KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Karcher 2017-2018 School Calendar

Students of the week!!!!!!!
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Article for the week!

Do They Hear You?

John Hattie, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

To make sure students will accept and use feedback, integrate these three strategic moves into your instruction.

Feedback is powerful. In fact, research suggests that feedback can be one of the most effective instructional strategies for improving student performance and closing achievement gaps (Hattie, 2012). Unfortunately, although getting teachers to provide feedback is relatively easy, getting students to receive that feedback is complicated.

In our experience, students who actually receive feedback are usually willing to use it. Why doesn't this happen more often? One problem is bias—like all of us, students seek feedback that boosts their self-image. If feedback is vague and personal, they may selectively accept only positive comments ("Great job! You're so smart!") and defensively reject negative comments ("This paragraph is confusing, with some awkward sentences"). What's worse, neither of these kinds of "feedback" is actionable; they do nothing to inform the student about what he or she should do in the future.

It's not easy to break through the walls that everyone has about receiving feedback, but it's well worth the effort. Here are some approaches that can help ensure that your feedback will be received.

Establish Clear Success Criteria

We cannot overstate the importance of setting clear expectations for learning. To make the most of feedback, teachers and students must understand what success looks like. When students are able to compare their performance with a clearly understood criterion for success, they are more likely to accept and value the feedback the teacher provides to help them reach that goal.

For example, teacher Melanie Strauss wanted her world history students to understand the specific events that influenced the rise of the empires of Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, and Russia in the 18th century and to use this information to gain insight into world events today. From their work in the instructional unit so far, her students understood the concept of an empire. They had studied the empire building of these three countries, and they had compared international timelines to explore the idea that history happens simultaneously all over the world. Ms. Strauss began a new lesson by saying,

Remember the CNN Student News page from last week about Russia? The annexation of Crimea from Ukraine by the Russian Federation has its roots in the Russian Empire dating back to the 1780s. It's still relevant. When you know the history behind the development of a country, you can get a sense of what their citizens value and why. Your challenge is to identify and explain whystrong central governments dominated Europe by 1750. When you can answer this question, you'll be ready to figure out why relations between Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, and Russia changed as they fought for dominance.

In this introduction, the teacher communicated her learning intention, attempted to make the learning relevant for students, and provided a definition of success for the day. In the lesson that followed, her students worked in small "expert" groups to identify the changes for their assigned empire. Ms. Strauss had populated the online learning management system with several articles and websites about each country, as well as commentaries from historians about this time period. The students were tasked with reading and taking notes on several documents to examine how the countries changed geographically, politically, economically, and socially. Then they reconvened in home groups to compare similarities and differences among the three empires. Each home group proposed a hypothesis for why central governments rose to prominence at this time, citing evidence the students had first formulated in the expert groups.

During the discussions, Ms. Strauss offered feedback to the groups, helping students identify what additional information they would need to refine their ideas and writing. As she met with one group, she noticed that they had included little evidence in their draft. Rather than simply telling them to add more evidence, she said, "I'm thinking that your readers might disagree with one of your statements. How could you make it more convincing?"

Arturo immediately answered, "We should say where we got the information so they could check if they wanted." The students welcomed her feedback because it was delivered just when they needed it to reach their clearly understood success criterion.

Here's another example. Students in a 3rd grade class were writing opinion papers. They had studied a number of ways in which writers can use lead sentences to engage their readers. In the current lesson, their teacher wanted them to learn about writing for an audience. She said,

Today, you'll have a chance to write your lead three different ways so that you can determine the best way to start. You'll get a chance to talk with three different classmates about your leads so that they can tell you which ones they think work the best and why. Then the choice is yours. You'll know you are successful when you have selected a lead for your paper that captures your audience's attention, and when you can explain why you chose it.

Again, the teacher's clarity invited students into the lesson and opened the door for accepting and valuing feedback from others as students took ownership of their learning.

*** This article will continue next week!

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Kudos

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Kudos to Kurt Rummler and Jodi Borchart for your efforts and time with our Safety Patrol students in the Dells last week! Also... our 7th graders did a great job with safety patrol in your absence here at Karcher! They were trained well!
Kudos as well to Barb Berezowitz, Andrea Hancock, and the 7th grade team for creating a great experience for our students a the Zoo!
Thank you to Mike Jones, Andrea Hancock, Marian Hancock, and our special education department for your efforts last week to finalize more for our schedule next year.
Kudos to our ELA team: Jenny Geyso, Kurt Rummler, Alyssa Riggs, Kelly Fulton, Ellen Murphy, and Kailee Smith for your work within the UOS Reading training this past week - it was a great day of learning.
Kudos to Brad Ferstenou and Stephanie Rummler for your set up and work with our students to determine our new student council officers for next year! Congrats to:

Secretary - Bayli Ketelsen
Treasurer - Bella Stoughton
Vice President - Samantha Wuori
President - Jake Christiansen

Kudos on a great end to the track season to our coaches and students! We had over 180 students involved!!! Awesome!
Briana Varnes will be joining our team next year within our special education team! She will be co-teaching in 8th grade and assisting with our ID students as well! Briana comes to us from the Randall Consolidated School District and has a Bachelors of Arts with a double major in K-8 Elementary education and K-12 Cross-Categorical Special Education!
Check out our final data for our Reading MAP scores for the year! We surpassed our goals in both 7th and 8th grade! This was some significant growth for our students!!! Kudos to all of you as it takes a team that is determined to infuse and focus on reading and our SQIDPAC strategies to make this happen! Awesome job!!!

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Information/Reminders...

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Social Studies... it is your week to have students email their parents/guardians.
The high school AP testing has ended so the use of the 3rd floor is available again - thank you for assisting with the noise levels and for adjusting throughout the last two weeks to make AP HS testing possible here at Karcher.
Monday, May 21 - Extended Advisory Week

Monday all 8th graders will be participating in a class picture outside. Please bring your advisories to the track after you take attendance and go over the announcements. Students will be taking a picture in the shape of a 22. Hive will make up one 2 and Silver will make up the other 2.
For the rest of the week the advisory lessons/activities are online through the advisory page.

Just a reminder to think of an activity with your elementary students that could be transferred inside in case there is bad weather.

Monday, May 21 - Start of Language Arts MAP testing within our ELA classes.

There are five 7th grade students that will be taking the iReady assessments instead of the MAP. We will be pulling them during their ELA classes to test within iReady.

Monday, May 21 - BLT Meeting from 2:40 - 3:30 in the conference room!
Wednesday, May 23 - Essential Skills PLC
Friday, May 25 - Cooper/Waller Visit, therefore, we will be utilizing an afternoon assembly schedule.

Looking ahead:

No school on Monday, May 28!
Tuesday, May 29 & 30

Karcher Character Assemblies!

Please make sure you have your student choices taken care of - the awards are sitting by your mailboxes. Each staff member should chose two students and write a brief reason for why they are the student of your choice.
The assemblies will be held in the gym!