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)
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.
______________________________________________________________________________
Kudos
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
- 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!
______________________________________________________________________________
Reminders
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- 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.
______________________________________________________________________________
Pictures from the week
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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!
Research Says / Mindsets Are Key to Effective Data Use
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:
