Principal's Corner
Volume V - October 2, 2016
CONGRATULATIONS TO JAMES MICHAEL MILLER, THE SEPTEMBER TEACHER OF THE MONTH
Teacher of the Month
Teachers, please announce this to your students, and post the link in your classroom.
What do the students think? (Highlights from this week's Teacher of the Month responses)
- Ms. Simmons is a very good teacher. She knows how to explain things well to the students understanding as well as make the class laugh every now and then. She always makes sure we know how to do our work and I feel like when I need help in math she's who I could go to.
- Mr. Kelly explains things that make sense and he teaches to a way where you understand the topic which will make me pass his class.
- Mrs. Roberts helps her students with the senior project and takes some of the stress away, while having fun at the same time.
SHOUT OUTS!!!
Shout outs to:
Ms. Brandi Eldred for doing such an awesome job while Ms. Wolfe is out. She hasn't skipped a beat and is working hard to keep teachers and students on board with technology!
Mrs. Cox and Ms. Brown for providing three separate sessions to parents on Lifelines training, and for always being flexible to see students at the drop of a hat!
Our Custodial Staff for keeping the school neat, clean, and tidy! Monday is National Custodial Appreciation Day, and RHS appreciates all they do!
Ms. Maready, Mr. Fields, Ms. Hackett, Mr. Miller, Ms. Williams and Ms. Joiner for assisting with federal cards! Their help is much appreciated more than they know!
Ms. Willaford for always ensuring substitutes are secured, receipt books are correct, and for keeping up with all the other busy paperwork daily!
Deputy Seifert for always assisting without hesitation and for providing support from the time he arrives until the time he leaves!
To the Wildcat Regiment, who performed at the Monarch Invitational on Saturday, and earned the following awards:
1st place color guard
2nd place percussion
2nd place Drum majors
2nd place marching
3rd place general effect
3rd place music
3rd place overall
And, for the seventh year in a row, Mr. S was elected ugliest band director!
(This is a REAL award, and really means that he had the MOST support from parents and fans in the crowd.)
Notes from the RHS Administrative Team
- Please make sure that your students have returned their federal cards. Hopefully you are at the point now where you can start to sort, see who has not turned a card in, and can start checking for accuracy. Remember to ask a team member to look over yours before turning them in. If you are missing cards, please also attempt to contact the parents. If you are unsuccessful, just let administration know. We will also gladly ask our social worker to assist!
- All Safe Schools online trainings were due on September 30.
- IST will meet at 2:30pm on Monday in the Media Center
- Full staff meeting at 2:30pm on Wednesday in the Media Center
- Following the staff meeting, we will briefly meet with Grad. Project homeroom teachers.
- Lesson plans should be kept current in OneNote. We will be looking at them during the current observation period.
- How are you using Edmentum in your classroom? Be prepared to answer this question in all upcoming post-conferences and informal classroom visits.
Data Spotlight - Top 5 users of Study Island
Data Spotlight - Top Discipline Offenses
PLC Spotlight
As we begin to refine PLCs on our campus, I will share some PLC fundamentals. This week's information is taken from DuFour's work with the PLC model.
Big Idea #1: Ensuring That Students Learn
The professional learning community model flows from the assumption that the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn. This simple shift—from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning—has profound implications for schools.
School mission statements that promise “learning for all” have become a cliché. But when a school staff takes that statement literally—when teachers view it as a pledge to ensure the success of each student rather than as politically correct hyperbole—profound changes begin to take place. The school staff finds itself asking, What school characteristics and practices have been most successful in helping all students achieve at high levels? How could we adopt those characteristics and practices in our own school? What commitments would we have to make to one another to create such a school? What indicators could we monitor to assess our progress? When the staff has built shared knowledge and found common ground on these questions, the school has a solid foundation for moving forward with its improvement initiative.
As the school moves forward, every professional in the building must engage with colleagues in the ongoing exploration of three crucial questions that drive the work of those within a professional learning community:
- What do we want each student to learn?
- How will we know when each student has learned it?
- How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?
The answer to the third question separates learning communities from traditional schools.
Here is a scenario that plays out daily in traditional schools. A teacher teaches a unit to the best of his or her ability, but at the conclusion of the unit some students have not mastered the essential outcomes. On the one hand, the teacher would like to take the time to help those students. On the other hand, the teacher feels compelled to move forward to “cover” the course content. If the teacher uses instructional time to assist students who have not learned, the progress of students who have mastered the content will suffer; if the teacher pushes on with new concepts, the struggling students will fall farther behind.
