November 23rd & 24th

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

No Student's of the week as it is only a 2 day week!  The students will be pictured on November 30th along with the staff of the week as well :)

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Kudos

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• Thank you Marilee Hoffman for taking our Student Council students to the Leadership Conference in Oconomowoc.  The students I talked to said it was a great experience!
• Congrats to Kim Moss for being the Biggest Loser for our in-house Biggest Loser Challenge!
• Also, congrats to Bobbi Smith, Renee Hisey, and Kim Moss for the overall best team percentage!
• AND... congrats to Lori Iverson, Renee Hisey, Crysta Hernandez, Jane Peterson, and Kim Moss for all meeting the goal of losing at least 5% of their body weight!  
• Nice work everyone :)

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Reminders

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• • Monday and Tuesday we will be continuing with the modified schedule as we have assemblies on both days for the Character Curriculum Music Videos!  
  • Any questions see Patti Tenhagen, Alyssa Riggs, or Jack Schmidt.
  • Parent/teacher conferences meeting after school November 23rd (Monday) in the library to brainstorm/formalize how conferences will run for December 7th.  Please attend if interested in assisting.
  • Flexisched starts back over with intervention iTime.  
  • Flexisched has been reset and shows December 3rd & 4th and 10th & 11th.
  • The next literacy lesson will be November 30th and December 1st with the focus being connections. 
  • November 23 through December 8 our 8th grade students will not have compass opposite PE.  They will be meeting with Jean Freund and Steve Berezowitz to work through career cruising.  
  • Special education aides:  This is just a reminder that there will be a training for all aides on  Wednesday, December 9th from 1:30 to 3:30.

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Pictures from the week

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Students working on their Tin Man Projects in Ms. Sturdevant's classroom.

Student Council representatives at the Leadership Conference in Oconomowoc.

7th Grade Boys Basketball home game.

Look at all the Karcher Staff!  Rod Stoughton keeping the peace as the referee, Donna Sturdevant and Stacy Stoughton controlling the pace as score book and clock masters, Mike Jones assisting Brent Grochowski on the bench and Faith Trow watching the crowd.

Below are some items currently sitting in the staff lounge.  If you know where these items should be housed please assist with getting them to their correct home within Karcher - Thank you!

Article of the week:

• This is the same article as last week as it is a longer article.  This is a great article to read right before Thanksgiving Break.  It is important to think about the affect homework has on families and students.  

Homework over Holidays...

Calendar for :

November 16th - 20th

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Karcher Character Students of the Week

November 9 - November 13

(left to right)

• Marissa Pena (Hive) 
• Showed leadership by organizing the Veteran's Day activity and was consistently kind and compassionate throughout the week. 
• Bronson Roanhaus (Silver) 
• Positive leadership in all of his classes and we appreciate his awesome sense of humor.
• Alexis Rodrequez (Diamond) 
• Very polite and hard working student who often helps out with little things that other students would ignore.  He treats all his classmates with respect.
• Dylan Umnus (Karcher Bucks) 
• Went above and beyond in PE class by assisting with cleaning up all the classroom equipment.
• Michael Bielefelt (Applied Academics)
• Being a positive leader inside the classroom and outside of the classroom.
• Alexandra Gauger (Onyx) 
• Positive attitude, work effort, always demonstrating "The Karcher Way" in terms of kindness, respect and compassion.

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Kudos

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• Bobbi Smith was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK!  Congrats Bobbi and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits. 
• Awesome job to Nicolas Buendia and all of our orchestra students for a GREAT fall strings concert.  I was REALLY impressed with the final number with students 7-12 - great performance!
• Thank you Brad Ferstenou & Katherine Botsford for putting the Chicago field trip together for the 7th grade class.  Below are pictures from the day.
• The literacy team, Jenny Geyso, Molly Ebbers, and Patti Tenhagen, did a GREAT job being instructional leaders for our PLC this last week - thank you for your hard work and time put into creating such engaging activities for our staff to use with our students.  
• Thank you ALL for a successful first Enrichment Week.  The rooms I attended had very engaging activities and the students were enjoying their learning/experiences.

