December 3, 2018

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

2018-2019 Karcher Calendar

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

BASD Staff Blog:  https://basdstaffnews.blogspot.com/

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Kudos

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• Thank you to Jon Nelson and Amanda Thate for your  assistance and willingness to help out in the office this past week!  
• Kudos to Barb Berezowitz for setting up the Karcher Christmas Party... it was a great night and fun for all! 

Article this week... Relates to the "I do it" portion of the GRR Model - our focus this week at PLCs.  

Releasing Responsibility

by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

We must transfer responsibility for learning to our students gradually—and offer support at every step.

There is no shortage of teachers assigning students responsibility for their own learning. Who isn't familiar with the following scenarios?

• In a 1st grade class, students independently complete practice pages from a workbook.
• A teacher gives her 4th graders a writing prompt and allows them 30 minutes to respond.
• Students in 8th grade are told to read Chapter 12 and answer the questions at the end.

Yes, students in these situations are responsible for their own work, but are they really learning? Students who do well in these kinds of activities are usually those who already understand the content. It's not hard to fill out a worksheet (or "shut-up sheet" as one of our colleagues calls it) when you have already mastered the information. Nor is it hard to answer end-of-chapter questions when you read well and are familiar with the genre of questions asked in textbooks.

But these "busywork" examples are not exemplars of true independent learning, which is a major goal of education. If students are to reach the high expectations we set for them, they need to be able to marshal previously learned concepts and apply them to achieve new understandings after they leave our schools.

How can we set students on a path to true independent learning? One way is to purposefully yet gradually release responsibility for learning from teacher to student (Fisher & Frey, 2008). To make this transfer of responsibility, we must give students supports that they can hold on to as they take the lead—not just push them onto the path and hope they find their way. These supports include models of the kind of thinking they will need to do, access to academic language, peer collaboration, and guided instruction. We've found the following instructional routines work well for teachers who seek to promote lasting ownership of learning.

Establishing Learning Objectives

Teachers must clearly establish the purpose behind any activity, including what exactly students are supposed to do to successfully perform learning tasks. A coherent objective or purpose makes it easier for learners to gain access to background knowledge that they can use to build a schema for new learning. When the objective is clear and instructional tasks align with it, students can share responsibility for learning and will be motivated to do so. When the purpose for learning is muddy or students don't buy into it or perceive its relevance, they may complete many tasks but will have zero motivation and assume no responsibility. Students practically beg for an established purpose to their learning when they ask, "What do we gotta know?" and "What are we supposed to do with the information?"

The learning purposes that you provide students when they ask these guidance-seeking questions should include both content and language goals, especially for English language learners (Dong, 2004/2005; Hill & Flynn, 2006). Generally, teachers post on the wall and discuss with students exactly what is to be learned and how students should demonstrate that learning through oral or written language. Content goals should come directly from the standards. For example, in a unit focused on oceans, waves, and tides, a content goal for a given lesson might be to identify the phases of the moon.

The focus of the language goal should reflect students' needs. For example, a goal might focus on vocabulary. Students of all ages need to understand both specialized words (those that change meaning in different contexts, such as expression) and technical words (words rarely used outside of a specific discipline, such as rhombus). A vocabulary-related language goal for the study of the moon might be to use the terms full, half, quarter, and new moon to explain the phases of the moon.

Alternatively, the goal might focus on language structure, such as grammar, syntax, or sentence frames. Returning to the study of the moon, a structure-related goal might be to appropriately use sequence words (first, next, then, last) to explain the phases of the moon. Or the goal might be based on mastering certain functions of language, such as questioning, summarizing, explaining, or persuading. A function-related language goal might be to explain how the moon, earth, and sun move through their phases.

