Clif Notes 10/14/19
Preparing Students To Be Career & Post Secondary Ready
DATES TO REMEMBER
This Week
Monday - 8am Start for Extra Help
Tuesday - CTE PLCs
Wednesday - Academic PLCs; PSAT
Thursday - Academic PLCs; Tutoring in Library
Friday - Faculty Liaison Meeting, Pep Rally 1:30 pm Schedule
School Spirit, Underclassmen Photo Re-Takes, Periods 1-4
Staff Wear Pink For Cancer Awareness
Upcoming:
10/23 Principal for a Day
10/25 1st Marking Period Ends
Co-op Newsletter
Construction Expo
Service Source Award
Chase Center Car Show
Pictured below is the car show held at the Chase Center on October 5th. Special thanks to John Collins, Adam Leiter, Tony Tiberi, and all the student volunteers that came out to promote the automotive trades and our November Open House. ~ Kittel
Career & College Fair
Delcastle will be hosting its annual Career & College Application and Readiness week from Monday, 10/28/2019, through Friday, 11/1/2019. We will also have a Career & College Fair for the juniors and seniors on Friday, November 1st.
Universal Design for Learning
Strengthening our inclusion model through professional development and employment of UDL strategies
A huge Thank-You to all the core-academic instructors who completed the feedback form following the PLC presentation facilitated by the Learning Support Coaches on learner variability. Staff feedback throughout this year’s exploration phase of UDL implementation is important to our end goal, which is moving all staff from awareness to evidence of sustained implementation of the UDL framework in instructional planning and assessment of our diverse student population.
The following is a summary of the feedback form for the September PLC presentation on learner variability.
What are 3 things that you learned about UDL from today's presentation?
· Students have different interests paired with strengths and weak areas that make them want to learn in different ways. This will be a three-year process
· Differentiated instruction is moving towards UDL, but they are not the same. Our students come to us with many various learner variability traits (socio-economic status, social-emotional conscious, trauma, etc.) This is a process that the school/district will be moving to in the next 3 years.
· Think more about how my lessons reach different learning styles. A strength in one area (recall) does not mean a student is strong in another (grammar).
· Students have different talents are those talents being given an opportunity to be used in class.
· Student variability means the students are coming from different backgrounds; we all learn best when we get a choice
· Many of our teachers use a lot of these UDL principals. I connect UDL to a push for equity. UDL should incorporate art, various media, and varied methods of instruction.
· We already do elements of UDL because it is about offering variability in the avenues students take to access or demonstrate learning. It is evident that our dept. listens to and respects our LSCs based on the comments and conversations.
Two questions that you have regarding the information shared today.
The majority of the questions posed surrounded needed clarification on administrative expectations, professional development and implementation resources, district/state assessments, and request for model lesson plans using the UDL framework.
· This is a three-year professional development program supported by an MOU between Delcastle and the University of Delaware Center for Disabilities studies. The Department of Education is funding the professional development cost for the next three years.
· This year our professional development will center around building whole school awareness on the research behind UDL and how the use of the framework can better support our diverse learners.
· Yes, district-level administrators are aware that Delcastle has secured this wonderful professional development opportunity and collaboration with UD to support our learners. As exemplified by the examples of other statewide and large district implementation of UDL, the most effective implementation efforts must include the adoption of the framework in curriculum, accountability assessment at both the district and state-level.
o Our goal, on a yearly basis of our 3-year implementation plan, is to inform district leadership of our progress with UDL to inform curriculum review, adoption of curricular resources, review of assessment data, etc.
· Within our current 3-year implementation, we do not have ‘compliance’ expectations surround classroom observation and use of the UDL framework. As the administration observes evidence of UDL in lesson planning and collaboration, we will highlight them in our feedbacks.
As a school, we have a good understanding that instructional practices and resources that allow student choice in how to access instruction benefits all learners. We also understand that there is diversity in how leaners provide evidence on what they have learned. Like many schools, our challenge has been bridging these inclusive understanding to coherent programming and resources that are sustainable. Our implementation goals for UDL are focused on achieving such coherence. ~ Princilus
The Tech Conference is Over, but the Learning Doesn't Have to be!!!
Additionally, there were over 40 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 remain 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 piques your interest, take a look at the materials to keep the learning going!!! 2019 Tech Conference Sessions
SNOW HOURS Opportunity - Wednesday, Oct. 16th (Rm. C103 from 3:30pm - 5:00pm):
Continue to apply the knowledge you acquired at the tech conference with the assistance of the tech coach during this after school snow hours session!!!
Please come prepared with questions and/or plans to implement something that you learned at the technology conference during this session.
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.