KARCHER STAFF BLOG
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Kudos
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- Big shout out to the WHOLE staff for a great week and for your participation and assistance with The Karcher Kickoff Day! Building relationships and creating a community... that is what this is all about! Thanks to Jack Schmidt, Eric Sulik, Wendy Zeman, and Steve Berezowitz for all the behind the scenes assistance to ensure the day ran smooth!
- Thank you to Judy Heinz and Kim Dorn for assisting with lunch today! For running it in this format for the first time it went really well! Thanks again :)
- Thank you Marian Hancock, Jane Peterson, and Kim Moss as well for the behind the scenes help with the staff lunch for Friday!
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Information/Reminders...
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- September 18 - First time using the STAR Schedule.
- ELA teachers shared the focus with you for your STAR time. Please make sure you end your character curriculum by 7:54 to ensure students are given their STAR time.
- This is also imperative because the Continuing Spanish students have class that starts at 7:54.
- September 18 - Math teachers... this is your week to have students send an email home to their parents. ELA did it last week so they should format it similar to what they did last week but with a math focus. You can have them send it at any time during the week, whatever day works best for you. Providing a stem or focus is suggested.
- September 18 - BLT Meeting from 2:40 - 3:30 in the conference room.
- September 18 - Start of MAP testing. This week students will take Language Arts within their ELA classes.
- MAP has changed the name of the tests. Please make sure you select your class that you are testing and the test that they should be taking. Below are the new names for the tests:
- The assessment should be taken on Monday and Tuesday and then depending on the number who finished go into Wednesday. Otherwise Marian will catch up those who were absent and needed more time Wednesday - Friday.
- Here are the names of the tests we need to be giving to our students:
- Growth: Math 6+ CCSS 2010 V2
- Growth: Language Arts 2-12 CCSS 2010 V2
- Growth: Reading 6+ CCSS 2010 V2
- September 19 - Start of your first iTime rotation. Please make sure you are set to go and have all questions answered about iTime on Monday so that we start off strong!
- September 19 - Start of Tuesday/Thursday school from 2:40 - 3:20 in the library.
- This time is set aside for students who need a structured time to work on their work, use their chromebooks, or be assigned by staff.
- Grace Jorgensen is the lead for this throughout the school year. If you have questions please contact Grace!
- September 20 - Essential Skills PLC in the library.
- September 29 - First FNL (Friday Night Live) from 6:00pm - 8:00pm.
- If you are able and willing to volunteer please email Mike Jones and/or Donna Sturdevant. This is a great event where we get a HUGE turn out so support on supervision is appreciated!
Pictures from this past week!
Noodle math challenge in Ms. Jorgenson's 7th grade math class.
Students in Ms. Salbrieter's Spanish class practicing and presenting their Spanish skits!
The Karcher Way - Our character education program ending with our Karcher Kickoff day on September 15. What a great community of learners we have!!!
BHS poms team came to participate in our Kickoff day and assisted and then competed with our students in a kick line challenge!
7th grade advisory students showing off their kick line abilities!
8th grading advisory students showing off their kick line abilities!
Karcher Kickoff Day afternoon activities - working to develop and build a team culture!
Noodle math challenge in Ms. Jorgenson's 7th grade math class.
Students in Ms. Salbrieter's Spanish class practicing and presenting their Spanish skits!
Students in Ms. Pelnar's class making progress on their ceramic pieces!
The Karcher Way - Our character education program ending with our Karcher Kickoff day on September 15. What a great community of learners we have!!!
BHS poms team came to participate in our Kickoff day and assisted and then competed with our students in a kick line challenge!
7th grade advisory students showing off their kick line abilities!
8th grading advisory students showing off their kick line abilities!
8th grade winning advisory for the tug of war challenge - Ms. Sturevant's advisory.
7th grade winning advisory for the tug of war challenge - Mr. Ferstenou's advisory.
Karcher Kickoff Day afternoon activities - working to develop and build a team culture!
Article this week:
Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner, 2nd Edition
Chapter 1. The High Cost of Disengagement
Train teachers to call only on students who raise their hands and to build on correct responses to maintain a brisk classroom pace. This would enhance the self-confidence of already proficient students and minimize class participation and engagement among those who enter with lower proficiency.
Kim Marshall, "A How-to Plan for Widening the Gap"
Think about the typical question-and-answer session in most classrooms. We call it "the beach ball scenario" because it reminds us of a scene in which a teacher is holding a beach ball. She tosses it to a student, who quickly catches the ball and tosses it back. She then tosses it to another student. The same scenario happens perhaps three or four times during what is poorly referred to as a "class discussion." Although the teacher asks three or four questions, only two or three eager students actually get an opportunity to demonstrate active cognitive engagement with the topic at hand (we say two or three because a couple of enthusiastic students usually answer more than one question). Often even seasoned teachers can relate to the problem of calling out a question and getting a response from only one or two students. They get little feedback from the others and don't get an accurate assessment of what the others have learned until it's too late. They remember the beach ball scenario because for many, they did it just yesterday. Let's face it: we can all get stuck in the beach ball scenario.