What typically happens in this situation? Almost invariably, the school leaves the solution to the discretion of individual teachers, who vary widely in the ways they respond. Some teachers conclude that the struggling students should transfer to a less rigorous course or should be considered for special education. Some lower their expectations by adopting less challenging standards for subgroups of students within their classrooms. Some look for ways to assist the students before and after school. Some allow struggling students to fail.
When a school begins to function as a professional learning community, however, teachers become aware of the incongruity between their commitment to ensure learning for all students and their lack of a coordinated strategy to respond when some students do not learn. The staff addresses this discrepancy by designing strategies to ensure that struggling students receive additional time and support, no matter who their teacher is. In addition to being systematic and schoolwide, the professional learning community's response to students who experience difficulty is
- Timely. The school quickly identifies students who need additional time and support.
- Based on intervention rather than remediation. The plan provides students with help as soon as they experience difficulty rather than relying on summer school, retention, and remedial courses.
- Directive. Instead of inviting students to seek additional help, the systematic plan requires students to devote extra time and receive additional assistance until they have mastered the necessary concepts.
The systematic, timely, and directive intervention program operating at Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, provides an excellent example. Every three weeks, every student receives a progress report. Within the first month of school, new students discover that if they are not doing well in a class, they will receive a wide array of immediate interventions. First, the teacher, counselor, and faculty advisor each talk with the student individually to help resolve the problem. The school also notifies the student's parents about the concern. In addition, the school offers the struggling student a pass from study hall to a school tutoring center to get additional help in the course. An older student mentor, in conjunction with the struggling student's advisor, helps the student with homework during the student's daily advisory period.
Any student who continues to fall short of expectations at the end of six weeks despite these interventions is required, rather than invited, to attend tutoring sessions during the study hall period. Counselors begin to make weekly checks on the struggling student's progress. If tutoring fails to bring about improvement within the next six weeks, the student is assigned to a daily guided study hall with 10 or fewer students. The guided study hall supervisor communicates with classroom teachers to learn exactly what homework each student needs to complete and monitors the completion of that homework. Parents attend a meeting at the school at which the student, parents, counselor, and classroom teacher must sign a contract clarifying what each party will do to help the student meet the standards for the course.
Stevenson High School serves more than 4,000 students. Yet this school has found a way to monitor each student's learning on a timely basis and to ensure that every student who experiences academic difficulty will receive extra time and support for learning.
Like Stevenson, schools that are truly committed to the concept of learning for each student will stop subjecting struggling students to a haphazard education lottery. These schools will guarantee that each student receives whatever additional support he or she needs.
Notes from the coach - Mary Wible
Making Data Meaningful – Part Three
Tracking percentage of students reaching mastery level on a specific standard was shared in a previous ‘Note from the Coach’ (NFtC) as one type of data to track. Another type of data that can be tracked is the average class performance on each standard. This provides the teacher and/or team a “big picture” view of student performance on multiple standards.
Average class performance is found by counting the number of correct responses to questions related to a particular standard and dividing by the product of the number of questions related to the standard times the number of students responding. For example: There are 5 questions on R.I.2 with 32 students responding which is a possible 160 responses. If there are 40 correct responses, divide 40 by 160 to get 25% class average for that standard.
In the table above, the R.I.2 & R.L.1 standards have a low enough overall class percentage to warrant re-teaching with the whole class. This is in contrast to tracking mastery level percentages as seen in the prior NFtC, which could be used to identify small groups of students needing targeted work with specific standards.
In weeks to come I will share instructional methods that could be used to re-teach & re-assess specific standards for small groups.
I am happy to talk with you about gathering, tracking & following up on student data anytime.
AVID Strategy of the week
Allows for connections between new concepts and prior knowledge. Students should be given a list of related concepts and asked to make connections between them. Students can also create their own lists.
MTSS Tidbit: Critical Components, Part 3
Data-Based Problem Solving
The use of data-based problem-solving to make education decisions is a critical element of MTSS implementation. This includes the use of data-based problem-solving for student outcomes across content areas, grade levels, and tiers, as well as the use of problem-solving to address barriers to school wide implementation of MTSS. While several models for data-based problem-solving exist, the four step problem-solving approach includes: 1) defining the goals and objectives to be attained, 2) identify possible reasons why the desired goals are note being attained, 3) developing a plan for implementing evidence-based strategies to attain goals, 4) evaluating the effectiveness of the plan.