Weekly News & Notes

Well, a very, very long week has come to an end. As some of you have heard, there has been more than our fair share of excitement, but it has not taken away from so many great things going on in classrooms, clubs, and athletic fields.


Halloween Parade

The Halloween Parade brought some clever costumes and some better compliance with some of our guidelines. The students did not throw candy, which was problematic in the past, and they assisted with the cleanup, leaving the building in its original form rather quickly, save a couple of scuff marks on the floor that will be taken care of this weekend.

There were, however, a group of young men who wore costumes and began acting out in a way that was racially insensitive or ignorant at best, and downright hateful at worst. They struck against the very heart of our core values of tolerance and respect. We pulled many of them from the parade and addressed collectively at the end, giving them some time to process our interpretation of what had happened and an opportunity to set things right, both for themselves, their community, and their school.

We specifically told the students that they had one week to meet with an administrator individually and explain why their actions could have been potentially hurtful, and how it does not reflect who they are or our values. To punish them, by imposing a detention or suspension, contradicts the purpose of teaching; in short, we would have missed a golden teachable moment and the opportunity to turn a completely unacceptable series of behaviors and bad decisions into a lesson.

For us, the lingering questions are: What did we miss? How did our students think this type of behavior was okay? What can we do differently or do more explicitly? To that, we invite you to be part of our solution, to ensure this does not happen again.

On a Lighter Note:

There is one funny story that puts a little bit of a grin on the disappointment of this morning.

I was walking by a classroom at the end of the Halloween Parade (more on the parade in a few). A teacher had asked his class what their favorite costume was, and one student replied that he thought the guys dressed as the Village People were clever and kind of funny. The teacher said, "yea, well, you know what that song was about, right?" The student replied: "Well, I'm pretty sure it's about a group of guys who liked hanging out at the Y, and they, like, played basketball, right?"

Not quite. Pretty sure that wasn't exactly the Village People's thesis.

Coming Attractions

Next week, seedings will be announced for the soccer, field hockey, volleyball and football playoffs. Stay tuned to the conference and try to get out to support the Mustangs as they look for glory in their respective tournaments!

Classes of the Week

In Jason Rojee's class, students were given an excerpt from Jeff Shaara's book Rise to Rebellion, which depicts the Boston Massacre. After reading the excerpt, students were divided into groups and created a reenactment of how they viewed the scene. Following this, students were shown a scene about the massacre from the view of John Adams, who was the defense attorney in the soldiers' trial. This ultimately led to a discussion on how  various views can arise even when we witness the same event. Excellent use of historical thinking skills!

In Mr. Borden's economics class, the students completed a group activity on price ceiling using the illustration of the market for kidneys. The discussion bridged the economic concept of price ceiling with the ethical discussion, and the class had a mathematical and analytic conversation piece. All the students were engaged - and the Q&A between the students regarding the conceptual and the ethical was enthusiastic!

In an IPEC class being shared by Mr. Infanger and Ms. Trottier, the students were working on a "stepping stones" activity which was forcing the students to work together to move from stone to stone, with certain variables in place. While the activity was initially easy, the students were given different scenarios, and watching them struggle to fulfill the requirements and reason their way to the right stone was a great exercise in thinking!

Coming Attractions

For those of you who like to plan way, way in advance, Student Government is working on a potential plan for December 23 that would give us a non-traditional school day on the lone Monday of a vacation week, presuming that a great many students won't be in. As more details become available, we will float that idea to faculty for approval.

Goals

Over the past couple of weeks, and continuing next week, we will be meeting with staff regarding their goals and the evaluation process for the coming year. As more commonalities are unearthed between the goals different staff members have, we will share them with the department leaders in order to provide time, both in PLC's and department meetings, to support what people are completing. There are a lot of great ideas out there!

Weekly Resources

These can be found here, as always. In keeping with needing something light after this week, please read this one - it's pretty humorous! Please read through the last one... it's really the truth.