Teacher Modeling

Modeling is another crucial component of releasing responsibility. Humans are hardwired to imitate other humans (Winerman, 2005). Students deserve to see an example of the kind of thinking and language a new task will require before they engage in that task independently, and teachers can provide that example. Through modeling—either by thinking aloud or by showing students their written notes—teachers reveal what goes on in their minds as they solve problems, read, write, or generate ideas. Modeling does not mean providing explanations or questioning students; it means demonstrating the way experts think as they approach problems.

Expert teachers prepare students for independent reading by focusing their modeling on comprehension, word solving, text structures, and text features (Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2008).

Choosing Strategies for Comprehension

Good readers deploy a number of cognitive strategies as they read, such as questioning, inferring, making connections, summarizing, and predicting. The key is to know when to use each strategy and to be able to use it automatically.

For example, predicting can help a reader create meaning when the author provides specific kinds of information, but it isn't a good strategy for understanding all texts. To model using this strategy well, a teacher might share his or her prediction when reading a certain text and then ask students to make predictions. A 9th grade English teacher we observed paused while reading the short story "Kipling and I" by Jesús Colón out loud and speculated on why the author would describe a gilt-framed poem so early in the story. "This must be an important object to the narrator," she mused. "I'll need to keep reading to find out." Later in the same story, she reflected on the protagonist's decision to burn the poem to keep warm:

I wonder if this means that the inspirational message of the poem is being destroyed, too? I could understand this in two ways: that he feels the poem is inside of him and he doesn't need the object anymore, or that a dream has died. I'm going to reread that earlier section where the character describes the poem's importance to see if I missed anything that would help me understand the deeper meaning.

With enough modeling and practice, students will imitate behaviors like this and reach for appropriate strategies automatically as they read complex texts on their own.

Teaching Word Solving

Given the demands of academic vocabulary and the effect that word knowledge has on comprehension, teachers need to show students how they can figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words on their own. Students must practice this skill enough so that it becomes automatic. There are two main word-solving strategies:

• Using context clues. We call this an "outside the word" strategy. A teacher might pause on an unfamiliar word and model using an illustration and familiar words in the same sentence to make inferences about the mystery word's meaning. The teacher's modeling should get across the fact that context clues don't always help and may be misleading. For example, a teacher might draw students' attention to a diagram of the solar system as she notes that an elliptical orbit is shaped like an oval: "I wasn't sure at first what elliptical meant, but the picture helped me understand that an elliptical shape is not a perfect circle."
• Looking "inside the word." This strategy involves looking at prefixes, suffixes, bases, roots, or cognates of the target word for clues to meaning. For example, while reading a science text out loud, Mr. Bonine stopped at the word carnivore and modeled his realization that carnivore was related to the Spanish word carne (meat). He noted that this probably means carnivore has something to do with meat and went on to use context clues—the fact that the word was describing an animal's habits—to conclude that the word meant meat eating.

Teachers should also model using dictionaries, Internet resources, or even reliable peers to understand a word, for those times when neither context clues nor looking inside the word helps.

Highlighting Text Structures

One way readers extract meaning from texts is through recognizing common text structures. Almost all narrative texts, for example, use a "story grammar" that includes character, setting, plot, conflict, resolution, dialogue, and various literary devices. Teachers should model using these structures as a tool for understanding stories. For example, Mr. Goodwin paused in his reading of The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton to point out how a character's recitation of Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" at a key point in the story helps reveal the themes of loss and redemption that are central to the novel—and that using a recurring phrase or image to highlight an underlying theme is a common text structure.

Nonfiction texts also have internal structures, such as problem-solution, cause-effect, compare-contrast, and description. Noticing which text structure a particular informational text uses helps readers predict what kind of content the author might present next. It also helps people remember what they read and organize their thinking about a text.

For example, while reading a passage about the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Ms. Allen paused at the point where the author introduced the problem of pay differences between Chinese and white workers and told the class

Now here's a problem. I can predict that the solution to the problem will come next. That's how many authors write, by introducing a problem followed by a solution. I might even help myself remember this information by taking notes using a problem and solution chart. In many cases, the solution to one problem creates new problems. I wonder if that will be the case here.

When Ms. Allen came to the part in the text describing the Chinese workers' strike for higher wages, she pointed out that the author was following up a problem with its solution.

Explaining Text Features

Students often need help understanding the text features included with many academic readings, such as tables, charts, figures, bold and italicized words, and headings. Many students aren't even sure when they should read text features—before, during, or after the text. But a lot of essential information can be presented in these features.

Teachers should model how to thoughtfully analyze text features. For example, while looking at a table in a math textbook on the use of distance as a function of time, Ms. Burrow pointed out the column and row headings and showed students how to use them to find information. Ms. Johnson modeled how to interpret a legend on a map in the geography textbook to find the latitude and longitude of a city.

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Information/Reminders

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Overall Information for upcoming items:  

• Monday, December 10 - Parent/Teacher Conferences 
• This 4:00 - 6:00 conference time will be scheduled conferences.  We were going to do some as open conferences but by emailing parents to see if they want to come in we are still providing the opportunity for parents to come in that want to so please just make sure someone in your team emails out to all parents an invite to conferences for those wanting to come in.  
• Otherwise this is for scheduled conferences of parents/guardians you want to see.  You can set a time for the entire team to meet with a family or you can have more than one student at the same time and split up the team to meet more families, up to you guys on how you want to do that.  
• Applied Academic teachers can also set up meetings with students you want to see and/or sit in with academic teachers for students you see coming in on the Google Document already.  All staff should be participating and working to meet with families during the 2 hours.  
• If you have a time slot where you do not have a family coming in then you need to use that time to make phone calls home... positive calls or calling families you wanted to touch base with.  Part of the reason for this is the 4:00 - 6:00 time frame is a great time to call as more often than not more parents/guardians are home during that time to touch base with you.  So as conferences get closer note who is calling who during open slots as well.  
• Click HERE for the Google Slides to keep everyone organized for conferences!
• December 11 & 12 - PRA Schedule 
• PRA is the architecture firm for the 6-8 new middle school project.  They will be coming to Karcher on December 11 and 12 (the project manager and designer) to meet with specific groups about the building.  
• The focus of this first User Group meeting is to get an understanding of curricular needs, from your perspective, for the new space/building.  Something to be mindful about is the difference between a need and want and to remember that this building will be used by the district for 30-50+ years!  So we just need to be mindful of not asking for personal wants but rather what is needed for students within specific curricular areas.  
• Below is the schedule for specific groups that will meet with the architects throughout the two days.  We put in for 2 subs already in Ready Sub to cover the bolded staff members in the document.  Please let me know if you see other areas needing coverage versus just the bolded names to ensure everything is taken care of for the day!  
• Click HERE for the schedule. 
• Huddle Week - right before Christmas Break 
• During Huddle Week, right before Christmas, students will be with their academic/special education teachers throughout the week.  8th grade will use this time for ODE and 7th grade will do some team building activities developed by the advisory committee!  
• More to come in the upcoming weeks!

This coming week:  

• Monday, December 3 - Staff Meeting @ 2:40 - 3:00 
• Monday, December 3 - District K-12 Essential Skills Committee from 3:45 - 5:15 in our Karcher library.  
• Tuesday, December 4 - Band and Strings Concert in our Karcher gym.  
• Strings Concert @ 6:15 
• Band Concert @ 7:30 
• Wednesday, December 5 - PLC in the library learning about the "I do it" portion of the Gradual Release Model.  
• Friday, December 7 - Flex day during iTime.  
• If a group needs to meet during iTime or would like to meet during iTime this is time set aside to allow groups to do so.  
• If you are wanting to meet with a group of students put in your group and other information in THIS Google Document for everyone to see and know.  
• If you meet with a group you do need to figure out who takes your iTime students if you currently have an iTime group.  Ideally they would be with a staff member with a similar group to yours.  

Pictures from the week!  

Getting into the Christmas spirit :)