The Weekly Armadillo
Monday, April 18, 2017
"The Best School in Town"
Vision
To create an exceptional learning environment that produces remarkable students who are prepared to be successful and equipped to compete in a global society.
Mission
To prepare all students to achieve the highest standard of intellectual, physical and social growth.
W. T. White Feeder Mission
We will cultivate a premier learning community to foster globally responsive citizens.
Therefore, we are committed to:
Providing access to an equitable and high quality education
Promoting citizens who contribute to the common good
Supporting our students academically, socially, and emotionally
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Wilt or Grow
There is no such thing as status quo.
You either wilt or grow.
Read and grow from the information below.
Action Item
Critically read the information below. During the remaining weeks of school and into the new school year, I want us to place a greater emphasis on teaching "thinking dispositions" or as the first part of the article refers to them, "soft skills." Part II of the article has strong implications for our practice as educators. Be sure to read part I so that you are able to make clear connections to part II and gain a deeper understanding.
Excerpt I: Hard Thinking about Soft Skills by Guy Claxton, Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick
Educational Leadership
March 2016 | Volume 73 | Number 6
Learning for Life Pages 60-64
Habits like persisting and drawing on past knowledge are some of the most essential dispositions we can teach.
Twenty-first century skills. Social-emotional learning. Grit. Mindsets. Character strengths. Habits of Mind; habits of the heart. People use these words and phrases—and similar ones—to describe skills that they also often refer to as noncognitive and soft (Conley, 2013; Kamenetz, 2015). Although most people in academics and business consider these skills to be crucial for a well-educated individual, the language people use reflects some problematic attitudes.
The term 21st century, for instance, implies that these attitudes have only just been discovered or are peculiar to the demands of the current day. Persisting in the face of difficulty or adopting someone else's perspective have probably been valuable inclinations since the dawn of human history and are likely to continue to be important well into the 22nd century. And calling these skills soft or noncognitive belies their importance.
What's in a Word?
Skills
First, let's tackle the word skill. This term can be useful in emphasizing that such outcomes as being inquisitive or persisting in the face of difficulty are practical behaviors, responses to situations rather than decontextualized displays of knowledge. It reminds us that there is more to real life than being able to call facts quickly to mind or checking the correct box on a test. In a fast-changing world, education has to prepare learners to act intelligently, skillfully, and with good judgment when they meet the unexpected.
However, we usually think of a skill as a procedure someone can be trained to do. Developing a skill seems like a technical matter. But guiding someone to develop an attitude of curiosity or self-evaluation, for example, isn't like training someone to shoot a rifle or make a béchamel sauce. Curiosity has a skillful aspect, certainly, but it also involves a deeper pleasure in making discoveries and an openness to novelty and challenge. To develop such inclinations, students need ongoing opportunities, encouragement, and guidance in a wide range of contexts, not just "training." Attempts to train students in thinking skills have often been ineffective. The skills developed don't last, don't transfer to new situations, and don't come to mind when they are needed. (Swartz, Costa, Beyer, Kallick, & Reagan, 2008).
Further, we must communicate more clearly about how to distinguish among types of thinking, thinking skills, and thinking dispositions. For example, the "4 C's" of 21st century skills (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2011)—critical thinking, creative thinking, communication, and collaboration—might be considered "types of thinking" that we should teach students to engage in. These are important types of thinking, and students do need to learn how to perform them on appropriate occasions. Merely engaging in these types of thinking, however, doesn't mean that students engage in them carefully or skillfully. Students can, for instance, collaborate in hasty, sloppy, and superficial ways (Swartz et al., 2008). Simply introducing students to these types of thinking doesn't ensure that they will develop thinking skills—or the disposition to use those skills effectively when faced with complex problems.
Soft
Think about what the word soft connotes. It's the obvious contrast to hard—as in the phrases hard data, hard evidence, and hard thinking. If hard implies objective, clearly defined and reliable, soft must imply subjective, fuzzy, and unreliable—softhearted rather than hardheaded. The terminology implies that these valued outcomes are sentimental or "warm and fuzzy." It immediately undermines their claim to serious attention, suggesting that we don't consider them as important as the "hard" data that's presently driving accountability.
There are no right answers to prove a student has developed one of these traits, no test scores to compare, no averages or standard deviations to yield. So soft also implies that these outcomes are impossible to measure and fall outside any framework of accountability.
