The Paw Print
Calendar, News, and Thoughts ++ Friday, November 13, 2015
Calendar of Events
November 17-Fourth Grade Writing Benchmark
November 18-Thanksgiving Meal
November 19-Wear your faculty shirt!
November 19-Writing Thursday
November 19-Hospitality Meeting in lounge after dismissal.
Looking ahead...
November 30-Library Display-Fourth Grade
December 1-5th Grade Math Benchmark
December 3-5th Grade Reading Benchmark
December 3-Writing Thursday
December 3-Thankful Thursday (see flyer below)
December 7-11-Science Benchmark Week
December 8-Tacky Tuesday Tinsel (details later)
December 8-1st Grade MOY Math Benchmark
December 8-3rd Grade Math Benchmark
December 8-5th Grade Christmas Concert 2:00-2:30
December 9-5th Grade Christmas Concert 9:00-9:30
December 10-3rd Grade Reading Benchmark
December 11-3rd Grade Field Trip
December 11-Faculty Christmas Party (see below for details and RSVP)
December 16-Wassail Wednesday (details later)
December 17-Writing Thursday
December 17-High School Christmas Choir Concert 9:00-9:30
December 18-Christmas Sind-a-longs
"Insanity in Education: Mistakes Schools Make Over and Over Again"
This article was taken from Terry Heick's webpage Teach Thought-We Grow Teachers
- Continue to teach how you learned! Times have changed! Start researching the 21st Century Learner because the "old" way is no longer "the" way. If you can't do that, then it's time to go.
- Believe that vertical alignment is possible to do consistently.
- Teach reading like a skill instead of a knowledge-seeking, pleasurable activity.
- Pay a lot of money for PD that is ineffective. Then do the same thing the next year.
- Believe that student engagement and curiosity are merely goals instead of absolutely mandatory.
- Blame technology when the pedagogy is bad.
- Blame pedagogy when the technology is bad.
- Fail to compensate for the heart-breaking conditions some students live in.
- Under-utilize and under-serve truly gifted learners. (Actually, we under-utilize and under-serve the gifts of all learners, but we have downright brilliant students in our schools just eking out an academic existence instead of changing the world.)
- Paint classroom walls beige.
- Make schools look less like Apple Stores and more like prisons.
- Make classrooms look less like cafes with alternative seating and spaces and continue with cemetery rows and stuffy rooms.
- Confuse rigorous, complex, challenging, and difficult.
- Make good ideas into “programs,” then wonder why teachers roll their eyes at good ideas.
- Separate curriculum, assessment, instruction, and technology.
- Value teacher compliance over teacher capacity.
- Celebrate uniformity and teachers being on the “same page,” but expect great teaching.
- Let teachers talk more than students.
- Dehumanize teachers with pressure, then wonder why they quit.
- Drag students kicking and screaming through lessons and units. (Instead of figuring out another way.)
- Under-value relationships with students (including formal mentoring programs).
- Think of school as “college and career prep.”
- Forget learning should be fun.
- Stigmatize failure.
- Think of children like little adults.
- Gamify compliance to institutional policies instead of social change and disruptive creativity.
- Place students on the periphery when we design, plan, and respond to their learning. (It’s theirs, not ours.)
- Assume all kids need to know the same things.
- Fail to meaningfully involve–or better yet, require–community involvement in every layer of our system of teaching and learning.
- Plan backwards from standards.
- Prioritize uniformity and expect creativity.
- Teach content instead of thinking.
- Put the “best teachers” in the “worst classes.”
- Misunderstand concepts and models (e.g., personalized learning, inquiry, PBL) that could change everything.
- Reduce understanding to letters and numbers.
- Talk about ideas instead of the effects of those ideas.
- Value answers over questions.
- Say we value depth over breadth, but then have policies and systems in place that imply the opposite.
- Fail to protect, optimize, support, innovate, and otherwise increase teacher planning time.
- Design curriculum based on content instead of thinking and action.
- Package that curriculum into units.
- Forget that play is the highest form of learning. (We come to understand through play; we can’t “play” with what we don’t understand; we can’t fail to improve our understanding when we play.)
- Seem to ignore that mobile learning is central to education’s future.
- Look back instead of forward.
- Resist allowing technology to radically alter our classrooms and ways of doing business within them.
- Plan the delivery of that curriculum as a matter of chronology–that is, treat it as if it is linear.
- Actually believe that every single student can master every single academic standard–without making them think they hate learning.
Christmas Party
Friday, Dec 11, 2015, 06:30 PM
Sweeny Community Center, West Ashley Wilson Road, Sweeny, TX, United States
RSVPs are enabled for this event.
VFW Essay Contest
Sweeny Elementary
Email: khenderson@sweenyisd.org
Website: www.sweenyisd.org
Location: 709 Sycamore St, Sweeny, TX, United States
Phone: 979-491-8300