lunes, 5 de septiembre de 2016

September 4, 2016

KARCHER STAFF BLOG


Clickable Link:  2016-2017 Google Calendar
  • Bookmark this link as this is where you should look when trying to locate meetings, early release days, schedules, iTime vs character days, testing window information, and an array of other things... As things become aware to be they are added to this calendar... some updates (MAP testing days for example) have been recently added.
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Kudos
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  • Patti Tenhagen, Jack Schmidt, and Marilee Hoffman for their hard work in ensuring our first two days were off to a great start this year!  Thanks again for all of your work with the advisory curriculum!!!
  • Thank you Harvey Kandler and the custodial staff for all of your hard work and preparation for the start of the school year. The last push was to put together all the cafeteria tables that were delivered on Wednesday so that they were ready for students on Thursday.  Thanks again for all of your hard work!!!
  • Thank you Kurt Rummler for assisting with the student assemblies!  And a special shout out to our actors as they demonstrated the proper way to dress:  Brad Ferstenou, Jack Schmidt, and Mike Jones.  Always funny to watch!
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Reminders
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  • Extended Advisory continues this week and next week.  Please make sure you are utilizing the Advisory website for information. 
  • PLC Wednesday:  PLC Norms and iTime rotation.  Meet in the library (2:40 - 3:20)
  • September 12 - BLT Meeting in the library 
  • September 13 - Picture Day - Students will be called to the library for pictures.  
    • Makeups are on October 25th.  
  • September 16 - Karcher Kick-off Day!!!  
  • September 16 - 1st FNL (Friday Night Live) from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.
    • If you are able and willing to volunteer to assist please email Mike Jones or Donna Sturdevant!  
    • This is an event open to all Karcher students to provide a space and time for them to participate in something positive on a Friday night!
  • MAP Testing begins - September 19th - See the Google Calendar for when and where... makeups will occur during Compass time seeing as every student will have a chromebook now!
Other important information/reminders:

ALL Staff:
  • Don't forget to get certified for the Bloodborne Pathogen's training... here is the step by step directions on where to go...
    • Click on this website.
    • Then... 
      • Sign in using your user name and password.
      • Go to "Search" 
      • Type in:  bloodborne pathogen training
      • Bloodborne pathogen training will then pop up in blue on the bottom... click on that. 
      • Watch the videos in order to take the test. 
      • The last segment is the test. 
      • Download your test results and create a PDF.  
      • Send your copy, via email, of completion to Jessica Polcyn.
      • Takes about 10-15 minutes total to complete.
    • This is due by September 9!!!!!!!
Teaching Staff:
  • Literacy Mentors... Jenny Geyso, Kurt Rummler, and Patti Tenhagen's mentor lists are noted within the following three Google Documents.  This allows everyone to see your available periods, etc in order to begin the process of utilizing your mentor to assist with continuing to infuse literacy into your classrooms.  Jenny, Kurt, and Patti will be reaching out to you within the next two weeks to set up your initial meeting to go over the information you provided during inservice time.  
  • Technology Mentor... Molly Ebbers is our go to person in the building to assist with your technology needs.  She is on the district literacy team and also the district technology team and is available to assist staff with the infusion of literacy through the use of technology and can assist with simple technology needs as well.  
  • Adjustment to the 8th grade teacher schedule has been made due to the high number of student requests for high school Algebra.  Within the last week weeks prior to the start of school we have had an increase in students registering to Karcher (awesome by the way).  A fair number of those students have requested high school Algebra.  Therefore, we have opened up a second section of Algebra which has changed around 20 student's schedules in order to ensure we are meeting the academic needs of all of our students.  
  • Please remember to indicate your Team Time conversations on THIS Google Doc.  
  • Here is The Karcher Way Classroom Behavior Rubric.
    • We will be making copies of this in green, yellow, and red.  They will be located in the main office once completed.  
  • Here is a copy of the Behavior Reflection Sheet... use if you would like.  We will use these for detentions and ISS situations.  
  • Here is a copy of our first day of in-service slide show... just in case someone wants to reference back to it!
Special Education Aides:
  • Bus Duty details...
    • All students are allowed to enter the building starting at 7:05.  
    • If you are on outside bus duty please remain outside until all students have cleared your area.  
    • When outside you are watching for negative behavior from students and ensuring all students are safe.  
    • When leaving your area please close all doors and make sure the building is secure in your assigned area prior to leaving.  
  • Grab and Go...
    • Please assist our kitchen staff with keeping an orderly line for breakfast.  They simply need help keeping the line shorter near the food to assist with decreasing the number of items taken without giving their student ID number.  
  • If there seems to be any issues with your schedule please talk to the primary teacher of the student(s) you are working with.  
  • If your 10 minute break would make more sense in a different time during the school day please talk with Amanda Thate or Ashley Parr.
    • Do not hesitate to communicate with the special education department about your schedule.  Last year we had some great ideas come from all of you but they were mentioned during the spring semester... if you notice or think of a better way please communicate with us about your thoughts as you are the ones living your schedules!
  • Please have your sub plans completed and to Jane Peterson by September 9, this Friday.  
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Pictures from the week
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Here are some pictures from last week's in-service... major points to remember... 1. How students feel when they shut down.  2.  How alone students can feel when they are not included in activities within the classroom/school.  3.  The importance of relevancy within your learning.  It is scientifically impossible to connect two pieces of NEW learning together.  You have to be able to connect new learning to something you already KNOW in order to make new connections to new learning.  






































