South Middle School
Staff Weekly Newsletter: November 18th - November 22nd
Week at a Glance
- Meeting for LN (Room 1, 7:40 a.m.)
- AVID Site Team (Barret's Office, 11:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.)
- Sparrow Assembly (Special Schedule; PM Assembly)
Tuesday, November 19
- Meeting for TC (Room 4, 7:45 a.m.)
- TIDE Meeting (SMS Library, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m.)
Wednesday, November 20
- Site Council (Barret's Office, 7:30 a.m.)
- PLC - Instruction (SMS Library, 7:37 a.m.)
- Student of the Month Lunch (Barret's Office, 12:30 p.m.)
Thursday, November 21
- Fire Drill (see email from Lingo)
- 3 Year Eligibility for WD (Room 1, 7:40 a.m.)
- ELA Meeting (DO Board Room, All Day)
- AVID Family Night (SMS Cafeteria, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.)
Friday, November 22
- Initial Eligibility for EN (Room 4, 7:45 a.m.)
Supervision Schedule
Supervision Schedule (8:10 - 8:25 a.m.) - 15 minutes a day as assigned.
Team 4:
6th Grade Hall: Ward
T @ 7th/8th Grade Hall: DeHarmony
8th Grade Hall: Serrage
Large Gym: Bigelow/Baertschiger
Parking Lot AM: Willaman
Parking Lot PM & Buses PM: Gottula & Pell
Daily Supervision Schedule:
Parking Lot/Exit AM: Aguilera, Huerta & Admin
Parking Lot/Exit PM: Aguilera, Kindrick & Admin
Cafeteria AM: Miller/McCarty & Hopkins/Karbowski
Bus PM (3:09 - 3:25): Hopkins, Admin & Team Teacher
Staff Shout-Out
Kim & Selena
We're excited to venture through our first round of the Discovery Program 2.0 with Kim & Selena! Our thoughts are with you as you embark on this journey with this group of kids!
Weekly Article
In Staff,
I couldn't help but think of Mr. Serrage as I was reading the beginning of this article. He often says in class when students are learning a new concept: "I'm so glad you're bring this prior knowledge into the discussion" (he placed emphasis on 'prior knowledge' when he says this). A good reminder of the KWL Charts and getting to know the background/prior knowledge our students have as we prepare them to encounter new learning.
Background Knowledge as the Key to Reading Proficiency
In this article in The Atlantic, Natalie Wexler describes looking over a first grader’s shoulder in a Washington, D.C. classroom and noticing that the girl was drawing a row of human figures on a piece of paper and coloring them yellow. “What are you drawing?” asked Wexler. “Clowns,” the girl replied. “Why are you drawing clowns?” “Because it says right here, ‘Draw clowns,’” said the girl and pointed to the place on her worksheet of reading comprehension skills where it said Draw conclusions. Wexler picked up the worksheet and saw that it asked students to make inferences and draw conclusions about an article on Brazil – but when asked, the girl said she hadn’t read the text and had never heard of Brazil.
This was an admittedly “egregious” example of a failed pedagogical approach to reading comprehension, says Wexler. The theory of action goes like this: “Use simple texts to teach children how to find the main idea, make inferences, draw conclusions, and so on, and eventually they’ll be able to apply those skills to grasp the meaning of anything put in front of them.” Therefore, what children read about doesn’t matter; the reading skills they acquire will enable them to pick up history, science, literary, and other content knowledge down the road.
This approach is dominant in U.S. classrooms, reports Wexler. Most teachers cover a “skill of the week” in their 90-minute daily reading blocks. They use textbooks adopted by their districts or gather their own books and forage for resources on the Internet. (According to a recent Rand study, 95 percent of elementary teachers use Google for materials and lesson plans, 86 percent use Pinterest.) Following the prevailing philosophy, the curriculum doesn’t systematically introduce content knowledge, focusing instead on a lot of fiction geared to students’ current reading levels, which are often below grade level. Again, the assumption is that by reading a lot and honing specific skills, students will eventually be able to handle more-complex texts.
Perversely, says Wexler, Common Core literacy standards have made “a bad situation worse.” The authors had the right idea: expand elementary children’s content knowledge by exposing them to more-complex texts and a higher percent of nonfiction texts. But in the absence of a curriculum that systematically introduces content knowledge in science, social studies, and other areas, the result has been many students struggling to read challenging, decontextualized texts without the background knowledge and vocabulary to make sense of them.
Wexler believes the skills-first approach is ineffective, as evidenced by the fact that U.S. students’ reading achievement has hardly budged since No Child Left Behind. That legislation’s heavy emphasis on reading and math test scores led many schools to double down on the skills-first approach, cutting back the time spent on science and social studies (and in some cases recess) to beef up reading. And there’s more bad news: economic and racial achievement gaps have widened. Why? Because children from economically disadvantaged homes enter school with less background knowledge, and when schools don’t teach it, students fall further and further behind. One more thing: the U.S.’s international academic standing has declined relative to high-performing countries.
"All of which raises a disturbing question,” says Wexler: “What if the medicine we have been prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized – including history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them?” Studies going back to the late 1980s have shown that content knowledge trumps reading skills. For example, lower-skill students who know a lot about baseball do better with a reading passage about baseball than higher-skills students who know very little.
The good news is that some districts (including Baltimore and Detroit) and charter schools have adopted a knowledge-first approach, and the anecdotal evidence is encouraging. Teachers interviewed by Wexler reported much greater enthusiasm among students for knowledge-based books and texts, especially students who had been struggling readers. But since knowledge builds slowly as students move up through the grades, it will be years before there is gold-standard research proof of the concept.
E.D. Hirsch Jr., the leader of one of these curriculum efforts (Core Knowledge), cites an intriguing natural experiment in France. For many years, French schools had a heavy emphasis on knowledge acquisition, but in 1989, the central education ministry adopted the American approach, with an emphasis on critical thinking skills and “learning to learn.” The results have been dramatic, says Wexler. “Over the next 20 years, achievement levels decreased sharply for all students – and the drop was greatest among the neediest.”
“The Radical Case for Teaching Kids Stuff” by Natalie Wexler in The Atlantic, August 2019 (Vol. 324, #2, pp. 20-23), https://bit.ly/2LKqmps; see Marshall Memo 130 for an early article by E.D. Hirsch Jr. on the importance of content knowledge.
November Birthdays!
- Cindi Long - November 9
- Tabitha Curry - November 17
- Robert Lingo - November 20
- Laura McGarry - November 23
- Marcus Karbowski - November 25