From the Desk of Principal Chalfant
A Preview of the 2018-2019 School Year for Staff
Our Vision at Summit Academy: Acceleration through Innovation and Collaboration
You might be asking yourself, "Why didn't I receive any emails from Mr. Chalfant since school got out in mid-June?" Watch below.
Well, what did Mr. Chalfant do this summer?
We found out we are pregnant with twins! AND we purchased our first home! We close 8/27.
Hilton Head Island, SC
Dissertation and Family Time
Martha's Vineyard, MA
So, what's happening this school year?
Responsive Classroom
We spent the end of the 2017-2018 school year interacting with an overview of Responsive Classroom, including a school-wide morning meeting. We will have a school-wide morning meeting every Friday this year!
Below, you will find a calendar that designates a group of people who will be in charge of running the school-wide morning meeting each month, including a suggestion as to the person who takes the lead (and even demonstrates certain greetings/activities with their own students):
September (Administration Team)
September 7 Chalfant
September 14 Vandercook
September 21 Chalfant
September 28 Vandercook
October (Administration Team)
October 5 Chalfant
October 12 Vandercook
October 19 Chalfant
October 26 Vandercook
November (Kindergarten and 1st Grade Teams)
November 2 Mazzola
November 9 Borowski
November 16 Whitney
December (Kindergarten and 1st Grade Teams)
December 7 Mazzola
December 14 Borowski
December 21 Whitney
January (2nd and 3rd Grade Team)
January 4 Weldon
January 11 Rybicki
January 18 Pirlot
Janaury 25 Weldon
February (2nd and 3rd Grade Team)
February 1 Rybicki
February 8 Pirlot
February 15 Weldon
February 22 Rybicki
March (4th/5th Grade Teams)
March 1 Kull
March 8 Crunk
March 15 Kull
March 22 Crunk
March 29 Kull
April (Pinnacle Team)
April 12 Anderson
April 26 Bourdua
May (Special Services Team)
May 3 Berger
May 10 Dolan
May 17 Hunt
May 24 Williams
May 31 Berger
June (Pinnacle Team)
June 7 Berger
June 14 Glaser
Guiding Principles of Responsive Classroom
- Teaching social and emotional skills is as important as teaching academic content.
- How we teach is as important as what we teach.
- Great cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
- What we know and believe about our students individually, culturally, and developmentally guides our expectations, reactions, and attitudes about those students.
- How we work together as adults to create a safe, joyful, and inclusive school environment is as important as our individual contribution or competence.
- Partnering with families ”knowing them and valuing their contributions” is as important as knowing the children we teach.
The Core Components of Responsive Classroom That We will be learning about
Hopes and Dreams
Classroom Rules
Morning Meeting
Closing Circle
Signals for Quiet: The Responsive Classroom Chime
- Teach students how to respond to the signal. Remember to model for students exactly how the signal and their response to it will look and sound, and give them plenty of practice. USE INTERACTIVE MODELING!
- Don’t start speaking before everyone is quiet. Waiting to speak sends the message that everyone is expected to respond to the signal.
- Be consistent about using the signals you’ve established. Otherwise, the signals will lose their power. Students will wonder if you really mean what you say and say what you mean.
- Don’t repeat the signal if it doesn’t get students’ attention the first time. Repeating the signal teaches students that they don’t have to comply right away—they can wait for the second (or third) repetition.
- Don’t expect immediate silence. This can feel disrespectful—and may be unrealistic: People have a natural need to get to a stopping point in their conversation or work (10–15 seconds should do it).
Using the chime on the first day of school
Teacher Language
Logical Consequences
Responsive Classroom's Steps to handling student misbehavior for teachers
- Take a break
- Buddy Classroom
- Problem-Solving conference
- Contact parent
- Parent conference
- Behavioral contract
Establish a Take a Break Spot
Buddy Classroom
Problem-Solving Conference
- Step 1. Establishing what the teacher and student notice
- Step 2. Naming the problem and the need to solve it
- Step 3. Understanding the cause of the problem
- Step 4. Generating alternatives
- Step 5. Choosing one strategy to try
Interactive Modeling
Learn more about each component of Responsive Classroom by clicking a button
K-5 Responsive Classroom Core Practices
- Morning Meeting: Everyone in the classroom gathers at the beginning of each school day for 20 to 30 minutes to engage in four sequential components: greeting, sharing, group activity, and morning message.