The problem with tossing the beach ball is that too many students sit, either passively or actively disengaged, giving no indication of what they are thinking or of what they have learned. They have effectively learned to fly beneath the radar. Do you remember doing the same thing? Was it a high school or an upper-elementary content class many moons ago? Did you actually even read the book? Well, we'll make no confessions here, for fear that high school diplomas can actually be revoked after issuance. But our point is this: unless you intentionally plan for and require students to demonstrate active participation and cognitive engagement with the topic that you are teaching, you have no way of knowing what students are learning until it's often too late to repair misunderstandings. With approximately six hours of actual instructional time per school day, what percentage of that time are students actively engaged and cognitively invested in what is being taught or learned in your classroom? What evidence do we as teachers have that students are actually cognitively in tune with us? And what wonderful and deep critical thinking are we missing out on by not requiring evidence of processing and content-based interactions by our students?
Research on Total Participation Techniques
If we were given the opportunity to choose just one tool that could dramatically improve teaching and learning, we would choose Total Participation Techniques as the quickest, simplest, most effective vehicle for doing so. Whether you're a student teacher, a novice teacher, or even a 30-year veteran, a total-participation mindset is essential for ensuring active participation and cognitive engagement by all of your learners, as well as for providing you with effective ongoing formative assessments. Total Participation Techniques (TPTs) are teaching techniques that allow for all students to demonstrate, at the same time, active participation and cognitive engagement in the topic being studied.Quite simply, we believe that if you infuse your teaching with TPTs, you'll be a stronger teacher and fewer students will fall through the cracks of our educational system. TPTs can make us all better teachers.
A study conducted in four North Texas schools, with 211 5th grade English language learners (ELLs), found that those who attended the two TPT-practicing schools outperformed those in the two non-TPT-practicing schools on standardized reading tests. Studies involving comparisons of ELLs are often subject to numerous variables that affect how data might appear. The biggest issue with studies involving ELLs is that of dissimilar proficiency levels of students in the schools being compared. However, when comparing monitored students who had been exited within two years, whose proficiency levels would likely be similar, the students in the TPT-practicing schools outperformed those in the non-TPT-practicing schools at the end of the year on standardized reading tests (de la Isla, 2015).
The importance of student engagement is not limited to K–12 classrooms. University professors Witkowski and Cornell (2015) used the TPT Cognitive Engagement Model (Himmele & Himmele, 2011) and quadrant analyses to investigate the effects of collaborative activities and TPTs on student engagement and learning for 95 students in two undergraduate literacy classes. The results prompted them to make revisions to their courses that supported an increase in the level of cognitive engagement on the part of all students. According to Witkowski and Cornell, "the TPT Cognitive Engagement Model and Quadrant Analysis helped us to dramatically change our methods of teaching" (p. 63). Self-reported student learning and motivation increased as a result of the integration of TPTs and collaborative approaches to teaching as well (Witkowski & Cornell, 2015). The TPT Cognitive Engagement Model will be further described in Chapter 2.
The more we observe excellent teachers teach, the more convinced we become that the common thread in their teaching is ensuring that students become actively, cognitively, and emotionally engaged in the content being taught. And although we are the first to admit that "there is nothing new under the sun" and that the idea behind TPTs is truly a simple concept, we too often see that the actual implementation of techniques that cognitively engage students is not the norm in many classrooms. This situation is true whether we visit urban schools, rural schools, or well-to-do suburban schools. We find over and over again, too many teachers continue to fall back into the same old pattern of "delivering" the content while allowing their students to fall into the pattern of delivering passive stares. Too much focus is often placed on the teacher as the distributor of knowledge. A TPT mindset can effectively take the focus off of teaching and place it on what, and to what extent, your students are learning.
Listening Objects
Unfortunately, as mentioned in the Introduction to this book, too much of today's teaching is characterized by a stand-and-deliver approach to presenting content, in which teachers simply stand at the front of the room and deliver the material to be learned. Paolo Freire (2000) describes students in this type of a scenario as "listening objects" (p. 71). Would you like to be a listening object? Think about it. Would it warm your heart to know that daily you pack your children's lunches and they eagerly race off to school, where they sit and become someone's listening objects? Education built around the notion of listening objects or stand-and-deliver teaching is not effective for young minds, and it doesn't work for adults either. At any age, people need to pause and process what they're learning. They need to chew on concepts, jot down their thoughts, compare understandings with peers, articulate their questions, and as reading specialist Keely Potter puts it, "celebrate the learning that is happening right now in my head."
This article will continue next week...