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Reminders/Information

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• November 16th through Novmeber 24th advisory and iTime will be combined for Extended Advisory for our character curriculum with the focus being on each advisories iMovie creation.  
• November 23rd and 24th will be a modified schedule for our students to present their iMovies during an assembly.  The schedule is located at the end of the blog.
• Any questions see Patti Tenhagen, Alyssa Riggs, or Jack Schmidt.
• Flexisched starts back over with intervention iTime for 4 weeks then enrichment the 5th week.  Flexisched will have two weeks at a time showing up for this next round.  Our next Flexisched intervention will be December 3rd and 4th.
• The next Literacy Lesson will be November 30th and December 1st. 
• Student Council representatives will be attending the Region IV JAM leadership conference in Oconomowoc on November 19th.  See Marilee Hoffman with any questions.
• November 23 through December 8 our 8th grade students will not have compass opposite PE.  They will be meeting with Jean Freund and Steve Berezowitz to work through career cruising.  
• Special education aides' training scheduled for Wednesday, December 9th from 1:30 to 3:30.  Email Gail for details.
• Just a reminder when providing information for our subs:
• Provide very detailed and really well laid out plans.
• Provide accurate seating charts
• The placement of your sub plans needs to be easily accessible and easy to locate within your classroom for the sub to find.  
• With a subbing shortage these things really affect their desire to return to our building... so just be cognizant of these things.
• Lets see who is really reading the blog... :)  Email me your answer!
• I'm tall when I'm young and I'm short when I'm old.  What am I???

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Pictures from the week

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7th grade orchestra with Mr. Buendia

 8th grade orchestra with Mr. Buendia.

 7-12 grade orchestra students with Mr. Buendia on drums and    Ms. Soeth directing.

Our 7th grade students enjoying their experience at The Bean and Field Museum.

TED Talk to share:   Interesting to think about... 

The moral bias behind your search results.

Article of the week:  

• This is a great article to read right before Thanksgiving Break.  It is important to think about the affect homework has on families and students.  

Homework over Holidays...

Calendar for November:

November 9th - 13th

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Karcher Character Students of the Week

All 6 of these students displayed positive character behaviors within our 8 focused traits:  

Be... responsible, respectful, kind, safe, honest, loyal, compassionate, courageous.  

Students:  (left to right) Spencer Crone (Onyx), Joel Fisher (Karcher Bucks), Kirsten Damrow-Blinderman (Diamond), Brian Fremgen (Hive), Wendy Villagran (Elective), Alex Hofer (Silver)

*** If you could please shoot Jane an email with WHY these students received your vote for student of the week I would appreciate it.  Moving forward we will put a quick sentence about why they were picked for the week.  Making it a bit more personal (thank you for the idea Stephanie Rummler).  So... for last week and this week please email Jane with the WHY.   Thank you.

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Kudos

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• Donna Sturdevant was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK!  Congrats Donna and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits. 
• Thank you Jacob Malewicki and Stephanie Rummler for taking the time to go see PBIS assemblies in action at Wauwatosa Longfellow Middle School.  The information you gained we are all excited to infuse into our PB_S here at Karcher!
• Thank you ALL for a great first term of the school year!  It is crazy to think we are already one term down.  Thank you for making my first 9 weeks working with all of you such an enjoyable experience.  I truly look forward to the rest of the school year with all of you!

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Reminders/Information

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• BLT Meeting on November 9th.
• Board Meeting on November 9th @ 7:00pm.  Larry Anderson's last day on the board as he has decided to retire.  He served for the Burlington Area School District for 18 years and on School Boards for a total of 36 years.  Come thank him for his service to the BASD.  
• Barry Schmaling was voted by the board last week to fill the open seat on the board for the interim time period until spring elections.  
• The String's Fall Concert is November 10, Tuesday night @ 7:30pm at BHS auditorium.  
• November 11, Wednesday the PLC will be in the library learning our new literacy comprehension tool.  
• November 12 and November 13 will be our first enrichment iTime periods.  Students all signed up on Friday and things are looking fairly even throughout everyone's classes for our first round!  Students will be in the same enrichment for both days (minus those going on the field trip).
• 7th grade field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago on Friday, November 13th (See Brad Ferstenou with any questions)
• Starting November 16 - November 24 advisory/iTime will be used for Character Curriculum with an assembly on the 23rd and 24th for the movies each advisory creates.  See Patti, Alyssa, or Jack for details.
• November 23rd and 24th will be a modified schedule - copies are on the counter in the main office.
• Student Council representatives will be attending the Region IV JAM leadership conference in Oconomowoc on November 19.  See Marilee Hoffman with any questions.