Weekly News and Notes

If you're anything like me, you woke up this morning after a restless night of sleep brought on by thinking about the number of emails I had answered, the number of events, games, and meetings coming in the next couple of weeks, working on teacher goals, and some of the conversations we are having with Student Government. Oh, and the Red Sox. Staying up for all of these Red Sox games has brought me back with a sense of deja vu  to my English classroom circa 2004, when my students and I were all bleary-eyed with extra inning game after game.

Someone should really alert the television networks and umpires that a baseball game CAN be played in less than four hours.

At any rate, thanks to caffeine, my adrenaline was going strong today. I'm not sure whether that's because it was Friday, because there was a lot to do, or because of Koji Uehara. Either way, I hope you find something to balance the hectic nature of our profession!

Power Standards 

Aubrie Rojee, Humanities Ed Leader

Last Friday, we began to explore and determine what were our “Power Standards”, or standards that the core of our instruction will focus on in order to lead to mastery. We followed the “LESS is more” philosophy in that all chosen standards met the following criteria: leverage, endurance, and success in schools. As we began to divide and conquer, we found many of the standards were targeted by more than one grade and/ or content area.

However, this process was not about eliminating. Instead, we highlighted what supporting standards best served each “Power Standard”. As many of you found, your choice standards often incorporated these other standards when taught properly.

So, where do we go from here? Our next step is to identify how these standards should mold our curriculum. Now that we know what our “Power Standards” are, ask yourself where in the course is this standard as well as its supporting standards best conveyed to the students? Remember, more than one standard can be addressed in a unit.

PLC time offers a great opportunity to start this discussion. In future department meetings, we will explore where these “Power Standards” overlap both vertically and horizontally. Next week, a list of all the determined “Power Standards” will be provided on our departmental conferences.

Thank you for all of your hard work on our Profession Development Day on October 11. Many remarked how exhausted but satisfied they were by the amount and significance of the work completed. Bravo!






DDM Pilot beginning in Allied Arts







The Allied Arts department is implementing District Determined Measures, which many of the other departments will also be implementing and piloting as the year goes on. Our work last week on Power Standards centered on defining our Core Course Objectives, and from there determining what methods were the best for measuring student growth, be it pretest/post-test or a repeated measures strategy.

For example, in physical education, we will soon be implementing software called "Fitnessgram," which will help track student performance over time. The hope is that students will be able to see the gains they are making over a specific period of time.

In many of our classes, the writing across the curriculum that began last year will continue to be refined this year, and the hope is that, over time, some more consistency with regard to student reflection will emerge.

School Committee This Week

At School Committee this week, Dr. Pires presented the district's MCAS data, which includes a great many points of which we should be proud. Our math scores, with upwards of 95% scoring proficient or advanced, rank near the top of districts in our geographic/demographic area. In English, our scores remain strong as well. In fact, the DART, a data review tool implemented the DESE, compares us with Scituate, Weston, Wellesley, Westwood, and Concord-Carlisle, among others, with our median student growth in ELA better than all of those schools and our growth in math comparable.

I'm not going to begin to get into the data points that help create that statistical analysis - I could leave that for the likes of Ms. Morin, Mr. Nassiff, Ms. Shire-Swift, and Ms. Kirby in their stats classes! However, what the data does suggest is that our students are capable of doing quite a bit compared to their peers across the state.

In addition, the middle school ranked among the top 15 middle schools in the state in several grade levels and subjects, which means, in terms of the standards and a test that is generally considered more difficult than the high school/Grade 10 test, we should be seeing students coming our way more equipped for the skills we require of them than in years past.

The other part of the School Committee meeting involved a presentation on Atlas by Ms. Menard, one of the middle school instructional coaches, and Ms. Rojee. They outlined the power of the program, provided School Committee with exemplars, and demonstrated some of the work many of you have been doing. The School Committee and Dr. Evans were effusive in their praise of the work that has been done and that is continuing to be accomplished in terms of Atlas and our curriculum maps!

