KARCHER STAFF BLOG
Karcher 2016-2017 School Calendar
Student's of the week for
May 15 - May 19
- Abigail Buss: (Silver)
- Abigail works hard and produces incredibly impressive work. We appreciate the informed perspective she brings to class!
- Mia Taylor: (Diamond)
- Mia is an incredibly kind student who consistently shows the Karcher Way. She treats her peers with respect and kindness and is always willing to help out. Mia always has a smile on her face and her positive attitude is incredibly contagious. Keep up the great work!
- Sammantha Hammiller: (Hive)
- Samantha displays perseverance in her work as she is always looking to improve and get better. Her responsibility and respect to her school and classmates is on display in the classroom, in the hallway, and on safety patrol.
- Leah Henning: (Applied Academics)
- Leah is a leader in class and always participates at her PERSONAL BEST! Leah exemplifies the Karcher Way!
- Beatriz Mondragon-Lopez: (Onyx)
- Beatriz has been doing a fantastic job. She has been putting a noticeable effort into whatever she is working on, and she is staying caught up in her classes. Keep up the great work Beatriz, and finish your 7th grade year strong!!!
- Sean Diggins: (Karcher Character Bucks - Not in Picture)
- Sean has a tremendous sense of humor that he uses to enhance our school. He is kind to his classmates and very responsible about completing his schoolwork - Awesome job!
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Kudos
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- Jeri Nettesheim was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Jeri and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits.
- Kudos to Andrea Hancock, Barb Berezowitz, and Kurt Rummler for your work with our 7th grade Zoo Field trip and our Safety Patrol field trip. Both were a success and students enjoyed their experiences.
- Kudos to Marian Hancock for your continued assistance with catching our absent students needing to take their MAP assessments. We are almost completely done with MAPs and will be looking at the data this week during PLC.
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Reminders
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- Monday, May 22 - Character Assembly awards are due by the end of the day!
- Please bring yours to the main office along with your short reason to be placed on the back of both student's awards so that we have time to laminate each one.
- Monday, May 22 - BLT at 2:40 in the conference room.
- Tuesday, May 23 - Our Math Meet students will be traveling to Madison to complete in the Math State Meet with advisors Mike Jones and Grace Jorgenson. Good luck!!!
- Wednesday, May 24 - MAP Data PLC
- MAP data will be broken down by ELA classes and math classes along with data for each grade in order to analyze our results for the 2017-2018 school year.
- Thursday, May 25 - TSID sheets are due to Grace Jorgenson.
- Please bring any forms you have to the main office and put them in Grace's mailbox.
- Thursday, May 25 - Last day of our iTime rotations for the year!
- Friday, May 26 - Half-Day with afternoon inservice from 1:00 - 3:00.
- We will be in the library to start in order to complete the CALL Survey and then you will have time to work on your SLOs, MLP, PPGs, Google Certification/Hours, and any of your end of the year needs.
Other information:
- The STEM posting is for an opening at Karcher due to Jayme Pruszka taking the Business position at the high school. Due to the move we decided to go to the board asking for the certification of the course change as the evolution of those classes has shifted to more of a technology education focus, which falls within STEM and opens up the certification needed. The position is posted internally/externally and we hope to fill the position prior to the end of the school year.
- Those running Compass opposite PE... you are welcome to allow students to use this time for Compass, SSR, and/or work completion as we are approaching the end of the school year.
- Our Character Assemblies will be taking place right after the Memorial Day weekend on Tuesday and Wednesday next week with morning assembly schedule days.
- June 2 is an afternoon assembly schedule with time spent with Cooper/Waller students!
- Room checkout information will be in next week's blog for June 9th!
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Pictures from the week
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NJHS (National Junior Honor Society) Highway clean up!
7th grade Zoo field trip!
Article of the week:
Designing a Community of Shared Learning
When teachers regularly observe one another, they gain ideas for sharpening instruction—and a conduit for leadership.
Continuation from last week's article...
Continuation from last week's article...
Setting the Stage
For the inaugural round, I invited teachers into the experience with four questions: (1) What can we learn from getting into other people's classrooms? (2) What ideas can we gather for ourselves? (3) What does the experience make us think about our own teaching? and (4) What questions are we left with? I anticipated that 15 people would be interested, so I was stunned when more than 50 teachers signed up to participate. I expanded my original plan and set a two-day schedule that provided substitutes to relieve teachers of their supervision duties so they could each visit a classroom.
I sent the entire staff a Google Form to elicit participants and gather information about each teacher's availability and preferences: Did they want to see a particular teacher or course? Someone within their PLC or department—or outside their department? (Many people clicked, "Surprise Me!," which gave me more flexibility.)
