Weekly News & Notes

Greetings!

There will be no newsletter next week in advance of the Thanksgiving holiday. Some information that you may find helpful for the week ahead:

• The Homecoming Dance is Tuesday night from 7-10. Admission is $10, but students can get a discount if they bring socks or a nonperishable.
  
• On Wednesday, our schedule will be a Day 1 schedule, with students meeting in A, B and C block classes before being called to the gym, by grade and by the PA system. Please resist temptation to send students around the building - typically, Wednesday is one of the hardest days of the year to teach - students are not focused and would rather be out and about, telling you that they have some task that "absolutely needs to get done before the break." It is likely the best day to try an enrichment activity, wrap up something so you can start fresh after the long weekend, or have a seminar or discussion on a key point. While not a throwaway day, please do what you can with those classes!
• In addition, in the coming weeks, there will be a couple of days when I will not be here. During that time, if there is a student-related issue, I would ask you to be patient with its processing. For students that seem to be demonstrating a pattern or for an issue that requires immediate attention, send me an email (I will be checking) and I can ask Doug or Dot to follow up more immediately - as I will not be in the building, I won't see any notes or slips that come my way until I am back.

One of our students!

This Friday very own Hannah Tight was selected to sing at the the MIAA Sportsmanship and Leadership conference in Franklin, performing in front of more than 1000 people! Technical difficulties precluded me from uploading the video, but I'll work on getting that here at some point!

PLC Time

There has been some question asked about PLC time and what staff could be doing. In the next couple of weeks, some ideas for PLC time could be:

- Looking at first quarter grades; analysis of first quarter student performance
- Developing common assessments (thinking of the mid-year)
- What are some cross-curricular skills that start to emerge as we get into the year?
- For teachers who teach similar content but different levels, how can some of the great lessons be adapted for different levels (meaning made more rigorous for Honors or scaffolded differently for Standard)?

Study Hall Attendance

For some folks that are having a hard time getting attendance taken in study hall when in the cafeteria, some suggestions:

1. Position someone at the door and check off names as you see students.
2. Have all students get there and call them up by teacher to take attendance. All students received new schedules last week, so they should know who is their teacher.
3. Announce that no students are to ask for a pass anywhere until attendance is complete.
4. Keep one person positioned by the door to take care of the traffic in and/or out.

If you have a system that works, please don't change it!

Scheduling

In the next couple of weeks, we will release a timeline to the staff regarding scheduling for 2014-15, including the expectation for course recommendations and a time frame for the students to be selecting classes. We also will be working with Shanley and Aubrie to determine what some of the new courses will be for next year and what revisions will take place within the Program of Studies, which is targeted to be approved at the January 2 School Committee meeting.

Holiday Giving Project

If you have not RSVP'd to indicate your willingness to help out, let Mike or Sharon Guilfoil know. Last year, we sent more than 500 gifts from Medway to a shelter in Brockton, providing more than 100 families a holiday. We hope to load a bus this year! Students from SADD will also be asking you to participate, so let me know ASAP - the Giving Project is set to start on December 3 and run until December 17.

Some Great stuff in classes!

Here are some photos of some projects from Ms. Pereira's chemistry classes - where on another day this week, students were engaged in a lab testing actual yield of a product compared to theoretical yield through a double replacement reaction, while other students were teaching each other equations at the board. Awesome stuff!

In Ms. Oleksy's Sociology class, as part of a current events discussion, one student was teaching the class about an incident that occurred this week in Somalia, before the class moved into a creative writing assignment based on their studies of the 1960s.

Speaking of the 1960s, Ms. Rodgers' history classes were talking to people alive in 1963 to capture their oral histories from the day President Kennedy was assassinated.


Weekly Resources are posted here. There is a great interview with Grant Wiggins on Backwards Design. A piece from The Atlantic details why great teachers don't always want to be principals, and if you scroll down a bit, there is a terrific resource on "27 simple ways to check for understanding." I also added a video from Tennessee in which a student crafts a brilliant argument against Common Core. Happy reading!


Finally, Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year, and as the notes will not be posted next week, I hope you all enjoy a pleasant weekend with family, friends, or both, and know that we are thankful for the work you do on a daily basis for our students.

Weekly News and Notes

Greetings!