Classes of the Week
 
After an exhausting morning of PSAT testing, Ms. Lynch took the opportunity to get her sophomore French ACC moving and engaged. After the desks had been designed in a circle, students played a type of musical chairs by asking questions in French and those who it applied to had to race move chairs. Last one standing? It meant you had to read your next question to the group. You could sense the enthusiasm in the hallway! Great job, Betsy!

In Mr. Hoek's Chemistry ACC class, the students were using a review game online to prepare for a test on atomic structure and isotopes. The students were able to work together, but, more importantly, were able to retake the game for a higher score in order to ensure that they were, in fact, retaining the information. The questions had varied degrees of difficulty and moved toward a varied level of inquiry and application.

With PSAT's in full swing, the counseling staff provided the ninth graders with a full program, ranging from information on how to deal with social media, their learning styles, or an explanation of the adolescent brain. The work that the entire counseling staff put into a meaningful few hours for our entire freshman class came to fruition in terms of their instructional plan and its objectives! To keep 200 students engaged for several hours, even with the chunking of the time, is not always an easy task!

Weekly Resources

The full paper can be found here. For a couple of very, very quick recommendations, I found a couple of lists. One included "Ten Things Every Teacher Needs to Survive" (my favorites: coffee and a story), and the other was a quickie on "Five Ways to Get Students to Listen."

Happy reading, and enjoy the weekend!

Weekly News and Notes

First off, thanks to everyone for such a productive PD day on Friday. There was a range of terrific discussions, and the work that everyone seemed to be completing was relevant, practical, and focused. We hope that the format was equally as productive for all of you.

In the interest of the long weekend, this week's news will be brief, but hopefully there will be something for everyone!

PSAT Day Next Wednesday

On October 16, we are administering the PSAT to all sophomores and juniors. There will be homeroom that day to facilitate attendance easily. We'll make sure to have a hard copy in your mailboxes, in case you can't see the homeroom in MMS.

The list of people proctoring PSAT as of right now can be found here. There have been a couple of changes made since Tuesday's faculty meeting, so take note if you can!

Incidentally, some parents have called wondering if the day is a full day of school. Like with MCAS, the periods after the PSAT should be regular periods. You may wish to pare down the amount of material covered that day, but those days are full days of school!

PLC Time

We have been making an effort to get to PLC time to help facilitate people's initial meetings in what could be new groups with the hope that that could be helpful. We indicated at the faculty meeting that a success analysis may be the best place to start. A protocol for getting that started can be found here; also, the log for the period can be found here.

Lest we take ourselves too seriously, this appeared in last week's paper and made me immediately think of some "peer coaching" that could happen:

SMART Goals

If you are looking for the templates for SMART goals, here are several:

Completed 2-Goals Form for Standards-Based lesson plans and Common Assessments

Completed 2-Goal Form for New Course Development and Common Assessments

Single Goal: Student Learning Goal on Common Assessments:

Single Goal: Student Learning Goal on DDM's

Single Goal: Professional Goal for Newly Created Course Development

Single Goal: Professional Goal for Standards-based Lesson Plan Development:

Lesson Plan Template:



Activity and Athletic Schedule

Stay posted to the calendar, found here and Doug's blog, for all our updates to the activity and athletic schedule. There will be a handful of service initiatives coming up, as well as events such as NHS induction, homecoming dance, and some fundraisers. As the end of October draws near, there will be several playoff-bound teams that would love our support as well!


Classes of the Week

Mr. Lemos' Human Geography class was starting a new project; presuming the Zombie Apocalypse, the students were researching areas of the world in which they could construct shelters and how those areas would impact their decision-making in terms of politics, economics, etc.

Mr. Lovett and Mr. Ryan were co-teaching a unit on types of angles in Common Core Math II, with both teachers providing supportive instruction to students on practice problems.