For the initial round, I made sure that every teacher who signed up to visit another classroom also had a visitor come to his or her own classroom, to stress that we all had something to learn from one another and that there wasn't one small group of expert teachers. Now, I've relaxed that rule a bit in an effort to draw in younger teachers who are hesitant to have veteran teachers visit their rooms. (They get one round as a visitor only, and after that they must be observed also.) I did my best to accommodate requests like "I want to observe a teacher who is more organized than me." If a teacher requested to see someone who had not signed up to participate, I sent an e-mail asking permission for the teacher to visit that colleague's room.
I made every effort to schedule only one visitor per classroom per period, but occasionally allowed two visitors to accommodate teacher requests. Some teachers had visitors during multiple periods throughout the two days, others only one. The final schedule fit together like pieces in the game Tetris. I wanted every teacher to have the best experience possible so they would participate again.1
On the day of the visits, I established norms that each participant agreed to follow: arrive on time; stay for the entire period; resist the urge to talk with students; remember that conversations with students and the teacher are at the teacher's discretion; and say thank you. An informal handout for observers reinforced that we were not evaluating, but merely taking the opportunity to observe a peer's practice and reflect on our own. The handout contained two overarching questions for teachers to consider during their visit: What does learning look like in other classrooms? and How are other teachers working to engage students? It also included places for teachers to take notes on three specifics: What do I notice? What does it make me wonder? and How have I benefitted from this experience? (See a sample handout.)
At the end of the inaugural round, I facilitated a 20-minute "brief debrief" after school. More than 40 teachers attended, bringing their handouts with reflective notes, and discussed in small groups what they'd noticed. They made connections with one another about what they saw and how it influenced their thinking about their own classrooms. One teacher reflected, "I want to try to bring real-world articles into my classroom related to the material we are learning like the teacher I observed does." Another recognized, "I need to focus on a goal of quality and less on a goal of completing a checklist."
As hosts, teachers shared that they wanted to make sure their visitor had something good to see; observation seemed to inspire teachers to be more thoughtful about their lesson design for the day, not from fear of evaluation, but out of pride in their practice. One host teacher commented that visitors weren't always aware of the context of the lesson, which "forced me to think about how to explain and facilitate the lesson so they could grasp it as well—which only helped the students understand the concept better, too."
Initially, I'd thought it might pose a problem if teachers saw any instruction that wasn't the best. But as our learning community grew and teachers reflected, we realized that teachers felt supported even when visitors witnessed challenging environments and saw the host teacher struggling. Teachers always found ways to gain from what they experienced.
It wasn't perfect, but it was a start. Ninety-six percent of the participants reported that they were looking forward to another round of classroom visits. Most commented that the experience was valuable. As we complete more rounds of Teachers in Classrooms, teachers are recognizing that, "I can be an instructional leader without taking on an official leadership role."
Letting the Horses Run
"You need to let the horses run." That's how our head principal describes how he leads our talented veteran staff. He sees teachers as professionals and believes teachers initiate the best, most lasting work in our building, reflecting Danielson's (2006) contention:
Leadership in schools need not be hierarchical; communication need not be a one-way proposition. And while schools, like other organizations, need to have someone in charge, there are ways of being in charge that not only honor the expertise of teachers but unleash the power of genuine leadership in them. (pp. 10–11)
Because of our principal's approach, I am free to coach throughout the building and design professional learning experiences for staff. Teachers are encouraged to lead efforts to improve learning from within their classrooms: English teachers redesign courses to dismantle tracking, science teachers digitize learning for students, and music teachers take students around the United States to perform. But often, teachers in various departments aren't aware of the feats colleagues in other departments are accomplishing. Through frequent mutual observation, we see and share all the great work being done around our building, beyond technical descriptions that live within PLCs and individual departments. This amplifies the influence of each success. We realize that all teachers, not just those deemed exemplary, deserve and benefit from a community of shared practice.
Learning and Leadership Revealed
We recently completed our fourth round of Teachers in Classrooms Getting Connected, and nearly 75 percent of Armstrong's staff members have now participated. Teachers continue to provide feedback that reveals the high level of reflection this professional development has inspired. Through surveys and "brief debriefs," teachers note how they've changed their practice after watching a peer.
We've tweaked how we operate the program, often in response to teachers' suggestions. ("Let's figure out how to spend more one-on-one time with the teacher you observed to ask questions.") Recently, I've revised the guiding questions to focus on a new theme each round. (We just finished "Community" and will move to "Innovation" next.) Some teachers are interested in learning about particular strategies, such as teaching writing to a certain age group; others use the experience to become more a part of the school community and talk to colleagues outside their department.
Teachers in Classrooms Getting Connected reminds all of us that just as students thrive in a safe, engaging learning environment, so do teachers.
References
Barth, R. S. (2001). Learning by heart. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Block, P. (2008). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Danielson, C. (2006). Teacher leadership that strengthens professional practice. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Sinek, S. (2014, March). Simon Sinek: Why good leaders make you feel safe [video]. Retrieved from www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe