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Pictures from the week

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All of the below pictures this week are from my time on November 4th.  Sue Mosher and I had the opportunity to see personalized learning in action (fancy term for student-centered learning environments).  Below are some pictures I took of some different ways to think about the organization of your physical space to give students choice.  

Article of the week:  
A continuation from last weeks article...

Surfacing—and Challenging—Mindsets

Case studies have also revealed that data reports can be a Rorschach test for schools: What teams see in data says a lot about their mindsets about students and schooling.

In one urban middle school, conversations about improving student achievement focused mostly on sending "bubble kids" (whose results fell just below cut scores for proficiency levels) to tutoring or after-school programs (Horn, Kane, & Wilson, 2015). Teachers focused on what someone else might do and rarely touched upon how they might change their own instructional practices to boost student learning.

The school principal also revealed a behaviorist mindset about student learning by directing teachers to show students their test scores to motivate (in other words, scare) them into doing better. This leader also quipped that the after-school math program ought to be reserved for well-behaved students—showing no awareness that poor behavior might reflect student disengagement or difficulties. The school's mindset appeared to be, "We're okay; it's our students who are the problem."

Teachers in the other school profiled in the same study dug more deeply into student test data, examining questions students had missed to determine what concepts learners were struggling to grasp. Yet even as they surfaced possible misconceptions, the new teaching strategies these data teams came up with focused on helping students perform better on those particular test items, rather than on improving instruction (Horn, Kane, & Wilson, 2015).

Seeking "Kaizen"

Blockbuster's executives were smart people with good information. However, their mindsets got in the way. Many had come from retailers like Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven, so they focused on generating impulse buys in the video checkout aisle. They also faced pressure from shareholders demanding quick results—which may explain why they ousted Blockbuster's CEO when he proposed dropping late fees and investing heavily in a digital platform to rival Netflix's (Satell, 2014).

High-pressure environments—whether in schools or business—make it hard for people to own up to their shortcomings and work together. That's exactly what a study of high-stakes accountability in an urban district found. The longer low-performing schools faced the threat of sanctions, the less apt they were to examine their underlying assumptions and current practices—and pull together to improve them (Finnigan, Daly, & Che, 2012).

Educators who fear being judged by their shortcomings will be less likely to engage in self-reflection. Unless thoughtful leaders create a safe environment and set a tone akin to what Japanese manufacturers call kaizen—the view that "every defect is a treasure" that offers a chance to improve—teachers can have all the data in the world, but they won't be able to use the information to guide improvement.

Calendar for November:

November 2nd - 5th

KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Karcher Character Students of the Week

All 6 of these students displayed positive character behaviors within our 8 focused traits:  

Be... responsible, respectful, kind, safe, honest, loyal, compassionate, courageous.  

Students:  (left to right) Bethany Bauerle (Karcker Bucks), Tatum Ludtke (Onyx), Brooke Schenning (Diamond), Michael McGinley (Hive),  Hailey Metzger (Applied Academics), Stella Trapp (Silver)

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Kudos

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• Katherine Botsford was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK!  Congrats Katherine and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits. 
• Thank you Jennifer Pelnar for being so willing to assist Kaylyn Waki with catching up with PLC information and other changes in the building!
• I want to thank those of you who have assisted with covering and subbing for other people in the building while we work through our sub shortage issues.  We really appreciate your flexibility and willingness to fill in when necessary. 
• Thank you to all of our fall coaches for everything you did for our fall teams!  
• Thank you Harvey Kandler for stepping up and involving the right people in order to get our boilers back up and running quickly!

