KARCHER STAFF BLOG
Karcher 2016-2017 School Calendar
Student's of the week for
February 13 - February 17
- Dara Herold: (Silver)
- Silver house choose Dara because she is a conscientious student who is always willing to lend a helping hand to others who need it. We appreciate her positive attitude and bright smile.
- Kaitlyn Beardsley: (Onyx)
- Kaitlyn has continued to show positive growth this year. Her smile, work ethic, and positive attitude are greatly appreciated by her teachers and peers. Keep up the great work Kaitlyn!
- Tyler Rutkowski: (Karcher Character Bucks)
- Tyler treats his teachers and peers with kindness and respect. He has a positive attitude and works well with others.
- Drew Stutzman: (Diamond)
- Drew is a quiet leader that always puts forth his best effort in every class. He is a great example of a student who always follows the Karcher Way.
- Cheyanne Hammiller: (Hive)
- Cheyanne is an outstanding young lady, She displays leadership throughout our building, including safety patrol. Her responsible work ethic and courage in speaking up in class are admirable.
- Marissa Post: (Applied Academics)
- Marissa is an outstanding student who uses leadership to help her fellow peers succeed.
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Kudos
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- Andrea Hancock was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Andrea and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits.
- Kudos to Andrea Hancock, Barb Berezowitz, Kim Moss, and Marian Hancock for your assistance this past week with our 7th grade students entering their course requests into Skyward! And to Jane Peterson for running the show while the rest of us were assisting with Skyward! It as been a lot of behind the scenes work and we thank you for your assistance as we discussed and checked every student's selections!
- Kudos to Harvey Kandler for your assistance this week with a few sick students. Harvey is always willing to come to the rescue when needed in order to ensure the learning environments are conducive for students! Thank you Harvey!
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Reminders
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- February 20, Monday - Staff Meeting @ 2:40
- This pertains to teachers as we will be focusing on making some adjustments to our literacy PLCs based on observations and conversations with our Literacy Mentors.
- February 21, Tuesday - Half Day with building level inservice in the afternoon.
- Special Education Aides will have training from 1:30 - 3:30 at our Cooper Elementary in the gym with Gail Spitzenberger.
- Teaching Staff we will meet in the library from 1:00 - 3:00.
- 1:00 - 2:15 we will be doing an assessment audit.
- Please bring a few (3ish) assessments you are currently using along with your essential skills folder.
- 2:15 - 3:00 we will be working with Jodi Borchardt on our Table Top in regard to active shooter.
- February 22 - Academic teachers:
- Please turn in your teacher recommendations sheets to Kim or Marian by the end of the day on the 22.
- February 22, Wednesday - Literacy PLC, more information on Mondays' meeting will shed light for everyone with how this will look.
- February 23, Thursday - Staff Meeting for all staff
- 2:40 - 3:00 in the library with Peter Smet.
- Peter will be coming to Karcher on the 23 (Thursday) and the 27 (Monday)
- You can pick which one you want to attend, you could listen/come to both as well.
- Peter will be providing information in regard to the referendum.
- Everyone is encouraged to attend.
- February 24, Friday - Staff Budgets are due to Kim via Google Docs. Please make sure you are sharing your documents with Kim and letting her know you have shared them with her!
- When naming your below documents please use this naming convention so that it is easy to search: Last Name - Budget Requisition Order Form, Last Name - 2017-2018 Budget Worksheet Form (Example: Ebbers - Budget Requisition Order Form)
- Budget Requisition Order Form
- 2017-2018 Budget Worksheet Form
- If you do not know your Function Number (Example: English 122200) email or ask Kim and she will help with what your number is.
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Pictures from the week
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7th and 8th grade girls volleyball is well on their way now!!!
8th grade students in Ms. Sturdevant's and Ms. Weis's class dissecting sheep eyes!
Students utilizing our new Buddy Bench!
8th grade students working with Mr. Berezowitz on their freshmen course selections and four year plans for BHS.
8th grade students in Ms. Rummler's social studies class conducting their summative Civil War Battle between the north and the south. At the beginning of the unit, students assume the identities of actual Civil War soldiers. They research them and role play them throughout the unit. As the unit goes on the command structure builds. The students run their own discipline and award promotions as earned. The week before our battle we study key battles and analyze the actions taken by each side. Because students are so invested in their roles by this time, the information lives and breathes for them. They see their own characters succeeding or failing and internalize the significance in it's historical context. Throughout the unit they write journal entries from the biased perspective of their army. They know this battle is coming and they build their strategy as they go.
The day of the battle the Generals have full command. They have the battle plan, and on their orders they create the defensive structures from the boxes. The South gets more boxes because they fought a defensive war. The North has more ammunition because they had more supplies. The students all know their worth is based upon their rank.
After the battle students regroup to tally the toll of the conflict. On Monday, students will be writing an account of their battle, comparing it to the real battles fought and drawing similarities to their strategy, their mistakes, and their triumphs with those of the historical battles they have studied.
8th grade pictures from our Character Assembly last week! I apologize for not having them in last week's blog but
here they are now :)
Article of the week:
Here is the second half of last week's article!
February 2017 | Volume 74 | Number 5
Literacy in Every Classroom Pages 24-29
The Writing Journey
Kelly Gallagher
A California school district provides a case study in how to improve student writing across the curriculum.
Over the past several years, I have been fortunate to work with an incredible array of teachers from across the United States who have given me valuable insight into their professional challenges. For a while now, I've started each workshop by asking the same question: "How many of you are seeing a decline in your students' writing abilities?" Sadly, no matter where I'm presenting or what the demographic of their students, the teachers' responses overwhelmingly confirm my worst fears: Wide swaths of students are not developing their writing skills—skills we know to be foundational to their literate lives.