There is hard evidence, however, for both the importance of traits like resilience or a growth mindset and the effectiveness of certain methods for cultivating them (Edwards, 2014). Although the attempt to define levels of such attributes is fraught with difficulty, that doesn't mean it's impossible to define levels and show evidence of development.
It's true that such skills are never fully "mastered," so they cannot be assessed using summative, right-answer forms of assessment. But such assessment tools as interviews; open-ended questionnaires that allow students to draw from their personal experiences; portfolios demonstrating growth over time; and performance tasks and capstone projects—especially combined with journals in which students reflect on their use of dispositions in such projects—can yield inferential but valid data on how skilled students are, for example, at collaborating or persisting through difficulties.
In a sense, these are the "hardest" data because they involve student voice, direct observation, and real-time performances. After all, which data are more significant indicators that a student will be a lifelong learner: scores measuring recall of information from an assigned text or the fact that a student voluntarily chooses to read? Bubbling in the correct answer to a complex math problem or persisting over time on a problem that demands insight and creativity?
Non-cognitive
In an attempt to distinguish attitudes, inclinations, beliefs, and dispositions from content knowledge, researchers coined the somewhat awkward term noncognitive for everything that was not, in their view, grounded in or directly derived from rational thought (which they labeled cognitive).
The term noncognitive tries to make space in our thinking for important outcomes of education that aren't simply concerned with the storage, retrieval, and rational manipulation of knowledge. But it sets up a false opposition between cognition and other aspects of a person, such as sociability—and between thinking (good) and emotion (problematic).
Every thought and action is accompanied by emotions, which originate in the amygdala. Feel-good neurotransmitters (serotonin, endorphin, dopamine) are released whenever we experience such feelings as satisfaction with the completion of a complex task, rapture from observing a sunset, camaraderie in working with others, or the Eureka moment of enlightenment.
Being a skillful collaborator, for instance, involves cognitive, emotional, and social aspects, used together. You need to be able to see the world through other people's eyes, which involves the highly cognitive ability to build accurate mental models of their knowledge structures and to keep them updated during a conversation. And persisting with difficult problems involves both cognitive strategies and a general tolerance for uncertainty.
The very term noncognitive suggests that cognition is well defined and well understood, while everything else exists in a dark zone around this patch of intellectual light. Again, the language itself carries a derogatory attitude toward some of the most valuable outcomes of learning.
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Hey! Look us over, we are the BEST!!
Nathan Adams Armadillos always beat the rest.
We're spectacular people with wonderful spirit
Who never let you down!
Nathan Adams, best in town!
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The Farm
My Category Tracker
Harry Potter!
Students in Ms. Miklosko's class look forward to the teacher station during guided reading. The Hogwart's house system is their guide.
Thanks to all of you for showing out the Armadillo way!
This week, go to the staff you'd like to recognize and give them a verbal kudos!
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4/17 NO SCHOOL (inclement weather day holiday for all students and staff)
4/17 TEI Student Experience Survey Begins
4/18 CIC Monthly Meeting @ Bush 8:00-2:00
4/19 Luna - District-wide Principal Meeting 1:00-5:00
4/19 GLL Meeting (132 @ 3:15)
4/20 Family Reading Night 5:30-7:30
4/21 Coffee with the Principal (library @ 8:15)
4/22 Earth Day Saturday (School Courtyard Beautification sponsored by SBDM)
4/24 Feeder Job-a-like
4/26 GLL Meeting (132 @ 3:15)
4/27 Two-way Dual Language PLC (Solar Prep 2:00-5:00)
4/28 Volunteer Breakfast (library 9:00-10:30)
5/1 Deadline - Purchase Orders for 199 General Fund
5/1 Staff Meeting in the library 3:15-4:30
5/1 Community Preschool Story Time (library @ 10:00)
5/2 Luna - Feeder Elementary Calibrations (Bush Elem. @ 8:30-11:00)
5/2 PTA General Meeting/ Talent Show
5/3 Hall Party sponsored by Specials Team and Sp.Ed. Team
5/3 SST/ RtI Progress Monitoring Meetings (grade level)
5/5 Sock Hop (Cinco de Mayo) sponsored by PTA
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Created by Adrian Luna, Principal
Nathan Adams Elementary School
Dallas Independent School District
Email: aluna@dallasisd.org
Website: www.dallasisd.org/nathanadams
Location: 12600 Welch Road, Dallas, TX 75244
Phone: 972-794-2600