ago, I was embarrassed by what I found. Although I claimed I wanted my students to think more critically and engage with the world more fully, my grading practices communicated a different message. Students received so much credit for completing work, meeting deadlines, and following through with responsibilities that these factors could lift a student's semester grade to a Bor an A, even as other indicators suggested that the student had learned little. My grading practices communicated clearly that, despite my claims to the contrary, students' willingness and ability to comply mattered most.
I've observed that other teachers approach grading similarly. Recently I heard from a parent who, after home-schooling for several years, had enrolled her son in a public school. After just three weeks, her son was failing his language arts class because he had failed to bring a book to read for the daily sustained silent reading time and to return a parent-signed course expectations sheet. The message? Compliance is the priority, and grades have little to do with learning.
An incident in my high school economics class confirms that students have internalized this message. A young man assigned to write an essay on health care turned in a neatly typed, but completely incoherent paper. The introduction supported universal health care, but the conclusion argued against it. I told this student that the paper must be redone. He was incredulous. He pleaded his case fervently, emphasizing that the paper was typed, edited, and completed on time. I explained that although punctuality, neatness, and grammar are important, it was his understanding that mattered most. Apparently 12 years of education had taught him otherwise.
Parent concerns are added proof that our unintended message has been delivered. Time after time, parent inquiry into student performance focuses on missing assignments. Parents want to know what missing work their child can turn in for credit, recognizing, quite accurately, that grades are primarily a reflection of effort rather than progress toward learning goals.
What Do We Measure?
As I reflected on this topic, I resolved to refocus myself and my students on learning. This, of course, required that I know what exactly I meant by student learning. Once more I took a look at my practice, and what I discovered was disturbing. I was not unlike the teacher I spoke with recently who hesitated to test her students after a three-day weekend because she feared they would perform poorly. If we avoid assessing our students after a long weekend, then obviously we are not expecting, nor attempting to assess, enduring understanding in students. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) agree that grades tend to measure students' short-term recall of information, rather than long-term, meaningful understanding.
If we focus predominately on measuring students' compliance and their ability to recall facts, our practices will interfere with our most significant purposes as educators. If we are to shift our focus to higher-level thinking, we must shift our grading practices.
Fixing the Fixation on Compliance
One key to making grades more meaningful is carefully distinguishing academic achievement from what Robert Marzano (2000) labels nonacademic factors. This strategy remains the important first step as we work to develop grading practices that support higher-level thinking (Winger, 2005).
As an instructional coach, I work with teachers to shift the focus of their grades from compliance to learning. Some teachers point out that nonacademic factors, such as the ability to meet deadlines, are crucial to success in school and in life. I agree that teachers should emphasize, and maybe even measure, student responsibility. The issue is one of focus and priorities. Nonacademic factors must be measured independently from learning and should never be allowed to dominate the overall grade.
To keep the focus on learning, we must carefully reconsider what we are measuring. For example, a student's performance on small daily assignments, usually assigned for practice or as preparation for the next class, is often more indicative of responsibility than of whether he or she grasps an important concept. Therefore, I record most of these daily assignments in a section of my grade book reserved exclusively for nonacademic factors.
If an assignment done at home will be used to measure students' academic achievement, I often give that piece of work a nonacademic as well as an academic grade. This allows me, for example, to lower the nonacademic grade if the work is turned in late while providing accurate feedback and full credit for the learning.
It is important to teach and expect responsibility. But it is also crucial that we value and accurately measure academic achievement. This system of separating academic and nonacademic factors in my grade book enables me to do both.
The continuation of this article will come next week...