First off, sorry that last week's notes never got posted. I apparently clicked save instead of publish, didn't realize it until Monday, and by that point, felt like I could just wait. At any rate, there's a possibility that we will be publishing this on a bi-weekly basis, but if there are announcements specific to the week, we will make sure those get out to everyone, particularly if there are any hot-button issues.

Activity Updates:

• Congratulations to the Science Olympiad team, which competed at Oliver Ames last week in its first matchup of the season; in addition to the host school, B-R and Stoughton were also present. Some of the highlights:
• For the Scrambler event:
• Gold Medals went to John Eisenstadt and Devin Rose
• Silver Medals went to Jason Sutherland and Connor Galvani-Campbell
•  For Bungie:
• Silver Medals went to Erica Carbone and John Williams
•  For Anatomy and Physiology
• Gold Medals went to Lauren Getz and Alyssa Whitaker
• Silver Medal went to Alex Callahan
•  For Experimental Design:
• Silver Medals went to Ben Lagan and Kevin Torchia

In particular, kudos to Mr. Hoek, Mrs. Pereira and Mrs. Colace, who advise the Science O team. Great job, all!

• The National Honor Society held its induction this week. While Mr. Nassiff served as the emcee, the roles of the student officers deserve accolades as well, as President Amanda Pollack, Vice President Vi Pham, Secretary Devon Murphy, and Treasurer Corrie Brown also played a role, as did publicists Colin Trainor and Elaina Bliss. As the new inductees were introduced, a brief biography of the students was read, and the litany of service projects and community leadership examples was truly humbling and impressive.
   
• Special thanks to Mr. Nassiff  for all of his effort and energy in creating a truly memorable evening, which Dr. Evans shared in her email to district news posted earlier this week.

• The Community Service Club, which is starting to go by the name of the "533 Club," in an effort to connect the organization to initiatives ongoing in town, will be conducting a Penny Wars fundraiser for the victims of the disaster in the Philippines. 10% of the proceeds will be donated back to the class that raises the most money (who hopefully will donate it back to the cause), with pennies counting toward the club and silver coins and paper money penalizing. If you have any of those large plastic water jugs lying around, please see me or Ms. Parrella and we can get them to the students. The proceeds are being donated to the Red Cross.

• The 533 Club is also collecting food and non-perishables during advisory before Thanksgiving.

• SADD and Peer Counselors will once again be conducting the giving project/toy drive in December.  The flyer can be seen here; see the High School Conference for more details.

Taking Risks

- Shanley Heller, STEM Leader

In walking through classrooms we have been paying attention to well-structured lessons and safe classrooms.  Having a "safe classroom" includes proper use of tools and instruments in labs and shop, and  having defined classroom rituals so students feel safe.  So why is this segment entitled "Taking Risks?"

A safe classroom will encourage students to take academic risks.  Learning to take academic risks is critical in teaching students to be good problem solvers, as well as helps empower students.  Often we, as teachers, are guilty of trying to do too much scaffolding.  We only ask questions that have a clearly defined answer, often creating scenarios that are not realistic.  The unintended outcome is that students are afraid to try to solve a problem they haven't seen before, or imagine alternatives solutions and scenarios.

How do you teach risk-taking?  I don't recommend pushing them out of a plane (a metaphor).  You need to build opportunities into your lesson plan.  I love to use Think-pair-share whenever there is silence to one of my intensely interesting questions.  I ask each table to share one idea, and I write the list on the board---no judgement.  Then we go through the list.  For math, I ask :  is this statement always true?  Thumbs up, down or sideways (for sometimes or IDK).  Students are asked to defend their positions.  We always have interesting conversations, and I uncover lots of misconceptions. 

For more ideas, here is a quick article to read.

Field Trip and Service Project!

Mr. Collins' English classes took a trip to the Community Farm as part of a service learning project!

 

Classes of the Week!

Lots of highlights this week from classrooms - a couple of note:

• Ms. Buscio had pretested and was using the results from the pretest to pair up students and work through problems, a great use of data to support what was taught. She had also created her first test on ItsLearning following Ryan Camire's workshop on writing tests in Its Learning.  
• Mr. Aylward's students in Project Physics have been working on a rocket launch:
•  
• Mr. Jacobs' sophomores were working on understanding tone through the staging and interpretation of the text of Shakespeare's Othello. Their goal was to pick apart individual lines, describe how they would stage them, and articulate to their peers what the emotion conveyed by the text should be for the audience. Students were completely engaged and were working diligently on paraphrasing and analyzing the emotions of the text!

Please don't view being left off this list as a slight - there were many classes visited this week, and there were many, many positives!

Late Buses

To help accommodate students staying after school for clubs and activities, as well as extra help, we will have late buses running from Medway High School each week on Wednesday and Thursday. The bus will leave from the main circle in front of the building at 4:00.

Athletics Postseason

I've learned over the past year or so that there are a great many things that are the norm at Medway High School. Fortunately, one of them is to plan on teams advancing in the postseason.

The boys soccer team makes a bid for a state title for the second straight year on Saturday evening at Foley Stadium in Worcester, when the squad faces Belchertown. I have two good friends who work in Oriole country, and we know that the match will be a difficult one for the Mustangs. Whatever the result, the team has played a fantastic tournament, winning its second straight Sectional and Eastern Mass title and, most importantly, has deported itself with class.

The girls soccer team captured the TVL title but fell in the second round of the tournament to an upstart Hanover team. Two of our girls earned Eastern Mass All-Star honors (Vanessa Bussberg and Shannon Simmons).

The field hockey team played its way to the Sectional semifinals, where it dropped a heartbreaking overtime decision to arch-rival Dover-Sherborn. Coach Hass was incredibly proud of her girls, and coaches from around the league that saw us play in the tournament consistently complimented her on the way this team came together at the right time!

Our football team plays one more home game, facing Foxboro tonight. They barely missed out on the winners bracket of the playoffs, but have dominated both Wareham and Middleboro in the "non-playoff bracket." If you don't understand how they decided which teams made it to which side of the bracket, and which teams did not - don't worry about it. Most people don't. The Thanksgiving battle with Mills-Hopedale looms in a couple weeks in Millis.

All in all, if you see students wearing any of the many garments depicting their allegiance to a particular fall sport, including Cross Country, Golf, and Cheerleading, congratulate them not only for their on-field successes, but for the way they have competed this year, which is a credit to their captains, their coaches, Mr. Pearl, and their collective sense of team. As someone who has been involved with athletics for most of his life, at a number of levels up to D-1 college, our student-athletes have represented this school very, very well this fall.

Finally, our school's current fight song, first as an instrumental and then sung by the immortal Bea Arthur - sorry, Ms. Webster!  

Service Distinction

A proposal was pitched this week regarding a Service Distinction for graduates at the School Council meeting. The full proposal from Student Government can be found here. While School Council did not vote to approve, the hope would be to move forward on it in the next couple of months for implementation before year's end.

If you have comments, questions, or feedback, feel free to send me an email, or you can also share your thoughts with Ms. Pereira, Ms. Bliss, or Mr. Brandon, who are the faculty representatives to School Council, or Mr. Christie and Ms. Ryan, who are the co-advisors to the students.

Videos of the Week:

So, depending on your generation or which show you prefer to watch in rerun, these two videos show a look at Bloom's Taxonomy through Seinfeld and the Andy Griffith Show. Both are pretty cleverly done. And for those of you who did not know, Mr. Murphy is an Andy Griffith aficionado!

The weekly resources can be found here. There's a thought-provoking piece on the importance of ninth-grade, though the headline is a bit misleading, as we know that there is no single "most important year." I also recommend the piece on "How to Remain a Teacher for more than five years," which is more about pursuing context, and may have some advice for those who are feeling some tension.

Be assured that the stress that everyone is feeling - staff, students, teachers, counselors - is a regular topic of conversation. We don't have all the solutions as of yet, but the message is being heard!

Weekly News and Notes

A few things for this week - starting with how thankful many of us are that the Red Sox "Rolling Rally" will be on a Saturday. I know in 2004 and 2007 there were a lot of students (and staff) who wanted to go and participate, but where it was on a school day, that made some things difficult - I, for one, remember a senior English class with 14 students absent, all of whom had made their way in to Boston. But what a week - hopefully, now that the World Series is over, we can go back to normal sleep patterns (for those of us who watched the games)!

I've Posted the Objective, So What? 
- Shanley Heller

 It's been wonderful to see so many classrooms with posted objectives!  A clear well-written objective can be a powerful tool in teaching ALL students, and so today I hope to answer the question:   How has my instruction changed by just writing a clear, well-written objective so all students can see it through out the lesson?

When the teacher has to articulate what the students should be able to do or know by the end of the period in a sentence (not question), the teacher has focused in on the point of the lesson.  Not only has the teacher answered for the students "what's the point?", but the teacher's language, activity and examples are more likely to be directed to that same objective.  

How can you make this tool even more powerful?  Don't just write it and ignore it USE IT!   Point it out to the students at the beginning of the lesson, refer directly to it at appropriate times throughout the lesson, and close your lesson with it.  For all of you from the old corporate world, that is an old teaching trick corporations would teach managers in making presentations:  say it 3 times-beginning, middle and end.   If your objective is the whole point of your lesson--saying it three times in 50 minutes must be worth the time!

 Doing a discovery lesson and don't want to "give it away"?   Careful wording works great!  Research shows discovery lessons are not effective, however GUIDED discovery is an effective instructional method.  Objectives should be guides for the students.  Ex:  Find the relationship between _____________ and _______________.

Here's a quick article from Eric Hougan, National Board Certified Teacher.



Editor's Note: This piece was originally supposed to run last week, but was mistakenly left off the blog!





Voice Mails!

As many of you know, but no doubt sometimes forget, we have voice mails, and our secretaries do forward calls to them. As if we all needed something else to do, please remember to occasionally check voice mail, and if you've forgotten for a few days and get one that's a few days old, try to remember to call the parent back quickly. Frequently, parents will follow up with an email, but many times, particularly in the morning, when parents call, the secretaries put the call to voice mail rather than a classroom (particularly if you're teaching).

If you need assistance with resetting a password, or accessing voice mail, see Lynda and/or consult the P-drive.


Lockdown Drill Training

Knowing full well that there wouldn't be a unanimously agreed time for the training, we decided to poll staff. The time that had the best availability for staff was November 6 (Wednesday), with Block C for Juniors and Freshmen and Block E for Seniors and Sophomores.

The Block E assembly will also include a brief presentation to sophomores regarding Class Rings.

In terms of the length of time, plan on 15-20 minutes for the lockdown drill trainings. If you do not have a class either period, please try to make at least one of them for a refresher, so that our staff hears the message delivered to the students.

Goals

At this point, most of the building has completed setting SMART goals for the year. The energy and thoughtfulness with which everyone approached them has been greatly appreciated, and the conversations have ranged from the pragmatics of the process to the challenges in practice that we face.

We will be compiling all of the goals to try and find some commonalities - there are many - and to find ways to support everyone's goals and the process efficiently and effectively, including providing feedback on our conversations with the ed leaders. As always, if there are concerns or questions, let us know!

Study Hall and Guidance

With the centralized study halls, more students have opted to go to guidance. While we will work with Mary Dolan (when she returns) on a better routine for getting more students going to the library instead of guidance, we are asking your support.

• If a student wishes to use guidance during study - and is a senior: use the phone in the caf or your classroom and call Barbara Rockwood at extension 5118. She will let you know if the space is open - and for how many students.
• If a student has a pass from his/her counselor, allow him/her to go. Chances are the student went to guidance first anyway.
• If a student has neither, but appears to be in a state that would require immediate support, give the student a pass to guidance and let Barbara know that s/he is coming.
• If a student needs technology and cannot go to guidance and the library is not available, or the student didn't go to the library first, there are seven Netbooks in the cart in the cafeteria, and a student may use one of them. You could also give the library a call to see if it has availability and then send the student with a pass (or a group of students with a pass).
• The past couple of weeks some students who have been upset have not wanted to go to guidance because of the number of students, which is something we need to fix, so we appreciate your help.

We are pretty confident that by tightening up some procedures we can have all spaces able to be utilized by students in an effective way. If you have suggestions, feel free to offer them. The goal, obviously, is finding ways for students to access what they need, both responsibly and respectfully.


Weekly Resources can be found here. Happy reading, and enjoy the weekend!