Why are writing skills in decline? To answer this question, one might start by reading a recent study of U.S. middle schools conducted by the Education Trust (2015), in which the researchers examined a key question: Do classroom assignments reflect today's higher standards? Their findings were sobering. Only 38 percent of assignments were aligned with a grade-appropriate standard. About 85 percent of assignments asked students to either recall information or apply basic skills and concepts. (The assignments were "largely surface level," the report noted.) Only 1 percent of assignments required students to think for extended periods of time; most assignments could be completed in one class period.
This lack of rigor was especially evident in schools' writing expectations for students in middle school (see fig. 1).
Start of the second half of the article...
Two Key Questions
After the Anaheim teachers had a deeper understanding of why students should write more, they were asked two questions that would drive a yearlong study of writing in their respective departments:
- What kind of writing will help students get smarter in your class?
- When and where should that writing occur?
Over the next several months, teachers met in subject-area teams to wrestle with these questions. The teams generated even more questions: Does a lab report in Teacher A's chemistry class look the same as a lab report in Teacher B's chemistry class—and should it? What does an argument essay look like in a government class? Is there a place in a math class for the narrative essay? What balance should we strike between on-demand writing and process writing? These are tough questions, and the answers were not handed down from the district office. Teachers were asked to use their professional judgment to generate responses to these questions. For instance, at Magnolia High School, world history teachers decided that their sophomores would benefit from a range of specific writing experiences, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Writing Experiences for World History Sophomores at Magnolia High School
Argumentative writing
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Informational/Explanatory writing
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Narrative writing
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Bringing teachers together for these discussions also sent the message that writing is an expectation in all classes. Whether or not a student writes should not be contingent on which teacher she has for world history. It is now a departmental expectation that students will write in all teachers' classes. In some departments, units and lessons were modified to build in more time for students to write.
After teachers decided what kinds of writing would benefit their students, they were asked to consider when and where that writing should occur. In the second half of the school year, each department at each school created Writing Journey maps for every course. In our English department, for example, teachers agreed to start the year with a narrative unit because we believe the ability to write a story is a skill that students will use when they write in other discourses. From narrative writing, we mapped out a year in which our students would progress into writing arguments, inform-and-explain pieces, and multi-genre papers. This Writing Journey became a department-wide expectation.
Later, teachers met as departments to align their maps vertically. For example, a student might take six years of science in this order: life science (grade 7), physical science (grade 8), earth science (grade 9), chemistry (grade 10), biology (grade 11), and physics (grade 12). Looking at this vertical pathway raised new questions: How should writing assignments progress in these classes? What writing gaps or redundancies are present in these pathways? Are certain kinds of writing better in certain kinds of classes? And most important, what should a student's Writing Journey look like after six years of science instruction?
These discussions were valuable because they required teachers to look beyond their classrooms and consider the bigger picture of students' literacy development. This, in turn, prompted teachers to be more intentional in their teaching. By the end of the first year, Anaheim teachers had decided what to teach and when to teach it.
Next came the hard part.
The Shift to How
After all content-area teachers had Writing Journey maps in place, the district's focus shifted to how. How do we support teachers in implementing the Writing Journey? How do we move beyond simply assigning writing and toward teaching writing effectively? It's one thing to recognize that students should write more; it's another to figure out how to help teachers teach writing skills.
The district distributed a survey to all teachers asking them to rank their greatest professional development needs in writing. Teachers in one school, for example, indicated that their top need was to motivate reluctant writers, whereas teachers at another school asked for help in handling the paper load. The district used the survey results to offer tailored staff development, both in after-school workshops and during department and PLC time. In many of these meetings, teachers shared and discussed student writing over the course of many months. Writing is not a "one-and-done, flavor-of-the-month" focus. It is continually revisited throughout every school year.
As a result, the instructional culture of the Anaheim Union High School District is beginning to shift. Three years into the Writing Journey, principals and department chairs at every school report significant increases in the quantity and quality of student writing. Some schools have started to explore department-wide or schoolwide end-of-the-year portfolios. Going forward, the district will continually revisit its plans to support teachers so that writing remains in the forefront of every classroom.
This quest raises a final thought: Earlier in this article, I referred to Anaheim's Writing Journey as an initiative, but it's really not. The word initiative implies that the project will fade over time. But AUHSD continues to take steps to remind teachers that writing is simply foundational to deeper learning. This is why the district continues to gather all its teachers in one place at the beginning of every year to revisit its commitment to the Writing Journey. In short, the district recognizes that the Writing Journey is not just an initiative; it is good teaching.
EL Online
For a discussion of building students' mathematics writing skills, see the online article "Why Should Students Write in Math Class?" by Tutita M. Casa, Kyle Evans, Janine M. Firmender, and Madelyn W. Colonnese.
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References
Conley, D. T. (2005). College knowledge: What it really takes for students to succeed and what we can do to get them ready. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Conley, D. T. (2007). The challenge of college readiness. Educational Leadership, 64(7), 23–29.
Education Trust. (2015, September). Checking in: Do classroom assignments reflect today's higher standards? Retrieved from http://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/CheckingIn_TheEducationTrust_Sept20152.pdf
Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools. Retrieved from www.all4ed.org/files/WritingNext.pdf
Langer, J. A., & Applebee, A. N. (1987). How writing shapes thinking: A study of teaching and learning. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
National Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools, and Colleges. (2004). Writing: A ticket to work … or a ticket out. New York: College Board.
Kelly Gallagher is an English teacher at Magnolia High School in the Anaheim Union High School District in California. He is the author of several books, including In the Best Interest of Students (Stenhouse, 2015) and Write Like This (Stenhouse, 2011). Follow him on Twitter.
