“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” ~Theodore Roosevelt
A friend of mine posted this on Facebook the other day and although I had read it in the past, it really resonated with me when I read it today. It reminded me of all of my students the past few days who have been toiling through the MCAS testing. While I may get bogged down in the endless and ever-growing logistics of running the testing, it is the students who are really in the arena. Some of the students worked all the way up to the end of the day. Other students struggled through to complete the test, but gave it their best effort.
It also reminds me of the teachers who dare to take risks, to challenge their students to do more and learn more. It reminds me of the teachers who when they realize a lesson has gone awry, but they get back up, evaluate and make the lesson better the next time. This reminds me of the teachers who never give up on their students, who no matter “spend himself in a worthy cause” of supporting our students.
How does this quote resonate with you as an educator?
Homework
According to Wormelli, “You falsify a grade” by including homework into the grading. Instead grades should be evidence over time of what they know against the standards. “Homework is to practice things already learned.” Homework should not be included because it influences the true accuracy of the grade. Please reflect on how much homework influences the grades of your students. Can a student do well on tests/quizzes and not do the homework and get a poor grade in the class? Does that poor grade truly reflect what the student knows?
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Reading Comprehension
What the Common Core Standards do and don’t value in reading comprehension.
The following are a list of phrases that are repeated throughout all of the K-12 Common Core Standards:
“close, attentive reading”
“critical reading”
“reasoning and use of evidence”
“comprehend, evaluate, synthesize”
“comprehend and evaluate”
“understand preciesely…question..assess the veracity”
“cite specific evidence”
“evaluate other points of view critically”
“reading independently and closely”
The following phrases are NOT in the Common Core:
“make text-to-self connections”
“access prior knowledge”
“explore personal response”
“relate to your own life”
In summary, the Common Core deemphasizes places a large emphasis on textual analysis rather than reading as a personal act. The focus is academic reading.
With this big shift towards academic and analytical reading across all grade levels and disciplines think about how this effects your own classroom. Look specifically at the questions you are asking students. Are they asked to “cite specific evidence” from the text and are they asked to “analyze and compare and contrast and evaluate” what they are reading using textual evidence support their responses?
Source: “Pathways to the Common Core” by Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, Christopher Lehman.
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3 Types of Writing
This week’s focus is on the three main types of writing emphasized in the Common Core:
1. Narrative Writing: personal narrative, fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, narrative memoir, biography, narrative nonfiction
2. Persuasive/Opinion/Argument Writing: persuasive letter, review, personal essay, persuasive essay, literary essay, historical essay, petition, editorial, op-ed column
3. Informational and Functional/Procedural Writing: fact sheet, news article, feature article, blog, website, report, analytical memo, research report, nonfiction book, how-to book, directions, recipe, lab report
According to the Common Core Standards the three types of writing are shared across all disciplines, with a larger portion on Persuasive/Opinion/Argument Writing and Informational Writing at the high school level.
They state the following in support of a shared responsibiity to teaching writing:
“To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students need to learn to use writing as a way of offering and supporting opinions, demonstrating understanding of the subjects they are studying,and conveying real and imagined experiences and events. They learn to appreciate that a key purpose of writing is to communicate clearly to an external, sometimes unfamiliar audience, and they begin to adapt the form and content of their writing to accomplish a particular task and purpose.”
Looking at your own discipline and the types of writing students are asked to do, how much of it already falls within the range of informational writing and persuasive writing? Are there any new forms of writing you would think about introducing after viewing the above list of options?
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Word Walls
One aspect of the Common Core standards is to increase student knowledge of academic vocabulary and to help students to develop the skils to use contextual evidence and analysis to make educated guesses about the meaning of terms. While it was often thought that using a strategy such as Word Walls was strictly for elementary classrooms, it can also be an effective strategy to use in high school classrooms as well. In walkthroughs at GHS I have witnessed the use of word walls in a few classrooms already where the cabinets have been used as the word walls.
What is a word wall?
A word wall is a display area in the classroom devoted strictly to high-frequency vocabulary that will be used or is being used during the course of a particular unit of study.
Check out this article on Word Walls in secondary classrooms: www.curriculum.org/storage/258/1334340769/World_Walls_-_A_Support_for_Literacy_in_Secondary_School_Classrooms.pdf
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Annotation Skills
In this month’s February 2013 Principal Leadership magazine, I came across an article Annotation: Noting Evidence for Later Use by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey.
Why are annotation skills important to teach?
According to the Writing Center at Colorado State University…
“Annotating is an important skill to employ if you want to read critically. Successful critical readers read with a pencil in their hand, making notes in the text as they read. Instead of reading passively, they create an active relationship with what they are reading by “talking bck” to the text in its margins.” (P. 49-50)
They offered the following suggestions and thoughts on the importance of teaching our students how to critically read and annotate. First, it is important to model annotation for your students to explicitly teach them the skills. Second, show them on the ipad how they can use the ipad for annotation of information as they read and search for the information and notes later.
