KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Karcher 2017-2018 School Calendar

Students of the week!!!!!!!
(Running slide show)

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/KarcherMiddleSchool/

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Kudos

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Kudos to all of our staff for a very successful Outdoor Education experience for our 8th grade students! Staff did a great job pulling together from those that attended Outdoor Education to those in the building to assist with 8th graders staying back and continuing our schedule with 7th grade. It took the entire school to have such a great experience for all of our 8th graders - kudos to everyone!
Kudos to our custodial staff who have been responsive to the current needs/concerns in our building. One change our custodial staff assisted with was the move of our ELA storage room to room 101 (past Jon Nelson's advisory) in order to allow work to be done to the ceiling in the old ELA storage room, floor of the 3rd floor room which had the steam leak - Thank you!
Jenny Geyso's daughter, Grace Geyso (current sophomore at BHS), placed first at both the post and district levels in the Voice of Democracy essay contest. Her essay will be one of ten essays being considered at the state level. Congrats Grace and good luck at the state level!!!

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This week's article...

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This week's article assists with the understanding and why for our Essential Skills: We use our content to teach the skills and the skills are used to understand the content.

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

Andrew J. Rotherham and Daniel Willingham

To work, the 21st century skills movement will require keen attention to curriculum, teacher quality, and assessment.

A growing number of business leaders, politicians, and educators are united around the idea that students need "21st century skills" to be successful today. It's exciting to believe that we live in times that are so revolutionary that they demand new and different abilities. But in fact, the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.

Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history, from the development of early tools, to agricultural advancements, to the invention of vaccines, to land and sea exploration. Such skills as information literacy and global awareness are not new, at least not among the elites in different societies. The need for mastery of different kinds of knowledge, ranging from facts to complex analysis? Not new either. In The Republic, Plato wrote about four distinct levels of intellect. Perhaps at the time, these were considered "3rd century BCE skills"?

What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills. Many U.S. students are taught these skills—those who are fortunate enough to attend highly effective schools or at least encounter great teachers—but it's a matter of chance rather than the deliberate design of our school system. Today we cannot afford a system in which receiving a high-quality education is akin to a game of bingo. If we are to have a more equitable and effective public education system, skills that have been the province of the few must become universal.

This distinction between "skills that are novel" and "skills that must be taught more intentionally and effectively" ought to lead policymakers to different education reforms than those they are now considering. If these skills were indeed new, then perhaps we would need a radical overhaul of how we think about content and curriculum. But if the issue is, instead, that schools must be more deliberate about teaching critical thinking, collaboration, and problem solving to all students, then the remedies are more obvious, although still intensely challenging.

What Will It Take?

The history of U.S. education reform should greatly concern everyone who wants schools to do a better job of teaching students to think. Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.

To complicate the challenge, some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.

The debate is not about content versus skills. There is no responsible constituency arguing against ensuring that students learn how to think in school. Rather, the issue is how to meet the challenges of delivering content and skills in a rich way that genuinely improves outcomes for students.

What will it take to ensure that the idea of "21st century skills"—or more precisely, the effort to ensure that all students, rather than just a privileged few, have access to a rich education that intentionally helps them learn these skills—is successful in improving schools? That effort requires three primary components. First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills. Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained. Finally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks.

For the 21st century skills effort to be effective, these three elements must be implemented in concert. Otherwise, the reform will be superficial and counter-productive.

Better Curriculum

People on all sides of this debate often speak of skills and knowledge as separate. They describe skills as akin to a function on a calculator: If your calculator can compute square roots, it can do so for any number; similarly, if a student has developed the ability to "think scientifically," he or she can do so with any content. In this formulation, domain knowledge is mainly important as grist for the mill—you need something to think about.

Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined. In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem. For example, even young children understand the logical implications of a rule like "If you finish your vegetables, you will get a cookie after dinner." They can draw the logical conclusion that a child who is denied a cookie after dinner must not have finished her vegetables. Without this familiar context, however, the same child will probably find it difficult to understand the logical form modus tollens, of which the cookie rule is an example. (If P, then Q. Q is false. Therefore, P is false.) Thus, it's inaccurate to conceive of logical thinking as a separate skill that can be applied across a variety of situations. Sometimes we fail to recognize that we have a particular thinking skill (such as applying modus tollens) unless it comes in the form of known content.

At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it. For example, a student might have learned that "thinking scientifically" requires understanding the importance of anomalous results in an experiment. If you're surprised by the results of an experiment, that suggests that your hypothesis was wrong and the data are telling you something interesting. But to be surprised, you must make a prediction in the first place—and you can only generate a prediction if you understand the domain in which you are working. Thus, without content knowledge we often cannot use thinking skills properly and effectively.

Why would misunderstanding the relationship of skills and knowledge lead to trouble? If you believe that skills and knowledge are separate, you are likely to draw two incorrect conclusions. First, because content is readily available in many locations but thinking skills reside in the learner's brain, it would seem clear that if we must choose between them, skills are essential, whereas content is merely desirable. Second, if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.

The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges for the 21st century skills movement. The first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training—an approach that has proven ineffective in numerous past reforms, such as the "New Math" of the 1960s (Loveless, 2002). Learning tends to follow a predictable path. When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.

Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division. The plan of 21st century skills proponents seems to be to give students more experiences that will presumably develop these skills—for example, having them work in groups. But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.

Because of these challenges, devising a 21st century skills curriculum requires more than paying lip service to content knowledge. Outlining the skills in detail and merely urging that content be taught, too, is a recipe for failure. We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.

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Information/Reminders...

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ELA teachers... it is your week to have students email their parents/guardians.
There has been an aide resignation and the position has been posted. The hire may cause changes to schedules... just wanting everyone to be aware. Goal is to hire asap.
Monday, January 8 - Start of MAP testing.

ELA teachers will be giving the Language Arts MAP assessment throughout the week. ELA teachers... you don't have to start on Monday but everyone needs to complete their Language Arts by the end of the week!
For the next three weeks please limit the number of students in the hallways to assist with a conducive testing environment for the MAP window.

Monday, January 8 - Special Education Aide meeting in the conference room from 2:40 - 3:00.

The focus will be on utilizing and learning about Snap and Read.

Monday, January 8 - Secondary Curriculum Committee Meeting in the Karcher library from 3:30 - 5:00.

Those on the committee the focus will be on 6-12 alignment of our Essential Skills and Subskills. Please bring the proper materials to do so.

Wednesday, January 10 - Start of 2018-2019 scheduling needs:

The forms have been sent for copies and we will get them labeled and in alphabetical order to the special education teachers by Wednesday. Please keep all sheets in alpha order and together. This will be the process:

Special education teachers will be given the class forms on Wednesday, January 10 to determine student academic courses, returning the forms to the main office by January 15 (Monday).
Then the math teachers will determine math placements for all students from January 16-19 - returning to the main office on January 19.
Then interventionists will have time to determine course selections from January 22-26, returning them to the main office.
Final suggestions/needs will then be looked at by academic teams the week of January 29th with our counselors and Ryan Heft.

Wednesday, January 10 - Essential Skills PLC for all staff.

Applied Academics I will communicate with you about working with the HS... that will be the plan this week, we just have to figure out release time to maximize your time together.

The focus will be for you to share what Essential Skills and sub skills you have come up with. This past week they looked at their standards and started working to articulate what Essential and sub skills are... the difference between them. Showing them your work will assist with making connections for them!

Monday, January 15 - The grading window for term 2 will open!
Wednesday, January 24 - Full Day Inservice from 8:00 - 4:00 for all teachers and aides. Below will be the schedule for Karcher staff:

7:30 - 8:00 (BHS Auditorium) will be a voluntary meeting with Michael Bruner, WEA rep, to share information on the Vitality Program. Anyone interested can attend.
8:00 - 8:15 (BHS Auditorium) Longevity Awards.
8:20 - 8:40 (BHS Auditorium) Top 10 Social Media Tips.
8:50 - 11:30 - Building level work time.
11:30 - 12:30 - Lunch (on your own)
12:30 - 1:15 - (Karcher Library) Building Level values exercise with all staff.
Teachers: 1:15 - 4:00 classroom work time.
Aides:

1:15 - 2:30 classroom work time.
2:30 - 4:00 (Karcher Library) 7-12 professional development.

Monday, January 29 will be the start of the process for students to pick their elective courses for both Karcher and the HS. More information about the applied academic side will come in future blogs.