- Establishing Rules: The teacher and students work together to establish goals for the year and rules that will help them reach these goals.
- Energizers: Students engage in brief, playful, whole-group activities that are used as breaks in lessons.
- Quiet Time: A short period of relaxation that takes place after lunch and recess, before the rest of the day continues.
- Closing Circle Everyone gathers for five- to ten-minutes at the end of the day to reflect and celebrate through participation in a brief activity or two.
6-8 Responsive Classroom Core Practices
- Responsive Advisory Meeting: A morning routine with students and staff that builds positive, meaningful relationships. Components include: arrival welcome, announcements, acknowledgements, and activity.
- Investing Students in the Rules: Students work together to establish classroom expectations based on their individual goal
- Brain Breaks: Short breaks are given in between lessons to increase focus, motivation, learning, and memory.
- Active Teaching: Teachers utilize a straightforward, developmentally appropriate strategy for delivering curriculum content. Components include: teacher presentation, explanation, illustration, and demonstration.
- Student Practice: Students explore and practice the content and skills taught during a lesson, under teacher guidance.
Purposes of Middle School Advisory Period
1. Build Student-to-Student Affiliation— Middle school students are in a period of significant developmental changes. They’re seeking new connections and learning to navigate new school experiences, and they have increased autonomy.
Teacher’s Role: To foster students’ sense of significance, belonging, and fun.
2. Energize and Re-engage—After sustained periods of academic focus, middle school students can benefit from activities that give them a brief mental break and recharge them for the learning ahead.
Teacher’s Role: To effectively manage activities that are fun, physically active, and energizing while helping students develop positive social skills.
3. Reflect and Recalibrate—The middle school is the students’ community, so there may be times when the primary purpose for Advisory is to analyze the events happening in school or to address critical issues, such as safe transitions, taking care of school property, preparing for high school, or taking actions against bullying.
Teacher’s Role: To provide leadership, clarity, and support as students discuss important issues; to invest students in doing their part to create a vibrant, healthy school community where they can flourish.
4. Support Academic Readiness—Every middle school has a set of academic goals for its students. An Advisory that has the purpose of helping students achieve these academic goals does so through a “whole child” lens. While the focus is on helping students meet the achievement standards, consideration is also given to helping them develop the academic and social-emotional skills essential for positive academic performance.
Teacher’s Role: To ensure that students get varied, targeted, and engaging learning activities that are curriculum-based; to help students develop a set of skills that enable them to engage in rigorous instruction.
5. Strengthen Advisor-Advisee Relationships— For middle school students to be successful, it’s critical that they have a positive mentoring relationship with at least one adult at school who knows and cares about them.
Teacher’s Role: To develop trusting relationships with a group of students and interact with them in ways that build that trust; to get to know each student personally and serve as a mentor and advocate.
6. Develop Communication and Social Skills—Sometimes, there’s an expectation that middle school students should already have well-developed communication and social skills. However, these skills must be explicitly taught to all students. The Advisory meeting focuses on helping students develop competencies, such as listening attentively, speaking effectively, and displaying cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
Teacher’s Role: To teach these skills directly, provide time for practice, and have students set and monitor goals for developing these skills.
Why Recess? Here's what researchers suggest
- Middle school kids actually need it more than any other kids
- Middle school kids are learning to socialize as adolescents. They need to try out various roles, and school is a safe environment.
- They need to control their unstructured time to use it well.
- They are growing at different rates and are at various levels of development physically, mentally, and emotionally. They need to be able to try out their skills and their muscles and use their energy.
- Building relationships with adults, as well.
- Release anxieties and stress of everyday school pressures
- Brain science: neurons begin to light up after physical activity
- There is substantial evidence that physical activity can help improve academic achievement, including grades and standardized test scores
Integrating CARES into our core values
Begin thinking about how we can infuse CARES into everything we do at Summit Academy: activities, lesson plans, family engagement, classroom discussions, morning meetings, etc. Here's what the acronym CARES stands for:
- Cooperation: the student’s ability to form new relationships, maintain healthy relationships and friendships, accept differences, avoid social isolation, resolve conflicts, be a contributing member of the classroom and school community, and work productively and collaboratively with staff and peers.
- Assertiveness: the student’s ability to take initiative, seek help, standup for their ideas in a positive way (without hurting or negating others), succeed at challenging tasks, and recognize themselves as an individual who is separate from the circumstances or conditions they are in.
- Responsibility: the student’s ability to stay motivated and take action in order to follow through on expectations; as well as the student’s ability to identify/recognize a problem, consider the consequences of possible solutions, and choose a positive solution.
- Empathy: the student’s ability to (recognize/understand) another person’s state of mind and emotions, and be open to new ideas and perspectives; to appreciate and value the differences and diversity in others; and to care about the welfare of others, even when it doesn’t benefit or may come as a cost to one’s self.
- Self-Control: the student’s ability to recognize and regulate their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in order to be successful in the moment and remain on a successful path.
Responsive Classroom's Youtube Channel
Positive Referrals and Discipline Referrals
Preparing for the Innovative A-Day/B-Day Block Schedule in Middle School (Pinnacle)
Here's an article about Block Scheduling from Phi Delta Kappan Below
Extracurricular Activities
Michigan's Third Grade Reading Law is in Effect
Family Engagement
Consider these tweets from my doctoral professor, former State Superintendent of Education in Virginia and one of the world's leading Family Engagement researcher and presenter, Dr. Steve Constantino.
I reflect on this all the time, as the school principal. While I try and communicate to families through several platforms: (a) twitter, (b) Touchcast, (c) email, (d) phone call, and (e) text messaging, I need to find ways to make the things we do at our school as transparent as possible for families and in conjunction, use a platform that allows them to interact with what we are doing on a daily basis.
So, what's your platform going to be this year? Sometimes, we need to use more than one to reach everyone!
- Classroom website (weekly, fix, etc.)
- Touchcast
- Remind
- Smore (this is what you're reading this on)
- Classroom newsletter
No matter what you choose--I am here to help and model how to use these as effectively and efficiently from here on out. Like Dr. Constantino said, it's not about MORE!
Let's be more efficient with our time and we will soon realize just how much more time we have to do the things that matter the most for Summit Academy. Speaking of time, let's take a look at scheduling for the year!
2018-2019 Teachers and Grade Levels
Master Schedule and 2018-2019 Documents
- Master Schedule
- Class Schedules
- Class Sizes
- School Blueprint (location of classrooms)
- 2018-2019 School Calendar (half-days and holidays, etc.)
- 2018-2019 Academic Calendar (deadlines for entering grades, etc.)
- 2017-2018 School Events (to begin planning for those to be added to our current calendar)
- Morning Meeting Visitors (this was created to allow non-classroom staff to attend morning meetings and for teachers to know who to expect on any given day)
- School-wide Morning Meeting schedule
Acceleration Time
- Acceleration is a time where all students will experience an acceleration in their learning
- Acceleration provides teachers extra time with their neediest students, on top of the time spent in small groups during literacy or math stations
- Acceleration is a time for students to receive personalized learning through Compass Learning
- Acceleration allows for students to enrich their learning, as well
Summit Sidekicks Program
This year at Summit, each class will become "sidekicks" with another class! Bringing your classes together will enable students to build cross-school relationships--something that will surely increase our school community! Begin thinking about the activities your students might benefit from being partnered with your sidekick classroom and start collaborating.
In most schools that use these types of programs, they typically call them buddy programs. We wanted to be sure to not confuse your buddy classrooms (where students can take breaks when needed) with this program, so we are going to call them sidekicks! Here's the research behind buddy programs:
Here are the partnering classrooms for our inaugural Summit Sidekicks program:
Back to School Professional Development Overview for Teachers and Staff
- Monday, August 27 - New Teacher PD All day at Summit North Middle School (8:00am+) / 2nd year Teachers (11:40-1:40 ATLAS training). Return to Summit afterward.
- Tuesday, August 28 - ALL FLAT ROCK STAFF (Summit Academy Flat Rock building meeting). 8:00-4:00.
- Wednesday, August 29 - All DISTRICT Staff PD-Full day at Summit North High School- with breakout sessions. 7:30-2:00. Lunch provided. Return to Summit afterward.
- Thursday, August 30 - ALL FLAT ROCK STAFF PD (8:00-12:00) / PM Meet the Teacher events (1:00pm-3:00pm)
- Friday, August 31 – Building OPEN
- Monday, September 3 – Closed for Labor Day
- Tuesday September 4 – First Day of School (Half Day)
More specific times to come!
GO DRAGONS!
Charles Chalfant, Principal
Email: cchalfant@summit-academy.com
Website: www.summitacademy.com
Location: Summit Academy, Olmstead Road, Flat Rock, MI, USA
Phone: 757-235-1781
Twitter: @MrChalfant