viernes, 24 de abril de 2020

April 27, 2020

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Kudos
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  • Congrats to Hans Block on the addition of a granddaughter, Tenley, to his family this past week!  Such a cutie!!!
  • Congrats again to Jeri Nettesheim for the additional of her new grandson, Alexander Thomas Beer Born April 21, 10:37 am  8 lbs 6 oz, 19.5 inches long.  Mom and baby are doing well.  Alexander will be joining his siblings Patrick (13), Katelyn (11) Emily (8) and Andrew (6) later today.  Rounding out the family with five total kids... Jeri sure is glad they didn't follow the COVID trend naming trend!  


  • Kudos to our staff members who are on the scheduling committee for the new 6-8 middle school:  Trent Tonn, Eric Sulik, Patti Tenhagen, Andrea Hancock, Barb Berezowitz, Jennifer Pelnar, Rod Stoughton, Dustan Eckmann, Mike Jones, Jon Nelson, Suzanne Dunbar, Justin Novak, Scott Staude, Amanda Thate, Kaitlyn Klipstein, Megan Riviere, Susie Fleischman, & Jenny Trewyn (I hope I didn't miss anyone).  They have been working hard to create a comprehensive schedule, as a team, that best meets the needs of our students and works to blend all three grade levels together as one 6-8 community of learners! 
  • Kudos to Mike Jones and Kurt Rummler for your assistance with our additional academic sections that are shared by both houses!  

Article this week:  

Assessments and Grading in the Midst of a Pandemic

Thomas R. Guskey, Senior Research Scholar, University of Louisville
Originally published in Ed Week, April 13, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to educators throughout the world. Schools have had to change entire instructional programs in widely varied contexts with inequitable access to technology and other vital resources. School closures and requirements for social isolation have created untold hardships for students and their families, especially those with multiple children at different grade levels, whose parents cannot stay at home, whose English may not be the primary language, and where the parents are also teachers.
In making these changes, educators recognize that we can’t do everything we did before. We must examine our purposes, establish priorities, and decide what is truly most important. When it comes to assessments and grading, two major needs influence these decisions.
First is the need to encourage and support student learning. We need to provide the best possible learning experiences for students under these constrained and demanding conditions. We also must do our best to ensure all students learn well, achieve important academic goals, and are not hindered in their learning progress.
Second is the need to document and quantify student learning for the purposes of accountability. Schools need to verify the success of these alternative instructional programs. For students, we also need to complete report cards and fill in transcripts. For graduating seniors in many schools, we need to calculate class ranks, identify the top 10 percent, distribute academic honors, and name a valedictorian.
Unfortunately, under the adverse circumstances we currently face, these two needs pull us in different directions and prescribe different courses of action. To accomplish one means sacrificing aspects of the other. This brings new importance to establishing our priorities, especially in light of issues related to fairness and equity. For educators who make encouraging and supporting student learning their priority, however, the direction is clear.
Assessments
When it comes to assessments, supporting student learning means focusing on feedback instead of a score or grade. It means helping students to see assessments as learning tools that have an integral role in the learning process, rather than as evaluation devices that mark the end of learning. It means making clear to students that the primary purpose of assessments is to verify what they’ve learned and to identify any learning problems so we can work together to remedy those problems. Hence, cheating on an assessment serves no purpose other than to delay our efforts to help all students learn well.
An emphasis on feedback also means we must plainly articulate our learning goals and the criteria we use to determine when students meet those goals. We need to be clear about how we will know if students “get it” and not worry about quantifying their performance on a scale with 101 different levels. Most important, we need to plan alternative approaches to help students when they don’t get it. This change eliminates the need to distinguish formative and summative assessments. If our focus is on feedback, then all assessments are formative until students get it. When results show they get it, then the assessment becomes summative.
Grading
When it comes to grading, encouraging and supporting student learning means ensuring grades accurately reflect what students have learned and are able to do, not when or how they learned it. As schools physically close and move to online learning, most attempt to accomplish this in one of two ways.
In schools required to give grades for the current term, even when not all students have adequate online access, grades are typically based on evidence of student learning gathered up to the time of school closure. But then they do three things:
  1. Add an asterisk to the grade to indicate it is based on the portion of the course completed up to the time of school closure.
  2. Develop specific procedures that allow students to improve that grade by redoing assignments or assessments, even when the grade remains based on only a portion of the course.
  3. Develop additional procedures for students to fulfill all course requirements and complete the course, with assistance from teachers, in order to remove the asterisk from their grade. Schools vary in the timelines they set for both #2 and #3 because the length of school closures remains uncertain. Ensuring fairness and equity for all students remains paramount in making these decisions.

Other schools, however, recognize the extraordinary nature of our current situation and are taking the same path as many elite colleges and universities: They are shifting temporarily to “pass/fail,” “satisfactory/unsatisfactory,” or “credit/incomplete” grading for the current school year. The University of Chicago, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University, along with many others, all recently decided to temporarily shift to pass/fail grading after switching to remote learning this semester in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The key to successful pass/fail grading rests in establishing clear criteria for “pass” and making those criteria challenging, rigorous, and attainable. This doesn’t mean lowering standards. Rather, it means being clear about the standards and doing all we can to ensure students meet them. Excellent examples of similar pass/fail grading include certification examinations in medicine, nursing, law, military, or civil service.
The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates said, “Desperate times require desperate measures.” What he meant is that in adverse circumstances, actions that might have been rejected under other circumstances may become the best choice. And these are certainly desperate times.

Pass/fail or credit/incomplete grades may prove to be the fairest and most equitable grading option available to educators in these desperate times. By making student learning our primary focus; helping students share the same focus; ensuring the criteria we establish for passing or earning credit are clear, rigorous, and attainable; and then doing everything we can to help ALL students meet those criteria; we will make the best of these difficult and trying times.
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Information/Reminders
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New Construction Information 
  • Click HERE to access the new building blog! This was updated this past Thursday, April 23rd!
Overall Information:

  • This is an additional reminder to all staff that it is required that you have a mask and gloves on to enter the building. Please make sure you bring a mask (as we have a very limited supply after donating to our local health care workers) and we have some gloves. Please make sure you follow this expectation.
  • Pass/No Pass
    • Please follow these instructions to convert your gradebook into a pass/no pass calculation versus a letter grade calculation. This needs to be done by Wednesday, April 29th.  
      • When the teacher goes into their grade book they need to click on the grade marks tab for each class.
      • Highlight Pass/No Pass
      • Click on Assign students on the right
      • When the list opens up they need to put a check mark under TR4 for all students  (HS Algebra is the only class where you select Sem2)
      • By doing this grades will stay the same for all of the other quarters posted and Term 4 will be Pass/No Pass.
  • In case you are asking... the staff video: We are in this together, is currently being looked at to ensure we can use the video as the song is a copyrighted song through Disney. It is a good thing we have a radio station in our district as Julie Thomas reached out to Tom Gilding to see if he could help get an answer for this!
  • We added a document to the first page of The Karcher Calendar sharing what our support staff hours are, so that, in the event you need an additional staff member present for a Google Meet you know who is available during which hours. Here is the link as well since your seeing this for the first time.
  • Thursday, April 30th - Student material pick up from 12:00 - 4:00.  
    • Thank you to those staff members who have worked to put materials together for our select set of students needing hard copies or materials. Please make sure you have everything on the document by this Monday, April 27th so we have time to get things organized.  
      • This document is on the first page of our Karcher calendar, I also sent a reminder email relating to this as well.
    • Pam Bauer, Annie, and myself will be here for the material pick up time frame.
  • Student locker clean out & staff room pack up.
    • This document is where we would like certified staff to sign up for a day (from 8:00 - 3:00) to pack up your rooms. You will notice we can have a max of 6 teachers per day, do not go over this amount. Also, be mindful to not sign up for a day if someone right next to you is also signed up to keep things spaced between staff members.
      • Pack up information from the custodians/Mike Wallace:  
        • Boxes will be delivered Monday and placed by the library entrance, along with tape.
        • Their goal is to clean the building like a normal summer, the only difference is the classroom floor care. 
        • Floors:  
          • If a floor is to only be cleaned, teachers can leave bookshelves packed, they would not have to pack up shelf units, wardrobe cabinets and so on. If a classroom looks good enough to wash and polish, that is what would be done. 
          • If the floor is really bad. We would do a scrub and recoat.
        • Staff should organize the teacher desk and counter top area's.
        • Cafeteria, hallways, and specific areas will be scrubbed and waxed. 
        • We will make sure there are garbage cans/dumpsters in the hallways.
      • Click on the "End of the year check-out form" to assist with remembering what all needs to be taken care of on the day you come to pack up your room.
        • Note that one item on this check out is the completion of your SLO and PPG... that may adjust your date you pick for room pack up...
    • Support staff... Annie put down your names, after we met with all of you and sent you this information, but here it is again in the event you need it.
      • Support staff will be assisting with collecting the student materials in lockers and organizing the student items for pick up on May 20th and 21st.
    • All staff have to have a mask and gloves on to enter the building. This is a requirement.
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Pictures from the week
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The Medal of Awesome is alive and well!!!


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