GREAT THINKING THURSDAY
For Klein ISD Educators of Gifted Learners
August 29, 2019
By Rhonda Stowe
Greenwood Forest GT Advocate
Third Grade Teacher
Destination Imagination Sponsor
Each year a new group of eager students enter our classrooms full of promise, but we don’t always get to watch them exit with a purpose until many years later. However, I have discovered a way to observe kids enter with a promise and exit with a purpose, and it happens in just five months. I am a Destination Imagination Team Manager! Each September a group of boys and girls full of promise and potential are chosen to be on a team, and I watch them take on a difficult challenge. In March those students exit with a purpose after they perform at the Regional Tournament, and their lives are forever changed by the DI experience. So is mine.
When one of my co-workers asked me if I would coach a Destination Imagination team with her, my first thought was “No way!” Even though I have taught gifted and talented students for many years, the thought of being a DI team manager intimidated me. However, I wanted as many students on our campus to have the opportunity to be on a team as possible, so I said yes. I won’t tell you it was easy, but to watch a group of boys and girls who don’t know each other become a cohesive team over the course of a few months was incredibly rewarding. Creativity, time management, research, problem solving, perseverance - these are invaluable life skills they learned during their DI journey.
When I first became a Team Manager, I coached the Improv Challenge. The kids were great, but I was not. As hard as I tried to understand how to help the team become brilliant at improv, it was difficult. At the tournament they used what they had learned through research and practice, and they stood in front of the judges and performed to the best of their ability. Even though I wasn’t an improv genius, the students still had a great time, grew by leaps and bounds, and more importantly, they meshed as a team. I coached an improv team for 6 more years, and my last team placed second at the Regional Tournament and moved on to the State Tournament. Promise to purpose!
Last year, I switched to the Service Learning Challenge. My team consisted of boys and girls with a heart for serving others. The first year they collected boxes of coffee pods for soldiers based in Afghanistan. Their efforts brought smiles to men and women overseas with the KCups and the cards from the students in our school. Last year, my team decided to hold a snack drive for the families who reside in the Ronald McDonald House while their child is treated in Texas Children’s Hospital. The whole student body was involved, and each grade level brought in a different type of snack. This time, my team members personally delivered the collection items directly to the Ronald McDonald House. The impact this had on each student was life-changing. They were able to observe firsthand how their service learning project helped out families who were experiencing an extremely difficult time.
Have either one of my service learning teams gone on to the State Tournament? Nope. Have the students on my DI teams learned valuable experiences which reach beyond winning or losing? Absolutely! From promise to purpose in 5 short months. And THIS is why I am a Destination Team Manager.
This year when your administrator asks if you would like to be a Team Manager, consider saying yes. You’ll be glad you did!
Reimagine Learning: Innovation Challenge: Operation Lifeline!
Teams of 3-5 students, in grades K-12, will design a medical pack to deliver refrigerated medications during times of disaster. This challenge is open to EVERY K-12 student who wants to participate. Student teams will compete in four different grade groups: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12.
All students will address this basic challenge scenario with varying degrees of rigor based on grade groups:
Design a medical pack that can be used to deliver refrigerated medications in times of disasters. The medical pack should:
- Meet the needs of emergency responders.
- Be able to be delivered to any location in the affected region.
- Keep medications cold for the duration of the delivery without freezing them.
- Hold as much medication as possible while not being too heavy to deliver.
- Be sturdy enough to prevent the medication containers from being damaged during delivery.
Please visit Innovation to review your grade level challenge, team sign up, important dates, and more!!
We look forward to seeing you on Klein ISD's Day of Design: October 2, 2019!!!
SAT/PSAT Boot Camps FALL 2019
Klein ISD's Nationally Recognized Official SAT Practice Student Ambassadors, now Opportunity Student Ambassadors will be hosting the annual PSAT/SAT Preparation Boot Camps this fall. Following the practice test session Klein ISD teachers will be leading personalized sessions in the areas of Reading, Writing and Math.
GT/Advanced Course Teachers-Please assist us with marketing this fantastic opportunity to prepare for and earn SCHOLARSHIP dollars for students who score beyond College Readiness Benchmarks!
Please visit bit.ly/Kleinbootcamp to sign up TODAY!
