Clif Notes 10/15/18
50 Years Of Equipping The State & Now Global Workforce!
DATES TO REMEMBER
This Week
Monday - 8am Start for Extra Help
Tuesday - CTE PLCs
Wednesday - Academic PLCs; Extra Help
Thursday - Academic PLCs
Friday - Faculty Liaison Meeting
School Spirit & ROAR Committee Meetings
Underclassmen Photo Re-Takes, Periods 1-4
Staff Wear Pink For Cancer Awareness
Upcoming:
10/23 Principal for a Day
10/26 1st Marking Period Ends
Special Thanks
Things to Remember
Talk to the Space Station
At Delcastle, where the event will take place on October 24, 2018, (Date could change to the 25) each science class is supporting the ARISS contact through their lessons and class activities. Physical science teachers are investigating electromagnetic waves, to help students understand how radio waves are used to communicate with the ISS and how the space station protects its crew from solar radiation. Biology students are investigating methods of growing a sustainable food supply for space travel as part of their unit on photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Chemistry students are exploring the nuclear reactions that powers the Sun and learning how to calculate exposure to solar radiation. Integrated science teachers focus their lessons on the different types of radio waves used for communication and how solar weather can affect their transmission. From these lessons, students will prepare questions for the ISS astronauts.
Just as on the International Space Station, teamwork is an important part of our mission to prepare students for a career and/or college. Students in the school’s Digital Media career program designed and produced banners and t-shirts and are using social media platforms to promote the ARISS contact. Students and faculty also designed a website, www.TalkToTheSpaceStation.com, so the community at large could learn about ARISS. Video production students will document the event and stream the experience on Facebook Live so all NCCVTSD students and viewers everywhere can participate.
Chromebook Update
As you are aware, we are experiencing a hardware issue related to a defective power button on the Chromebooks. Dell worked closely with us to determine the cause. We are expecting additional replacement machines over the next five days which should allow us to accommodate all impacted students. These additional machines should cover all of the students who are currently without or are using a loaner device.
To assist with this situation, we are turning off Kiosk Mode as of 3:00 PM today, Friday, October 12, 2018. The issue with the power button manifests when students power down their device, which is what they have to do in order to leave Kiosk mode. Therefore, temporarily eliminating Kiosk mode will greatly extend the life of the devices while we await the final resolution.
We are implementing the following guidelines:
· District Assessments will be administered using paper and pencil. Teachers will monitor, grade, and securely store all of the assessments. Teachers will not return the graded assessments to students, nor to Instructional Services. Assessments can be shredded at the end of the school year.
· Non-District Assessments can still be given on Schoology or on paper at the discretion of the teacher.
We appreciate everyone’s patience throughout this process and everything you have already done to make this initiative successful. Now that the district and Dell are aware of the root cause, we are working together to determine a resolution. We will continue to keep you updated on the details as they become available.
Thank you for your patience,
Terri Villa, Instructional Services
Steve Mancini, Technology Division
Career & College Fair - Wells
Delcastle will be hosting its annual Career & College Application and Readiness week from Monday, 10/29/2018, through Friday, 11/2/2018. We will also have a Career & College Fair for the juniors and seniors on Friday, November 2nd.
The Tech Conference is Over, but the Learning Doesn't Have to be!!!
Additionally, there were a total of 34 instructional sessions offered this year. Since you were only able to attend a maximum of 4 sessions, there's a lot you missed. Remember that the materials from each session are available for you to access in the Tech Conference course in Schoology!!!
The materials are organized in colorful folders that provide a description of what the session entailed. If the description peaks your interest, take a look at the materials to keep the learning going!!!
https://nccvt.schoology.com/course/1834042830/materials?f=143819266
Delcastle Instructional Focus
Interesting Read - Taking Action on Adolescent Literacy by Judith L. Irvin, Julie Meltzer and Melinda S. Dukes
Why Motivation and Engagement Are Important
Until recently, most middle and high schools in the United States have not included a focus on improving academic literacy skills—reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking—as a primary educational role. People have largely assumed that students are supposed to arrive in middle and high schools with adequate reading and writing skills that they can then apply to assignments involving increasingly complex reading and writing tasks. If, by chance, students do not arrive with these skills, educators sometimes prescribe remediation. More often, students are able to get through classes without reading and writing much at all. Well-meaning teachers may focus on alternate methods—showing and telling as opposed to reading and writing—to ensure that students are “fed” the content and not “penalized” for having low literacy skills. The result is that the students with the weakest skills often get the least amount of practice.
Other teachers assign reading and writing tasks and give low or failing marks to students who do not complete the assignments, assuming that motivation, not ability, determines if the work is turned in. The mindset of many teachers and administrators is that if students do not have the requisite reading and writing skills by middle or high school, it is simply too late. A number of educators speculate that some students just do not like to read and write—“that's just the way it is.” Additionally, many middle and high school teachers do not know how to provide explicit reading and writing instruction. Specific literacy instruction, as part of content-area learning, tutoring services, learning centers, or study skill classes, has been virtually unknown in many middle and high schools.
