Kougar Kronicle
Kankakee Valley School Corporation
March 2017
Curriculum Design
We had the pleasure of working with just about every team in the district over the last several months. Even though we didn't see each and every one of you, we know that you all had input and an influence the power standard selections and the sequence of your units. It was so very impressive to see how our teachers embraced the process and took it to levels we didn't even anticipate! Thank you for all of your hard work.
It was stated many times during the curriculum workshops that we are not looking to create documents that are placed in a binder and on the shelf. It is the district's goal to have the curriculum documents you are creating drive your instruction and assessment. It should be a document that you return to, tweak, and utilize often as you plan. So then, what are the next steps?
Next Steps-
- If your grade level teams are not finished with the scope and sequence document , this is the first thing to finish. This will give structure and focus to your unit design process. It should be a common document used for all teachers at the same grade level. We will be expecting to see everyone following the same scope and sequence (grades K-8 or HS courses taught by multiple people) during the year. This will ensure that guaranteed and viable curriculum regardless of the school or teacher in a course.
- You are ready for unit design!
- Use the unit design template and save your units in your Standards folder that corresponds to your subject area. I have started a folder that contains sample units. Mrs. Schnick is trying to add to it as she can. However, if you find great examples, please copy the links and add to the list. That will help your colleagues.
- The templates and folders can be accessed through the KV Intranet. On the left will be a link for Curriculum Resources. This contains the links above as well.
- Mrs. Schnick will be recording screencasts where I will walk you through different grade level units as I develop them. This first one is very rough, but my first attempt at this kind of sharing tool.
- A reminder that high school teachers and those who teach multiple grade levels are only asked to prepare units for 2 of your preps (classes/grade levels).
- Special education teachers will continue to plan instruction based upon the IEPs that they write and not unit plans.
Unit Development Timeline
One unit submitted from each area by April 10th
One from each subject area @ HS & specials areas K-8
Special education teachers will collaborate with general ed, but will not write individual units. They write IEP’s to drive instruction.
One from each grade and subject @ MS
One math and ELA from grades K-5
Units should be submitted to the standards/units folder- Intranet. Please let your principal know which unit you are using for this submission.
Feedback will be given for this unit within a short period of time.
Full Curriculum Development Timeline (Communication will come from corporation office)
Overall goal is to have 1st semester completed before the start of the 2017-18 year & 2nd semester by midterm of second quarter 2017-18.
Quarter one due by April 28, 2017
Quarter two due by August 11, 2017
Quarter three due by September 15, 2017
Quarter four due by November 17, 2017
Teachers Need a Growth Mindset Too
For a teacher, it’s pretty easy to focus on improving students—that’s our job, right? So when I learned about Carol Dweck’s theory of growth mindset, my first thought was about how I could get my students onboard with this idea.
And then I realized that if I were to better my own craft, I would have to take on the challenge for myself as well.
I think that I succeed as a teacher because I’m willing to mess up often and mess up big. And yet, I also take any excuse to avoid pushing myself to grow. Having a growth mindset doesn’t just mean learning about the theory and leaving it at that. It’s a constant process. Sometimes it’s difficult, often it’s a little painful, but it’s always worth the effort.
Six Tips for Instilling a Growth Mindset in Yourself
1. Focus on the hard stuff. I remember early on in my teaching career realizing that while I was doing a pretty good job getting students to read and discuss literature, I was not really teaching them writing. So I decided to schedule the block day in our week as a writing day. Ten years and thousands of pages of creative writing later, I still had not successfully taught my students to write a research paper, so I blocked out three full weeks in our schedule to work through the process from beginning to end. Rather than focus on what I know is humming along fine, I look for the weaknesses. Usually, these are the areas that don’t come naturally, or that I don’t like very much myself. (And I still sort of despise research papers.) But when I focus on the hard stuff, I am a providing a much better learning experience for my students.
2. Try innovative solutions, and if they don’t work, try some more. I have tried some crazy things as a teacher. Some I realized were flops immediately, while some I pushed through for months before admitting that they weren’t working out. But some of those innovations have saved my sanity, and I would never have tried them if I had been afraid to fail. Again, I think the key here is to focus on the weaknesses, on the stuff that is not going well. It’s fun to tweak assignments that are already a hit, but when I focus on my most nagging problems, I make my biggest breakthroughs.