Most common annotation marks include:
- Underlining for major points
- Vertical lines in the margin to mark longer statements too long to underline
- Star or asterisks to use to emphasize important statements
- Mark the upper corner of a page where important sections were noted
- Numbers in the margins to show sequence of points by the author
- Circle of key words
- Writing notes to record questions
Teachers can ask questions in the following areas to help students to better analyze their texts:
- General Understanding
- Key Details
- Vocabulary
- Author’s Purpose
- Inferences
- Opinions/Arguments
Video of a teacher modeling strategies for annotating text:
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ADHD from a Student’s Perspective
As educators we are always trying to do our best to support the wide diversity of students in our classrooms.
As we continue to offer resources and potential accommodations to help students with various needs, please take a moment to review the potential accommodations that can be used with students who have ADHD or ADD and read the following article. The following Letter to the Editor written by a boy with ADHD is a powerful explanation from a student’s perspective on how it feels to have ADHD. Additude Magazine: Boy Meets World
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Learning Environment
· Create a structured environment—Consistency, routine, preparation for change, visual cues and reminders
· Reduce distractions—Use study carrels, headphones, alternative settings for work
· Allow the use of technological aids: spell checkers, calculators, recorders, word processing
· Limit transitions
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Instructional Techniques
· Teach organizational techniques/study skills
· Color code/highlight materials and assignments
· Break down long-term projects into small steps
· Create daily assignment notebook
· Use memory strategies such as summarizing and paraphrasing
· Teach test taking and note-taking skills
· Teach reading strategies and prioritizing
· Provide clear, concise directions, expectations and rules—repeat directions, model directions, demonstrate task with student imitation, use of multisensory approach, limit number of rules, teach routines
· Allow for movement—provide opportunity for movement with a purpose and use of manipulatives. Allow frequent breaks.
· Promote use of peer helpers and improved peer relationships—Create cooperative learning groups with appropriate peers, peer tutoring; facilitate peer acceptance.
· Provide/allow modified or adapted assignments—eliminate excessive copying from board or books to paper; use of recorded books; alternative assessment formats; provide set of books and materials for home use.
· Communicate with involved persons on an ongoing basis—Use of home/school communication system; maintain a list of “what works” for the student.
· Allow the student processing time for questions and information
· Provide desirable alternative activities for students to access after completing assigned tasks.
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Behavior Management
· Clearly state and consistently implement expectations and consequences
· Catch students being good.
· Develop behavior plans to address problem situations across the day/settings.
· Provide meaningful positive reinforcement systems.
· Reward partial accomplishments
· Increase supervision during unstructured times.
· Set up behavior management systems and frequently review and update
· Promote use of charting of student progress/promote student use of self-charting
· Avoid power struggles; pick your battles, and maintain a calm neutral response
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Assessment Strategies
· Test in one-on-one or small group settings
· Provide alternative settings
· Allow for movement/standing instead of sitting
· Provide extended time with breaks
· Break tests into smaller parts
· Give clear descriptions/expectatios of what will be assessed
· Test only what is taught
· Allow verbal/oral responses
· Promote use of project portfolios
· Provide alternatives to computerized answer sheets
· Provide practice tests
· Provide a study format identical to the test format
· Allow open book/open responses
· Provide word bank for vocabulary or fill-in-the-blank tests
· Allow take home tests
· Provide readers or scribes for tests
· Promote self-evaluation
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Assessments and Grading
Here are two video clips to share on assessments and grading:
What is authentic assessment?
Educational Leadership: Formative Assessment
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Co-Teaching
“Collaboration is no longer a choice; it is a necessity. Working together….is essential in order to address the increasingly diverse and sometimes daunting needs of students. If we work together, both when it is easy and when it is difficult, we can meet these needs.” Marilyn Friend, University of North Carolina
What is co-teaching?
We define co-teaching as two credentialed teachers teaching together at the same time in the same classroom.
The advantages of co-teaching include:
–downsizing an overcrowded classroom
–managing behavior challenges
–designing curriculum to meet to greater variety of student needs
–sharing various classroom responsibilities
–modeling teamwork for students
(Fattig & Taylor, (2008) Co-Teaching in the Differentiated Classroom, p. 4).
Check out the following articles on co-teaching:
Ten Steps to Collaborative Teaching between special education and general education: http://www.donjohnston.com/research/articles/TenStepsCollaborativeMattison.html
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Heart of a Teacher
Excerpts from “The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching”
p. 2, by Parker J. Palmer
“Here is a secret hidden in plain sight: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. In every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning.
My evidence for this claim comes, in part, from years of asking students to tell me about their good teachers….In every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work. ‘Dr. A is reallythere when she teachers, a student tells me, or ‘Mr. B has such enthusiasm for his subject,’ or ‘You can tell that this really Prof. C’s life.’
One student I heard about said she could not describe her good teachers because they were so different from each other. But she could describe her bad teachers because they were all the same: ‘Their words float somewhere in front of their faces, like the balloon speech in cartoons.’ With one remarkable image she said it all. Bad teachers distance themselves from the subject they are teaching and, in the process, from their students.
Good teachers join self, subject, and students in the fabric of life because they teach from an integral and undivided self; they manifest in their own lives, and evoke in their students, a ‘capacity for connectedness.’”
Change Magazine, Vol. 29, Issue #6, pp. 14-21, Nov/Dec 1997.
Do you agree with Dr. Parker’s assessment of what is good teaching? Why or why not?
Be the Change 