KARCHER STAFF BLOG

2019-2020 Karcher Calendar

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

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Kudos

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Thank you to Brad Ferstenou and Stephanie Rummler for organizing and running the Leadership Field Trip to Camp MacLean for our student council students this past Monday!
Thank you as well to Sue Bekken and Erika Fons for starting the bowling club again for our students! There was a great turn out of kids in attendance!
It was great to come around to PLC groups this week and see people tweaking their rubrics, laying out their scope and sequence with Essential Skills, creating formative assessments, and/or reordering summative assessments. This time is a sacred time for us to work on the work and we appreciate your commitment to the work!
Rod Stoughton set up a field trip for our male choir students. This was a great opportunity for our male students to participate with other male singers throughout the state! Thank you Rod for setting up this opportunity!
Thank you to Mike Jones and Donna Sturdevant for putting on Friday Night Live! We had 162 students come to attend! Thank you also to Stephanie Rummler, Kurt Rummler, Briana Harris, Barb Berezowitz, Jack Schmidt, and Brad Ferstenou for assisting as well and giving up your Friday night to help! It was a great turn out and such a great opportunity for our students to choose something positive to do on a Friday night!
Lastly, as I write this it makes me think about a conversation Annie Phillips and I had after Thursday's events. We truly appreciate your professionalism as we come into your classrooms and pull students on a daily basis. We really appreciate your efforts to continue as normal and so great to see our culture is established that is it normal for administration to be in classrooms. Again, we thank you for all you do and for maintaining a calm learning environment for all of our students, even in moments of concern.

Article for the week: This is a continuation of last week!

On Formative Assessment, Edited by Marge Scherer

Feed Up, Back, Forward, by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Moving Toward Alignment

For a feedback system to be informative, all measures must align with one another to present a rich portrait of how students are progressing toward a common goal. For example, daily checking-for-understanding practices should contribute to a teacher's understanding of how students will perform with similar material in a unit, in a course, and on state assessments. The following practices form a system of assessment experiences that allow for feeding up, feeding back, and feeding forward.

Check for Understanding

At the core of daily teaching is the ability to check for understanding in such a way that teachers learn how to help students. Fostering oral language and using questioning techniques aid this kind of informed check-in (Fisher & Frey, 2007). The evidence on using student talk as a mechanism for learning is compelling; in classrooms with higher rates and levels of student talk, more students excel academically (Stichter, Stormont, & Lewis, 2009).

Language frames help stimulate academic talk in the classroom and also help gauge students' understanding of concepts. Language frames are cloze statements that provide students with the academic language necessary to explain, justify, clarify, and ask for evidence.

In a mathematics lesson, Ms. Kelly introduced her 1st grade English language learners to the language frame "The ___ is _-er than the ____" to help them contrast the relative size of two objects, a math standard in Ms. Kelly's district. Using a feedup strategy, she explained that the students' purpose was to approximate the size of two objects. She then had the students, in pairs, practice making sentences using this language frame in several different contexts.

On the day we observed Ms. Kelly's class, student pairs were using this frame to compare the sizes of different animals on laminated cards (see www.ascd.org/el to view a video of this lesson). When Joseph, one of the students, said, "The snake is wider than the duck," his partner Mario asked, "Is the snake wider or narrower than the duck?" to cue Joseph to rethink his answer.

Ms. Kelly let the boys know they needed to approximate more accurately and asked each boy to show the width of each animal with two hands spread apart. Joseph could gesture correctly but could not accurately convert his knowledge to spoken language. Ms. Kelly understood that the barrier was language and not the measurement concept, so she concentrated on reteaching the language frame until Joseph could use it correctly (the feed-forward element).

Questioning is vital to checking for understanding, especially as it pertains to giving feedback on incorrect responses. When faced with a student error, we should remind ourselves that the answer usually makes sense to the student and reflects what he or she knows and does not know at the moment. We can rapidly form a hypothesis about what the student might not know to provide a prompt that will help that student achieve the needed understanding. Walsh and Sattes (2005) suggest these follow-up prompts:

Words or phrases that foster recall ("Think about the role of hydrogen").

Overt reminders to trigger memory ("The word begins with d").

Probes that elicit the reasoning behind the answer to identify knowledge gaps ("What led you to think the character would do that?")

A reworded question that reduces language demands. For example, instead of asking a student to "identify the role of tectonic plates in earth geophysical systems," the teacher might say, "Earthquakes and volcanoes have something in common; let's talk about that."

Use Common Assessments

In addition to providing a way to check daily for understanding, an aligned system includes common formative assessments that enable teachers to coordinate with other teachers in their grade level or department. These assessments are usually based on units of instruction and become part of the pacing guide for each course. Such benchmark assessments gauge increments of student performance and provide teachers with data that spur conversation about instructional and curricular design.

We recommend that teachers meet in advance of teaching a unit to develop common formative assessments. The assessment items teachers select should be geared to diagnose specific kinds of learning so that teachers can discuss any misconceptions students still hold after instruction and recognize patterns among students (Fisher, Grant, Frey, & Johnson, 2007). Teachers should meet as soon as possible after they score each assessment to discuss the relationship between the results and teachers' instruction and to plan next steps (the feed-forward component).

Partial conceptual understanding is a common cause of incorrect responses. For example, Ms. Goldstein's English as a second language class was studying affixes in preparation for a benchmark assessment. Ms. Goldstein explained that the lesson's purpose was to analyze new vocabulary words (feed up). Omar incorrectly identified in- as the prefix for interlude. Rather than simply supply Omar with the correct answer and move on, Ms. Goldstein asked him what the prefixes in- and inter- meant and received a correct reply. "Could the root be '-lude,' or is it '-terlude'?" Ms. Goldstein questioned. Omar stayed with his initial incorrect answer, so she tried again, asking Omar's small group, "Is the prefix in- or inter-? I'll let you figure it out" (providing feedback that something needed to be figured out).

Omar's group talked about the two meanings and how they would affect the overall word. Ms. Goldstein checked a few minutes later on whether Omar and his group had arrived at the correct answer.

After the English as a second language department administered its common formative assessment on affixes, Ms. Goldstein remarked, "I noticed some students in my class getting similar prefixes like in- and inter- confused. This was a pattern in all our classes. How can we teach look-alike prefixes more effectively?" The teachers decided to develop a Jeopardy-style game that included easily confounded affixes to give students practice.

Identify Competencies

Although unit-based formative assessments are valuable benchmarks to inform teachers' instruction, they offer students only snapshots of their progress. Learners need a system to measure their own attainment of course goals. Goals should be a balance of short-term ("I'm going to ask good questions today") and long-term ("I'll pass biology"); however, the gap between short-term and long-term goals can be overwhelming. Creating a system of specific competencies that students should achieve in a course and a series of assessments that measure those competencies and provide clear feedback enable students to measure their progress through any course.

Grade-level teams or departments usually specify course competencies and corresponding assignments. Competencies should reflect the state standards while offering students an array of ways to demonstrate mastery, not just paper-and-pencil tasks. The competency assessments should be numerous enough that students can adequately gauge their own progress at attaining competencies; generally 7 to 10 per academic year is best.

Ninth and 10th grade English teachers at one high school devised a series of 10 competency assessments for their common courses. These included four essays based on schoolwide essential questions, two literary response essays, an oral language assessment that included retelling a story and delivering a dramatic monologue, a poetry portfolio, and tests on persuasive writing techniques and summarizing.

These teachers designed a two-week unit on plagiarizing that, as they explained to students in a "feed-up" message, would help them write their formal essays. The teachers developed a common formative assessment that measured how well students could cite information from a newspaper article, a Web site, a book with two or more authors, and an interview. The results indicated that even after studying plagiarism, many students still couldn't correctly cite online sources. Knowing that students would need this competency to write their first essay, teachers analyzed students' incorrect answers and retaught the specifics of this type of online citation accordingly.

Build Toward State Assessments

An aligned system of assessments should build toward helping students do well on state tests that measure the progress of students and schools. Although we do not believe a few weeks crammed with test-prep worksheets are useful, we do believe that students should understand that tests are a genre, one they are capable of mastering. And we advocate assessment practices that build test wiseness by giving students encounters with test formats in the context of meaningful instruction.

For example, a math teacher might model thinking aloud as she eliminates distractors on multiple-choice questions. When faced with the problem 1/7 + 3/7 and three answer choices of 4/7, 3/7, and 4/14, the teacher might say, "I see one of the choices has 14 as a denominator. But I know you don't add the denominator when adding fractions so that can't be correct." When teachers embed test-format practice within daily checking for understanding, formative assessments, and course competency exams, students acquire the stamina and skills they need to score well on state assessments.

What the Mariner Teaches Us

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a cautionary tale about failing to learn from one's mistakes. The mariner was doomed to walk the earth telling strangers that he had killed an albatross that had saved his ship from disaster. If educators view data as a liability simply because we don't know what to do with that data, we risk ignoring something that may help us. By viewing assessment as a system that gives us the power to feed up, feed back, and feed forward, we can avoid mistaking help for hindrance.

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Information/Reminders

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Overall Information:

Scherrer Construction as created an external doorway between the football field and the former orchestra room (room 39). As shared before our former orchestra room and the old FACE classroom are being taken over by Scherrer Construction to use as their break room, offices, and meeting rooms. This was intentionally provided to them so that we did not have to give up green space across the road of Wainwright (recess grass) to Scherrer for construction trailers.

On my desk is the VERY FIRST brick to be removed from our current building!

Middle School Athletics:

Becky Sagedal is the middle school athletic director. If you have any questions about middle school athletics she is your go to contact person.
We will also be using the concession stand funds that take place during sporting events to support middle school athletics. This will be something new and I will work with Ruth Schenning and Mike Jones to set up the account, etc.

If you have questions about this please see Becky Sagedal, Mike Jones, or myself!

This week:

Monday, September 23

Start of iReady math testing week.
District Essential Skills Committee Meeting @ 3:45-5:15 in our Karcher library.

Tuesday, September 24 - Special Education Department Meeting in the small conference room from 2:40-3:15. Please let Alyssa Riggs know if there are any agenda items you would like to discuss.
Wednesday, September 25

PLC focus: Essential Skills and/or Strategy/Skill groups.

Please make sure we are using our time from 2:40-3:20 to work on either of these two areas of focus. As a reminder, please then complete the PLC reflection form found on the Karcher Calendar.

Friday, September 27

Danish Invasion in our 8th grade advisories!!!

Annie Phillips is creating signs for each advisory. Please send down two of your advisory representatives to find their 3-5 Danish students who will be holding your sign with your name on it.
Please note this is an Advisory+ day so if you have not received your elective teacher's list of students that will be added to your advisory please reach out to them.

Elective teachers... please remind students that morning to go to their designated Advisory+ group!

7th grade BASD School Forest Field Trip.

Any questions... ask Barb Berezowitz or Andrea Hancock

Looking ahead:

Monday, September 30 - Special Education Aide meeting in the large conference room from 2:40-3:00.

All special education teachers please also attend!

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Pictures from the week

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Students in Mr. Sulik's STEM class created and designed their own motorized car by incorporating one engine, gears, and an axle!

Students thinking like an archeologist in Brad Ferstenou and Katherine Botsford's social studies class in order to connect their "garbage dig" to how cultures and history is pieced together.

Kurt Rummler utilizing the "I do it" portion of the GRR model to model his thinking (metacognition) of how he determines the exact text from a story to support his thinking so that students could then practice citing text evidence correctly within the ACES format.