Weekly Resources

For a couple quick reads, check out the blog post on Project-based learning myths; there's also a quick read I added on student engagement from the perspective of the kids.

The entire work can be found here.


Happy reading, and have a great weekend!

Weekly News and Notes

Happy Friday!

Next week will bring us the first of two shortened weeks with students, as we have our PD day next Friday and Columbus Day the following Monday. With half the first quarter already gone (or 1/8 of the school year, depending on your perspective), we have already seen some remarkable bits of instruction.

We know you are seeing all of us in classes - it is part of our collective goal and initiative to be in classes. Remember - the questions being asked in PD360 are for your reflection as well, and frequently to clarify. Keeping those objectives posted on the board is a huge help, but sometimes it impossible to know what happened before or after the brief snapshot a walk-through may yield, which the questions and reflections may help.

As for some data as we have gathered past the one-month point:

• So far, the loss of homeroom has cut down on the number of students tardy to school. Our total number of tardies is down by about 27% after a similar span of time, from September 2012 to September 2013.
 

• First period attendance remains an ongoing bugaboo. In a three day span this week, we had 16 errors. That's better than our record number of 18 for one day, but still not great. To those who take accurate first period attendance on a daily basis, thank you!

• While last year took us until January to register our first suspension, we have had a handful of students whose behavior has warranted a suspension as a consequence. While we are not necessarily proud of that fact, it underscores that we will continue to have some students whose behavior will require the clean slate approach when they come back. Before it gets to that point, though, contact families with respect to behavior - both positive and negative. If there are certain students who are causing you some angst already at this young juncture of the school year, reach out - to counselors, a Dean, a Department leader, a parent. If you want support with that call, we're happy to assist!

What's The Big Deal About Learning Objectives?
- Shanley Heller, STEM Leader
You may have noticed in our walkthroughs that we are emphasizing a visible objective written on the board.  What's up with that?  Yes, it takes time, and sometimes is not easy to write...but what do the students get out of it?  According to research that began in the 80's "clearly articulated learning objectives help students to differentiate among types of knowledge".  Knowledge is often divided up into two categories:  declarative (facts/concepts) and procedural (knowing how and when to apply).  Students tend to work at the lowest acceptable level of knowledge, so if we are not clear if we expect knowledge of concepts or application of concepts students will choose to learn at the declarative level.  If we are clear they are expected to USE the knowledge for a specific purpose, more students are likely to rise to that level.

But my favorite reason is to lessen the gap between what we want students to learn and what they actually learn.  Here are the "big 3" that is likely to raise student achievement:
1) Focus on specific skill or performance (clearly articulated objective)
2) targets appropriate level of challenge to their current performance
3) sufficient quantity and frequency to cirterion

The key is time in "deliberate practice"  that is working toward a specific goal, rather than same time in "generic practice". 

Reference:  The Educational Value of Course-level Learning Objectives/Outcomes,www.cmu.edu/teaching

Classes of the Week

I can't speak for everyone who was in and out of classes, but here are a couple highlights of  walk-throughs this past week:

Mr. Petrarca's Economics classes were conducting a simulation that resembled the trading floor at the stock exchange. It enabled the students to practice an authentic set of skills, use target vocabulary, and implement some of the problem-solving that will later find its way onto Advanced Placement tests. The students were all out of their seats, working with one another, driving costs up (and down) with their discussion. The class was extremely high on the engagement scale!

Ms. Champagne's Art History students moved class to the atrium outside guidance to work on a project where students interviewed each other as ancient Greek statues. The students were human works of art, having become experts on their piece for the interview by their peers.

Mr. Christie was introducing a Peer Editing rubric for his ninth-grade standard English class, in which the guidelines for specific essay writing techniques were explained and the standards for peer editing introduced and implemented. For a last period class of a day, and featuring a lively bunch, the students were moving upward on the Bloom's scale as they provided feedback for each other's work.