Students first two days of the 2016-2017 school year at Karcher!

Working on finding their classes and figuring out their lockers.  


Getting the lay of the land down within the cafeteria.  


Taking advantage of their free time right after lunch!



Students getting to know each other in Ms. Tenhagen and Ms. Nettesheim's classroom.


Already working on their book selections for Ms. Geyso's ELA class.  

Students working on building the tallest spaghetti tower as a team building activity in Mr. Sulik's class.  







2nd day assembly on the utilization of their 1 to 1 chromebooks!  

After the assembly students were already engaging in their learning through the use of their chromebooks in Ms. Murphy's ELA class.  

Article of the week:  Here is the first half of this article for the week...

What to Do in Week One?

Rick Wormeli
How to open the door to a successful teaching-learning dynamic.
In the school district where I taught for many years, school always began on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Our middle school teaching team, which served 185 students, competed every year to see who could learn every student's name by Friday. Most years, I won.
While students worked in my class, I used memory techniques to review their names. After school, I studied pictures of them. I asked students to switch their seats each day, sometimes even in the middle of class, and then I identified each one of them anew. I practiced naming them as they entered my room and in the cafeteria during lunch. I dared students to try to trick me into associating them with an incorrect name; I bungled a few, and there were a lot of laughs. But by the end of the fourth day of school, I knew all 185 students' names.

It was the first leg of the year's journey in relationship building. Parents wrote notes and e-mails marveling that I knew their child so well so quickly and predicting that this was going to be a great school year for their child. Of course, I didn't really know their children yet. But all of us feel honored when others whom we respect think our names are worth remembering. In that simple act, we make a connection.
It's like the Na'vi expression of deep respect in the movie Avatar: "I see you." When we affirm to each student, "Yes, you exist; I accept all that you are, and I value time in your company," it opens the door to the successful teaching-learning dynamic so important to academic success.
For many of us, the daily connections we make with colleagues and students have become routine. But these connections can make all the difference for our students. That moment at the end of lunch with 13-year-old Owen, in which the two of us wondered how Doctor Who could travel back and forth through time and space in his TARDIS without causing time paradoxes, may have been the first time Owen had a conversation with an adult who accepted him as an equal partner in the discussion. It was fresh and exciting for Owen, and his limbic system and autonomic nervous system surged with well-being. Now he wants more connections like this. And the more such positive connections he makes, the more personally and academically resilient he'll be.

Yes, It Is That Important

Although we can build positive relationships throughout the school year, the first weeks are crucial. They set the tone and conditions for the year ahead, creating a more effective teaching and learning enterprise for everyone. James Comer, professor of child psychiatry at Yale University, often declares, "No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship." This connection is especially powerful for students who struggle. As Rabbi Harold Kushner said in an interview with Educational Leadership,
Often I will read about someone from the most unpromising circumstances—inner-city ghetto, drug family, single-parent home, abandoned by father, abandoned by both parents sometimes—and the child will have grown up to be a star athlete, a successful politician, or a doctor. The reporter will ask, "How did you get to be who you are?" And the answer will always begin with the same four words: "There was this teacher." (Scherer, 1998, p. 22)
For all humans—and especially teens and young teens—whatever enters our brains as we learn activates emotional responses, even before we process it cognitively. Even if teachers deliver curriculum content with an inert, unemotional lens, our students' internal monologue takes it to an emotional level—"This is so tight/wrong/bad/cool/radical/wild/dope/stupid/GOAT (Greatest of All Time)!"
Research by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang demonstrates that students need to feel a meaningful emotional connection to the material to learn. In an interview, she asserted,
People think of emotion as getting in the way of cognition, but it doesn't. Emotion steers our thinking; it's the rudder that directs our mind and organizes what we need to do. (Sparks, 2016)
Positive teacher-student relationships build on this connection to promote learning. An extensive research base shows that
improving students' relationships with teachers has important, positive and long-lasting implications for both students' academic and social development. (Rimm-Kaufman & Sandilos, 2016)
In sum, students' learning is markedly influenced by their connectedness with the adults in charge, classmates, and the larger community. How can we take advantage of this dynamic to support learning, especially in the first weeks of school?