Reimagine Learning: Advanced Placement Instruction:
New Tools, New Tricks
By Brooke Downey
Klein Oak HS
World History AP Instructor
At the end of the last school year, after AP Exams were completed and on the way to being scored, my AP World History course changed – dramatically. These changes had been announced a few years prior and many AP World History teachers knew that a large shift in their classrooms was coming with its implementation. That kind of change can spark some anxiety and concern for how you can best prepare students when you are navigating through the “newness” of your class. The AP Classroom and its new instructional tools are just what College Board needed to introduce to teachers like me, and I am excited to explore more of them this school year.
Over the past two years, my classroom at Klein Oak and others in Klein ISD, have had the opportunity to work with the College Board to pilot a new system of Advanced Placement (AP) Resources. These resources included instructional guides and a question bank of released and new AP-style questions. In the early participation of the pilot, summative assessments in my classroom looked a lot more aligned to what students could expect on their AP Exam and instruction was so much more targeted in terms of content. Now College Board has released for the 2019-2020 school year these same resources for each Advanced Placement course to help support students as they work through content, skills, and preparation for their AP Exam.
There are four main resources provided in AP Classroom for each course:
Unit Guides are built off each AP class’ Course and Exam Description (CED) and provide an outline of the exact content and skills covered on the exam. These guides can have helped me the most to better understand and structure pacing, as well as integration of material, since most of it has been reorganized in AP World History.
Personal Progress Checks are constructed formative questions meant to measure student progress throughout the course. The content and skills for each unit are measured in both multiple-choice questions and free-response questions. I am really looking forward to using these assessments because formative assessments that aren’t tied to summatives are sometimes very hard to get or create. College Board has helped fill that need for me.
After assigning the Personal Progress Checks, teachers can analyze student data in the Performance Dashboard. With this dashboard, I will be better able to provide intervention and enrichment based on areas of strengths or growth, chart student growth throughout the school year, and equip students to monitor their own progress. If I notice an area to target with multiple students, I can use our intervention period, or Panther Den, to reteach and reassess that with them.
The AP Question Bank gives teachers access to a database of real AP questions. Using the library of questions, I can filter questions by content or skill and create their specific, targeted assessments to assign in the AP Classroom online as in-class assignments or homework.
Each teacher has access to AP Classroom by logging in to https://myap.collegeboard.org. Once logged in, I created sections for each of my class periods and shared the join code so students could access the AP Classroom content with their College Board accounts. To make sure I followed the right steps and students did, I used the Teacher and Student User Guides to help with instructions. These guides are super helpful and very easy to read with images for reference.
We did take time this week to set those up in class, and now I’ll be able to start using the Progress Checks, Dashboard and my own assessments using the Question Bank later throughout the year. All of these instructional tools are going to really help me support student learning that is more aligned and more responsive to help students achieve high levels of success in my AP course.
Research Milestones: Development of Questions: Target Date: October 10, 2019
Review this INCREDIBLE brainstorming video by John Spencer to assist your learners with the brainstorming! Here are two additional tools to assist with brainstorming:
The Research Pathways site provides guidance to our gifted learners and their teachers as they progress through their topic of interest and research throughout the school year leading to their presentation at the Research Expo! Be sure to check out the Development of Questions resources for students and teachers!
Gifted & Talented Referral Window Opens September 3rd!
Carie Barber
AA Program Coordinator
GT Identification Process Leader
The referral window for gifted and talented services opens September 3rd and will close September 27th for parents interested in gifted programming. Teachers can also refer students by notifying the parent and providing the link to refer. Advanced Academics must have parent permission to test before beginning the assessment process.
Teachers who completed a form in the spring to recommend a student for testing can rest assured that parents will be contacted by Advanced Academics to get permission to test.
Testing will take place on campuses October 15th through November 15th. Campus Gifted Identification Committees will make placement decisions in December with services starting in January.
For more information about the characteristics of Gifted and Talented Students or the GT assessment process, please visit the Advanced Academics website at kisd.us/AdvancedAcademics.
CALLING ALL EDUCATORS AS PRESENTERS!
Teachers who attend at least three sessions or present at least two sessions will receive 3 hours of GT Update credit for the 2019-2020 school year!