The beauty of going into 20-30 classes a week means seeing, frequently, a variety of different instructional strategies, both direct and differentiated, and assessments, those that are traditional, alternative, and/or authentic. It's proof (and validation) of many, many great things going on, so we hope to find ways to get folks to share these ideas and, ultimately, look at student work to tune those plans!

PLC TIME

Speaking of time to collaborate, we will be implementing a different model in the next week or so that will help facilitate better planning.

Recognizing that supervising students AND engaging in common planning is not ideal, the following solution was offered and accepted:

• All students in the self-directed study will be assigned to specific teachers for the purpose of attendance and supervision of the study. The student-to-teacher ratio in the study hall will not exceed 35:1, in accordance with Article IV D-5 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
• The teachers who are assigned a PLC/non-instructional time shall not report to the cafeteria, but to a designated common space.
• All full-time teachers shall be afforded a minimum one period of PLC/non-instructional time absent any responsibility in the cafeteria.
• Teacher schedules shall be changed to reflect, via MMS, the period(s) which have been assigned as either the supervision of Directed Study or the opportunity for PLC time.
• A PLC log shall be completed to provide feedback on the use of the time, to reflect evidence of collaboration, and to share said evidence among professionals in the building.
• All study halls, save those assigned during the lunch block, shall be assigned to the cafeteria.
• Teachers who wish to collaborate during periods when they are assigned to the cafeteria for supervision purposes may do so at their leisure and as individual periods permit.
• Should teachers assigned for a PLC period wish to collaborate in the cafeteria with the teachers assigned for study hall supervisory purposes, they may do so at the discretion and consensus of the group.
• For the purpose of calculating the student-to-teacher ratio during first and last block, the members of the senior class, the majority of whom are partaking in senior privilege and thus will not be present, have been omitted from the total number of students. Should such time arise as when the ratio would exceed 35:1, an additional staff member would be assigned.

The patience that has been demonstrated over the first month is sincerely appreciated. The goal, obviously, is to give people opportunities to plan together, collaborate, and share ideas for the purpose of fulfilling the many responsibilities we share. I'm open to suggestions about how to make PLC time better as we move forward, and have already started having conversations about how to, in scheduling next year, giving people more time to work together.

Over the course of the year, there may be specific tasks assigned to the PLC time, such as examining mid-year exam data, looking at some common curriculum, piloting a new program, lesson plan tuning (more on that later), or what is called a success analysis (looking at what went well, and why). Again, ideas for the good of the order for how to structure that time to make it productive, particularly among the groups that have used it well,  are appreciated and welcomed.

I ask for and appreciate your continued patience as I make the changes in MMS. A revised duty schedule can be seen here; I will let everyone know when it goes into effect. The numbers reflect the total number of students in that period; the italics reflect the PLC group, many (most?) of which are comprised of people who teach similar subjects - in a couple cases, similar grade level.  My hope is by the middle of next week everything will be updated.

NON-PLC STUDY HALL

I know this has been said before, but I'm putting it right here, in black and white, to be explicit.

There are several periods in the study hall schedule where there are, say, four teachers assigned for 50 students, well below the 35:1 student-teacher ratio.

If you, as professionals, wish to divvy up the duty, to keep the number satisfactory but to free others up  - please do. I want people to use their time productively and, more importantly, work collegial as professionals. That means it is okay to leave the cafeteria to consult with counselors, meet with someone, go to a class - whatever needs to be done. Again, work it out amongst yourselves and let me know if I can help... I think almost everyone should be able to squeeze out the equivalent of an every free period every cycle or so.

Other Study Hall Procedures

Just a reminder that the first three and last period of the day should have the students seated in the bottom half of the cafeteria.

The period immediately after lunch -the students should sit in the upper part of the cafeteria.




Finally,

Weekly Resources are posted here. There is a particularly fitting piece from Edutopia on how to stay positive in trying times - the steps they recommend are solid and hopefully things we can emulate!

Have a great weekend!