Make Sure Students Feel Safe

The most urgent questions students ask as they begin a new school year are, Am I safe? and, Do I belong? Once students feel sure these needs are met, they'll dive into learning. We can't take successful communication of these assurances for granted, though. We have to prove them to students every day. What can teachers do?
First, let's laugh at our own mistakes, and model what it looks like to acknowledge our blunders publicly and handle them constructively. Let's not ridicule students' questions ("Why can't we see latitude/longitude lines from the air?" "Seriously, Mr. Wormeli, did we land on the moon?" "Why are women always naked in Renaissance paintings?"). Let's remove all sarcasm from our comments, realizing that the sting of even a small, tossed-away remark can leave a lasting scar.
Let's not assume that students understand the idioms and references we use; let's accept instead that we have to make the implicit explicit: "When I refer to syntax or describe sentences as being parallel, I'm referring to the repetition among the phrases used to improve flow and clarity for the reader. Here, let's line up these three sentences to see how they're parallel."
And let's not take students' inappropriate comments or reactions to our teaching personally. Instead, let's respond with concern: "That doesn't sound like you, Matthew. What's really going on?"
We can withhold judgment when giving descriptive feedback. Instead of writing, "This is incoherent—rewrite!" in the margin of the student's paper, we might write, "I see you've included five arguments in this paragraph, but I don't see how they're connected. Can you suggest a way to make your point more clearly?" Instead of, "Excellent math work!" we might write, "You isolated the variable to one side of the equation sign. What does that enable you to do now?" Instead of pronouncing a grade on a small project immediately, we might ask students to write a letter analyzing how their effort does or does not match the exemplar provided, and if it doesn't match, what they'd need to change to achieve a full match between the two—then give them time to make those changes.
Judgment on the quality of work distances students from us; it creates the need to save face, and it seems adversarial. In contrast, thoughtful, specific feedback positions us as a personal advocate. Students are willing to connect with an advocate.
In class discussions, students will offer something incorrect from time to time. We need to correct the statements without rejecting the students and stalling their participation. Here are some suggestions for responding in a way that respects a student's dignity.
Affirm risk-taking. "You know, Carl, that answer is actually incorrect, but thank you for taking the chance and getting it out there as something for the rest of us to consider. That's what scholars do!"
Ask the student to explain more about his thinking. When students explain further, they often discover their errors. If we identify the errors for them, it raises defensive walls and causes embarrassment.
Be empathetic to their thinking. We can tell a student that we used to think this way (even if we didn't), but we changed our mind when we read the information at the bottom of page 89 (the page intended for last night's reading that this student failed to do). "Let's see whether reading that section changes your thinking, too."
Change the current reality. Sophia needs a win today. So after she responds to a question with the incorrect answer, we respond with, "That's the answer to the question I was about to ask," even if it wasn't. It is now, though, and we go on to ask it so that Sophia can offer her answer again and experience being correct.
If a student indicates that she doesn't know the answer to our question, we can ask, "Pretend that you did know the answer—what words would come out of your mouth?" A teacher in Naples, Maine, taught me this, and, gosh, it works. Students answer every time, and most often, they're good answers. The student didn't trust herself, so I had to provide her with a different reality.
Affirm the portions that are correct and invite focus on the incorrect portions. "Your claims are based on the author's perspective, Leila. Thank you for making that so important. I'm having trouble, however, finding the specific evidence you're using to make the claims. Can you help me find it?"
One last note about trust: We can never forget that we are under scrutiny. Students notice how we interact with their classmates and our colleagues. If we're curt, insincere, unfair, indifferent, or less than supportive with others, they'll assume that we might be that way with them, despite any previous positive experiences.
Students detest duplicity in their teachers. The first few weeks should provide consistent proof of personal authenticity. So the words we use with parents are the same ones we use with students. We follow up on our promises. We don't use sarcasm with our colleagues if we don't allow it in the classroom (the same goes with chewing gum). We are sad at sad moments and happy at happy moments. We don't always embrace students' cultural likes and dislikes just to be more accepted by them. We share our unique interests—a favorite sport or book; how much we liked Legos as a child; our dream of going into space someday; our fondness for summer camp, bike touring, and pecan pie; and a little about our families and our deep commitments to them. In short, we're our real selves.

References

Rimm-Kaufmann, S., & Sandilos, L. (2016). Improving students' relationships with teachers to provide essential supports for learning. Retrieved from American Psychological Association website
Scherer, M. (1998, December). Is school the place for spirituality? A conversation with Rabbi Harold Kushner. Educational Leadership, 56(4), 18–22.
Sparks, S. D. (2016, April 26). Emotions help steer students' learning, studies find. Education Week, 35(29). Retrieved from www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/04/27/emotions-help-steer-students-learning-studies-find.html















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