3. Seek feedback wherever you can. Evaluations don’t have to come from administrators— they can come from fellow teachers or even the students. When I switched schools about 12 years ago, I was having an especially hard time dealing with some of my new students. So a colleague came in one day and wrote down everything that was said or done during an entire class. No comments, no suggestions, and no filter. It was brutal to be confronted with that reality, but it also gave me a lot of insight into what I was missing from the front of the room. Two years ago, when a group play project went really badly for some of my classes, I took a whole day to get student feedback on the event. Through reflection questions and some writing, I figured out what was going on behind that disastrous cooperative project.
4. Know that you are always developing your skills. I often say that I consider myself to be a B+ teacher. Maybe I’ll be an A- teacher one day. Giving myself permission to be good now means that I don’t wait until I’m perfect to try something new.
5. Reflect at the end of every day, especially the bad ones. I have learned a lot from my toughest students and my biggest lesson plan flops—but only because I reflect on what went wrong. If I were to write those students and lesson plans off as not my fault, I would never learn from experience. Sometimes one kid has a bad day, but the truth is that when the lesson goes badly for the entire class, it’s probably something that I did wrong.
6. Notice the areas where you have a fixed mindset. It’s easy to think that there are some areas of teaching that I’m just not good at, but I know that’s an excuse I use when things get hard. Reflecting on my attitude and how it affects my willingness to grow is always useful. I can’t have a growth mindset about everything all the time, but I can notice when I’m talking myself out of trying something because I’m afraid.
There’s a catch to learning a lot about growth mindset. Once we learn just how much of our lack of growth is a product of our attitude, it’s not so easy to write things off as impossible anymore.
Source: https://www.edutopia.org/article/teachers-need-growth-mindset-christina-gil
Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook shared the following excerpt in his blog post titled:
Ditch That Textbook’s Best of 2016
Now, drumroll please … the most popular posts of 2016 from Ditch That Textbook:
10. 10 engaging Google Drawings activities for classes — As you’ll see below, posts to this blog about Google tools are always popular … eight of the top 10 posts have the word “Google” in them. Google Drawings is such a versatile tool. It’s like a digital poster board. Here are ways to use it in class.
9. 20 collaborative Google Apps activities for schools — I wrote this post more than two years ago, but the ideas in it are still relevant to classes that use Google Apps. If you want students to work together within the Google universe, these activities can help.
8. The NEW Google Forms: 9 classroom uses — Google revamped its Google Forms, the survey app, in 2016. It unlocked some new features and a beautiful new design. Google Forms is a powerful tool for gathering data and keeping track of things. Here are ways to use Google Forms in your classroom.
7. Game show classroom: Comparing Kahoot!, Quizizz, Quizlet Live and Quizalize — There are lots of these fun formative assessment tools that can make class feel like a game show. In this post, we look at four of them and compare them — similarities and differences.
6. The Magic Automatic Lesson Planner with Google Forms — I just mentioned how powerful Google Forms can be. Here’s an example. You can use Google Forms to write lesson plans — list activities, track standards, whatever. Then, using the Autocrat add-on, Google will turn your answers to the form/survey into nicely-designed documents. You get step-by-step instructions in this post!
5. The Google Classroom Quick-Start Guide + tips and tricks! — Google Classroom is still a powerful tool that teachers want more and more details about. This post gives you the basics if you’re just getting started.
4. 8 interactive Google Slides activities for classroom excitement — Google Slides may be my favorite of all of the Google apps in G Suite. Students can collaborate in it. They can create some pretty cool products. It allows for all sorts of creativity. Here are eight “outside of the box” ideas with Google Slides.
3. 15 FREE Google Drawings graphic organizers — and how to make your own — I was home on a snow day when I wrote this post. I created these graphic organizers and thought, “Will anyone actually use these?” I guess so!
2. 10 Google Slides activities to add awesome to classes — See No. 4 above. It was written this year … this one (No. 2) was written in last year. All of the ideas are still current though!
1. 20 video project ideas to engage students — This post has been No. 1 for page views for the past three years. It’s a popular one through Google searches for video project ideas. If you’re looking for some ideas, check it out!
Source: http://ditchthattextbook.com/2016/12/29/ditch-that-textbooks-best-of-2016/