News You Can Use
Harris ES
Messages from EH
Thank you all so much for an amazing week of conferences with parents. Your dedication to your students and families of Harris ES is obvious. I appreciate your time; I know if makes for a very long week!
Please mark your calendars for October 15th from 2-4 PM to celebrate Harris ES turning 50! We will have many special guests here that day. Please let Margarita know by FRIDAY if you plan to attend. Thank you for your participation and support!
Above and Beyond the Call of Duty:
Congratulations to the teachers recognized on our ABCD bulletin board in August and September:
Mark Coker and Mary Adams
Brenda Warbington
Cindy Conley
Special Ed TEAM
Leigh Frere
Kimmie Calhoun
Jedonia Cooper
Rachel Kirk
Courtney London
Jeremy Sena
Courtney Bernardo
Kristina Coker
Laura Calvert
Kristen Richard
Monica Knox
Kindergarten TEAM
Thank you all (and the rest of the staff as well) for going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty! Congratulations to Kimmie for being selected as the winner of the Starbucks gift card.
Please remember to recognize your peers for the amazing work they do every day! This is the BEST TEAM and I am so honored to work with you all!
Have a great week!
EH
October 3rd
IRR planning
October 4th
5:30 PM PTA meeting
October 5th
Read, Deed, Run
October 6th
Collaborative planning with the Assessment Office
6:00 PM Literacy Night
October 7th
Lunch Bunch
“AS YOU NAVIGATE THROUGH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, BE OPEN TO COLLABORATION. OTHER PEOPLE AND OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEAS ARE OFTEN BETTER THAN YOUR OWN. FIND A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO CHALLENGE AND INSPIRE YOU, SPEND A LOT OF TIME WITH THEM, AND IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.” AMY POEHLER
Pursuing the Depths of Knowledge by Nancy Boyles
I highly recommend this article as it aligns with our work with the Assessment Office...it is a good read (when you have a spare 10 minutes;)!!!)
I will place a copy of the article in each grade chair's box to share.
A snapshot of the beginning of the article...
Where Planning for Depth of Knowledge Has Gone Off Track
When teachers ask "What does depth of knowledge look like on these new, more rigorous assessments? How do we prepare students for this kind of thinking?" they are often referred to well-known models like Bloom's Taxonomy, with its six cognitive process levels—remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create (Armstrong, n.d.).
But guidance based on such models has often been too general in nature, and sometimes even misleading. For instance, some schools have expanded the use of projects in the belief that projects automatically require higher-level skills, such as "creating" and "evaluating." Teachers have found themselves asking students to complete tasks like "Draw a map of your dream bedroom" or "Create a life-size model of Sarah from Sarah Plain and Tall." Such tasks are substantially off base when it comes to increasing the kind of rigor that the new assessments demand.
Other teachers have been advised to use "verb wheels" (which sort verbs into the various cognitive domains) and to design learning tasks that tap into "high-level" verbs (assess, plan, justify) instead of "low-level" verbs (identify, list, locate). But this advice isn't very helpful either. For example, describing doesn't fit neatly into one category. We might ask students to describe a character based on details retrieved directly from a text; such a task would represent a low level of knowledge. Or we could ask them to describe similarities and differences in the way an author portrays characters in two different texts, a much more robust, high-level task.
We need a better way to teach for depth of knowledge and prepare our students for today's standards-based assessments.
Level 1: Recall and Reproduction
Tasks at this level require recalling facts and locating information in the text to answer questions about who, what, when, where, why, and how. Students either know the answer or they don't. The answer is either right or wrong. Sample multiple-choice assessment items reflecting this level include
What is the meaning of trudged as it is used in paragraph 10 of the folk tale?
Which sentence from the folk tale helps the reader understand the meaning of trudged?
Two-part questions like this one can relate to any aspect of literary or informational text—character analysis, plot development, text structure, and so on.
So where's the rigor in instruction at Level 1? For teachers, it's in maintaining high expectations for all learners and in providing honest, specific, and immediate feedback. For students, the rigor is in holding themselves accountable for spot-on accuracy, choosing the very best evidence. If we don't convey to students that literacy expertise is founded upon precision rather than "close enough," students will have little to build on for deeper levels of thinking.
Above all, it's important to give Level 1 the respect it deserves. Recall and reproduction are components of all depth-of-knowledge levels because all reading comprehension must be based on textual evidence.
The article then continues through Level 2, 3 and 4 of DOK and provides insight and examples for teacher and student responses.