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Reminders

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• November 4th is an early release with dismissal at 12:00.  Rose Dolatowski will be in the library to explain how to use an EPI-Pen and assist with what is the best way to assist a student if they are having a seizure.  This is NOT mandatory - any staff interested can attend @ 1:00.
• November 5th is also an early release with dismissal at 12:00.  We will start in the library at 1:00 with a few brief announcements/items for the good of the order and then you will have time to work on your SLOs and PPGs - both due November 9th.
• Staff, please remember to input your absences in the employee portal as soon as you know you are going to be absent.  Currently there are 300 absences recorded in the district that have not been added to the employee portal.  Staff are calling the subline (that is how we know about the 300) but not also putting their absence in the employee portal.  So... this is just a reminder to remember to do both.
• 7th grade field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago is on Friday, November 13th.  See Brad Ferstenou or Katherine Botsford with questions.
• Starting at the beginning of term 2 students who are late to school MORE than 3 times will receive a detention every time they are late.  So the 4th late, 5th late, 6th late, etc they will receive a lunch detention every time.  The count will start back over at the start of term 3 and again start over at the start of term 4.  So students can be late three times per term.  This information will also be in the morning announcements starting on November 2nd (Monday).  
• Please help remember that the library and PC lab carts should be brought back to the library or PC lab at the end of your scheduled time.  

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Pictures from the week

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Work of Donna Sturdevant's students - creating watermarks to help make their math content relevant and engaging for them.

Student working on his daily wellness log for PE class.  Students use a pedometer daily in class to assist with monitoring their activity.

Students in Mrs. Murphy's 7th grade English class working together to analyze the organization of an ACES paragraph.

Girls Basketball out for pizza after their game on Tuesday night with their awesome coaches Mr. Ferstenou and Mr. Rummler!

Article of the week:

Research Says / Mindsets Are Key to Effective Data Use

Bryan Goodwin

Better data drive better decisions—or so we think. Yet all around us are examples of people and organizations with good information making bad decisions. Consider the case of Blockbuster. Less than a decade ago, Blockbuster had 8,000 stores in 17 countries and millions of customers. It was awash in data, including customer surveys that said people disliked going to video stores and hated late fees. Company leaders were also well aware of the rapid growth of Netflix, having turned down offers to acquire it. Despite all this telling information, Blockbuster failed to change with the times—and went bankrupt in 2010 (Satell, 2014).

Accounts of what happened inside Blockbuster reveal striking parallels to observations of school data teams. These observations show that putting data in teachers' hands doesn't guarantee better student performance. Many obstacles thwart the effective use of data in schools, including aspects of the data themselves and the mindsets of those expected to act on the data.

Data, Data Everywhere and Not a Thought to Think

Few educators complain about having too little data. A recent survey of 4,600 teachers found that teachers are overwhelmed with so much information that it's difficult to "separate the signal from the noise" (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2015, p. 18). Data often come too late, leaving teachers feeling as if they're driving away, looking at data through the rear window. Case studies of four schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example (Young, 2006), revealed that many teachers had little use for data from standardized reading assessments. One teacher noted that simply listening while students read provided more salient, real-time information than did formal assessments.

Teachers can be ill-equipped to parse and make decisions from data. A study that asked 230 teachers to make judgments from particular data sets found the teachers often "lost track of what they were trying to figure out" and relied on general impressions rather than empirical ones "if the calculation became at all complicated" (U.S. Department of Education, 2011, p. 61).

Even if teachers receive timely data and are skilled enough to analyze it, school culture can impede the ability to use data effectively. An in-depth examination of two urban middle schools engaged in mathematics reform (Horn, Kane, & Wilson, 2015) found that in one school, data conversations were mostly superficial. Discussions focused on how to present data differently or asked teachers to predict the percentage of students who might fall into various performance categories on the statewide test—with no reflection on how to change instruction to boost achievement.

Similarly, a team of researchers from Florida and California observed data teams simply going through the motions. Teams quickly worked through a data discussion protocol—without reflecting or identifying any changes in instruction—before exclaiming, "Yay, we're done!" (Datnow, Park, & Kennedy-Lewis, 2013).

However, the good news is that those same researchers observed other teacher teams digging deeply into data, respectfully questioning one another, and examining their own practices. This was usually thanks to a principal who clearly defined the purpose for data analysis and created a "we" feeling in the school (for example, stressing that math achievement was everyone's responsibility). These strong leaders created and modeled norms for data conversations, specifying what materials—and attitudes—teachers should bring to meetings. They set up ways teachers would hold one another accountable, argue productively in a safe and confidential environment, and ensure that conversations about students never turned to "nit-picking or trash talking" (Datnow, Park, & Kennedy-Lewis, 2013, p. 354).

Calendar for November: