KARCHER STAFF BLOG
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Kudos
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- HUGE shout out to Mike Yopp for assisting as Katherine Botsford's long term sub AND for helping with Outdoor Education. We are lucky to have you Mike!!! And we are excited to have you back Katherine!!!
- Thank you to all staff for your efforts with the MAP assessments and to Marian Hancock for your assistance with make-up MAP testing! MAP testing will continue into this week as well. It will be exciting to see the growth and progress our student's have made due to all of your efforts!
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Reminders
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- Monday, January 16 - Skyward Scheduling training.
- A group of staff members will be participating in an all day Skyward Scheduling training. The goal is to adjust what scheduling looks like for Karcher to meet the needs of our building. We will be taking a look at setting up teams, aligning classes to teams, creating co-requisites (band/choir split, PE/compass - for example), understanding how teacher requests can play a role, and arena scheduling (allowing students to enter their applied academics into Skyward themselves).
- Monday/Tuesday, January 16-17 - MAP Testing for Language Arts.
- Please continue to be cognizant of your noise volume during MAP testing and limit your passes to students during the school day.
- Monday, January 16 - Staff Meeting - not in the library.
- We will not be meeting in the library for our staff meeting. This staff meeting will be dedicated to reflecting on our work with our literacy mentors and establishing short term goals leading up to spring break.
- This time will be with your literacy mentor in their classroom:
- Kurt Rummler's room for those working with Kurt
- Jenny Geyso's room for those working with Jenny.
- Patti Tenhagen's room for those working with Patti.
- Please bring your literacy mentor goal sheet with you - Your goal sheets will be in your mailbox on Monday.
- Monday, January 16 - PBS Meeting following your time with your literacy mentors. The PBS meeting will be held in the library with Stephanie Rummler and Matt Behringer.
- District Literacy Committee Meeting @ Winkler - 3:45 - 5:00
- Monday, January 16 - Board Meeting
- At this board meeting the board members will be discussing if they want to move forward with a referendum for April and if so what would the referendum question(s) be. This meeting will take place at 7:00pm. Any and all are welcome to attend.
- Tuesday, January 17 - 5-12 Math alignment conversation in the 21st Century Lab.
- Due to our data on the Forward Exam and continued data on the MAP assessments, for our special education students, we are taking a look at our alignment 5-12 in the areas of special education and intervention for our students. There is an opportunity gap as our students who place into special education that need Math 180 do not have exposure to grade level math... the work done on Tuesday will be to look at what changes can be made grades 5-12 to ensure we close the opportunity gap for our students.
- Those attending are Amanda Thate, Ashley Parr, and Wendy Zeman (from Karcher) along with teachers from Dyer & the high school and administration.
- Wednesday, January 18 - Essential Skills PLC in the library.
Looking to the following week:
- Monday, January 23 is an iTime day, not extended advisory as we are having an afternoon assembly on January 27th where the high school DRIVEN students will be coming to Karcher with the focus on bullying for the afternoon.
- Matt Behringer will send out details.
- January 24 - Full Day In-service (8:00 - 4:00 workday)
- 8:00 - starting in the BHS auditorium
- Special Music Performance
- Longevity Awards
- State of the District Update
- Safety in our schools
- 9:30 - 10:30 - Technology Session
- 10:45 - 11:45 - Technology Session
- For these sessions you will have the ability to select where you want to go. Scott will be sending something out to staff for this...
- 11:45 - 12:45
- BASD Chili Cook off Throwdown!!!
- Here at Karcher we need to have a minimum of 2 chilis represented for the chili cook-off competition.
- Please email me if you are willing to make a chili for the BASD staff. The amount needed is a crockpot size portion of chili...
- Each school will have a minimum of 2 chilis brought to the commons. BASD staff will then vote on the best one and the winner will have the trophy for the year!
- Sides will all be taken care of and covered by the district.
- 12:45 - 4:00 - Classroom Preparation Time
- January 27 - Our next Friday Night Live from 6:00 - 8:00pm!
- Please email Mike Jones and/or Donna Sturdevant if you are able to assist as a chaperone.
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Pictures from the week
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Article of the week:
Burlington Referendum - Monday's Board Meeting
*** This is the first half of this article... the other half will be shared next week!
Starting Strong
Establishing the "what" and the "why" in the first 10–15 minutes pays high dividends.
My high school biology teacher had a sign taped to her desk that read "Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." After becoming a teacher, I realized that when it came to lessons, failure to plan on my part did constitute an emergency. And that emergency resulted in feelings of confusion, misunderstanding, frustration, and boredom on the part of my students. That's not a formula for academic achievement.
Careful and thoughtful planning is a formula for academic achievement. This type of planning involves a great deal of instructional decision making. What to say, when to say it, what to have students do—the number of decisions that go into a single lesson is almost limitless. The effort can feel overwhelming. I find it helps to think of a lesson plan in terms of three parts—beginning, middle, and end—each with its own intricacies and decisions to make. Let's focus on the part that doesn't always get much attention when it comes to developing strong lesson plans: the beginning.
Although no one-size-fits-all approach will work in every lesson-planning scenario, teachers should consider several big ideas when preparing the first 10 to 15 minutes of a lesson. Let's dig into the decisions a teacher needs to make in planning these valuable initial minutes.
"The What" and "The Why"
Because time is short or because we make assumptions about our students' levels of understanding, teachers often skip the brief but important exercise of clarifying what I call "the what" and "the why" of the work. It's important that students know exactly what they are learning and why they're learning it before instruction begins.
The "what" refers to the content, context, and, more specifically, the learning objective for the day. Teachers learn early in their careers that a learning target represents the end goal of a lesson, but we often miss opportunities to clarify this target for students. Effective lessons begin by unpacking this objective.
Discussing "the what" is also an opportunity to provide context by making connections between the day's content and earlier work—connections that activate students' background knowledge and reinforce the idea that what they're learning doesn't exist in isolation. Students should see their learning as a series of interrelated concepts and ideas linked together to create meaning.
The "why" simply refers to the purpose. Why is the work important? Why is it relevant? Think about your own life: When you're called on to engage in a task or attend a meeting with an unclear purpose, how do you feel? Probably disengaged, confused, or bored—not emotions we want students to feel. Taking just a minute to remind learners why the day's work is worth spending time on and its role in the bigger picture of their learning goes a long way toward helping everyone master the lesson's objective.
It's worth tightly planning your introduction to the what and why. A quick class discussion, with the teacher making statements about the content and purpose and asking questions to prompt students' thinking, does the trick nicely. Write down the main points you'll say and key questions you'll ask. Some general questions ("In your own words, what are we going to be learning about today?") will become habit; you'll use them without needing to note them in your plan. But prepare in advance questions more specific to the goals of the lesson and those that connect to previous learning ("Remember how we looked at the parts of stories last month?").
"What" and "Why" in Action
Consider a 4th grade teacher's plan for a lesson on comparing fractions, with the learning target "I can compare fractions with different numerators and different denominators using benchmark fractions." His script might look like this (with anticipated student responses in italics):
Teacher : Students, today we're building on yesterday's work with fractions. What did we learn about fractions yesterday? We used models to compare two different fractions.
Teacher : And when we were comparing two fractions, how did we decide which one was bigger? The fraction whose model was more completely shaded was bigger.
Teacher : Now turn and talk to your partner about how we made our models and decided which fraction was greater. We drew a model for each fraction and divided it into the number of parts that equaled the denominator. Then we shaded the number of parts that equaled the numerator.
Teacher : Right, and remember, when we compare fractions, we use the same size whole. Today we'll explore another way to compare fractions. Let's read our learning target. Talk to your partner about what words here seem important or unfamiliar. Compare, different numerators/denominators, benchmark fractions.
At this point, the teacher might note in his planning sheet to be sure to define benchmark fraction ("a familiar fraction that we can easily locate on a number line in our mind, such as one-half") during class discussion after students' partner talk. Note how this plan and script connect to students' earlier learning and give students time to unpack the learning target. The teacher's final planned comment connects the work to a sense of purpose so students will see where they're headed—and why.
Teacher : We're doing this work today so we can become stronger mathematicians! When we use benchmark fractions, we can work more quickly and can compare fractions in our minds. When we're quick with mental math, we can solve more challenging problems that involve adding, subtracting, multiplying, and even dividing fractions.
To be continued next week...