For students with poor academic literacy skills, this lack of embedded and explicit literacy support results in a downward spiral that can lead to academic failure. It is especially important to motivate students who arrive in middle and high school classrooms with a history of failure as readers or writers. People are understandably reluctant to persist at behaviors that they do not enjoy or that make them feel incompetent—adolescents even more so. Adolescents with poor literacy skills will sometimes go to great lengths to hide their deficiency; some of them devote considerable energy to “passing” or to distracting attention from their struggles, and the effort required is a major reason why many drop out of school.
Yet discussions with teens who are struggling readers and writers do not suggest convictions such as “we are proud of not being able to read and write well” and “we should be left alone to reap the lifelong consequences of leaving school with inadequate literacy skills to face the workplace and the responsibilities of citizenship.” Many of these students understand that poor literacy skills place them at a distinct disadvantage economically, personally, vocationally, and politically. They want to be better readers and writers, but in addition to their weak literacy skills, other serious barriers interfere, such as
- minimal and often inappropriate help,
- alienation from uncomfortable school environments and curricula that seem irrelevant to their lives, and
- unreceptive environments for admitting the level of vulnerability they feel.
Motivation and engagement do not constitute a “warm and fuzzy” extra component of efforts to improve literacy. These interrelated elements are a primary vehicle for improving literacy. Until middle and high school educators work strenuously to address all of the barriers, and thereby motivate students to become engaged with literacy and learning, in the words of one student we interviewed, “I can tell you it just ain't gonna happen, you see what I'm sayin'?”
The Connection Between Motivation, Engagement, and Achievement
By the time students reach middle and high school, many of them have a view of themselves as people who do not read and write, at least in school. It is often difficult for teachers to know if middle school and high school students cannot or will not do the assignments; often all they know is that students do not do them. Herein lies the challenge for teachers and administrators: how to motivate middle and high school students to read and write so that they engage in literacy tasks and are willing to accept instruction and take advantage of opportunities to practice and accept feedback, thereby improving their academic literacy skills that will, in turn, improve their content-area learning and achievement.
This is not an either/or proposition. Instruction without attention to motivation is useless, especially in the case of students who are reluctant to read and write in the first place. As Kamil (2003) points out, “Motivation and engagement are critical for adolescent readers. If students are not motivated to read, research shows that they will simply not benefit from reading instruction” (p. 8). In other words, adolescents will take on the task of learning how to read (or write) better only if they have sufficiently compelling reasons for doing so.
Because motivation leads to engagement, motivation is where teachers need to begin. Reading and writing, just like anything else, require an investment by the learner to improve. As humans, we are motivated to engage when we are interested or have real purpose for doing so. So motivation to engage is the first step on the road to improving literacy habits and skills. Understanding adolescents' needs for choice, autonomy, purpose, voice, competence, encouragement, and acceptance can provide insight into some of the conditions needed to get students involved with academic literacy tasks. Most successful teachers of adolescents understand that meeting these needs is important when developing good working relationships with their students. However, many teachers have not thought of these needs in relation to their potential consequences for literacy development, that is, to what extent they meet these needs in the classroom through the academic literacy tasks they assign and the literacy expectations they have for students.
Motivating students is important—without it, teachers have no point of entry. But it is engagement that is critical, because the level of engagement over time is the vehicle through which classroom instruction influences student outcomes. For example, engagement with reading is directly related to reading achievement (Guthrie, 2001; Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). Engagement—with sports, hobbies, work, or reading—results in opportunities to practice. Practice provides the opportunity to build skills and gain confidence.
However, practicing without feedback and coaching often leads to poor habits. Coaching—or, in this case, explicit teaching—helps refine practice, generates feedback, creates structured exercises targeted to specific needs, and provides encouragement and direction through a partnership with the learner. Note that more modeling, structure, and encouragement are often needed to engage students who are motivated to begin but who have weaker skills and therefore may not have the ability or stamina to complete tasks on their own.
Sustained engagement, therefore, often depends on good instruction. Good instruction develops and refines important literacy habits and skills such as the abilities to read strategically, to communicate clearly in writing or during a presentation, and to think critically about content. Gaining these improved skills leads to increased confidence and competence. Greater confidence motivates students to engage with and successfully complete increasingly complex content-area reading and writing tasks, and this positive experience leads to improved student learning and achievement.
Thus, teachers have two primary issues to contend with when trying to improve the literacy skills of unmotivated struggling readers and writers: (1) getting them to engage with academic literacy tasks, and (2) teaching them how to complete academic literacy tasks successfully. Proficiency is developed through a cycle of engagement and instruction (Guthrie & Wigfield, 1997; Roe, 2001)
***** Read more next week.