EAGLE MOUNTAIN NEWS & NOTES #5
SEPTEMBER 14 , 2015
EAGLE MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY
Email: bmclain@ems-isd.net
Twitter: @bmacEME
REAL QUICK
I want to thank each of you for a successful Curriculum Night last week! Parents’ comments reflected their appreciation for all that you do & the excitement you have generated about this year. Thanks for being the top-notch educators & people you are!
At our faculty meeting on Wednesday Cindy Tucker will provide training for us on Canvas & she will make it seem easy for us!
This reminder that Thursday is Constitution Day. Here is a link you are welcome to access: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/fund/guid/constitutionday.html
Kelli, Drew, & I will be out for Poverty training on Thursday.
Friday is out annual PTA Howdy Dinner which begins at 5:30. (Some of you sent out a 6PM time to parents, but the correct time is 5:30 so please make sure your parents know this.) Please make an appearance at our Howdy Dinner if at all possible. Not only do our kids appreciate seeing you at school events, but your presence means a lot to our parents as well.
In this week’s Bulletin there is an excellent article on BRANDING YOUR CLASSROOM I hope you will take time to read.
Important Information this week!
- Thanks again for a wonderful Curriculum Night! You did such a terrific job of informing our parents & making connections. Your efforts will pay off in a big way.
- Due to issues with AIMSweb, we are adjusting the window for the Kindergarten BOY. We are hoping it will be up & running by next Monday the 21st, & we’ll keep you posted as we learn more. There will be some overlap with iStation but it cannot be helped.
- Colleen Clower has also adjusted the window for the KR common assessment so that you have a longer period in which to assess prior to the end of the first reporting period. We appreciate your patience as we work with service providers for the implementation of these new products.
- ESTAR/MSTAR is being loaded today & you should hear something later in the week about access.
· Please remember to tweet several times a week as we talked this up in today’s PTA board meeting.
· Drew will be starting his small groups today.
· The lunch monitor that was supposed to begin today backed out on us on Friday, so we’re back to the drawing board, & Kelli & I will be setting up interviews for later this week.
· The PDAS window opens today, & remember that formal observations are unscheduled this year.
· Thanks for ensuring that your TSR section 1 form was turned in!
· Grades are due this morning & Progress Reports should go out tomorrow.
· I need a teacher rep to head up Spring Creek nights (Pam?) & other teachers who might spearhead a night once a month. Please visit with me if you are interested in helping us obtain additional funds for EME.
· There is a PTA Council meeting tonight at 7PM at HCTC.
CHECK OUT WWW.DIY.ORG/SKILLS TO GET CLUB IDEAS.
GE COMMERICAL
Consider the parents to be school and their son to be students in school.
Our students are going to be doing so many amazing things that schools just don't understand what that is.
We have to change and adapt with the times. We are not doing our students any good if we are preparing them for the 1950's.
TECH DO'S
Week 4 – (This week) Brand your classroom – We want you to tell your story & what your classroom is all about. We will include a picture of a classroom that is “well-branded” so parents walk away with the assurance that they feel like they know what is going on. It’s just getting information out to parents that highlight some of the great work you are doing with our learners, it fosters open communication, & it helps build a true learning community. Please read this week’s article about BRANDING in this week’s newsletter.
Week 5 – Set up a SKYPE account to use within our campus. More information on this later. Last year Jennifer DeCorte skyped with Madeline Tittle’s class & it was very cool to see this unfold.
Week 6 – Set up your Canvas Profile Page – this should be after we’ve had the training, so you will know what to do, & we’re told it is easy to do.
Week 7 – Set up your You Tube Channel. Chase & Tim are our resident experts on this. More information will be shared soon.
Week 8 – Create a Flipped Lesson that you can use with your learners. (This will be modeled for you before our Fundamental Five faculty meeting at the end of the month.)
Week 9 – Create a presentation for your class using one of the following presentation tools: Prezi, Powtoon, Emaze, Power Point, or another one that you like.
The Importance Of Branding Your Classroom
Classroom Brands
Just as product and service have a brand, so does your classroom whether you plan for it or not. What is the perception of your classroom? Is it dominated by you—are you your classroom’s brand?
Is the content area itself—“math”–the brand? American Lit, Psychology 101, etc.
Is it how challenging or fun the class is? The cool presentations? The decorations on the walls? The technology in the lessons?
While you juggle a million things–standards, proficiency, research–the students are mercifully ignorant of most of that. In your class, they see a grade, a credit, or an opportunity, when they need to see a brand.
A brand in a classroom is not unlike a business brand. You’re essentially creating a “face” for what students will experience in your classroom, and it’s often communicated in directly and indirectly in equal parts: through signs and tone, message and implication, content and non-content. It should be a message that is informative without being dry, brief with being reductionist.
“You can trust me, I have credibility.”
“The content you get here will be visibly relevant.”
“I understand the walls outside of this classroom.”
“You cannot be passive, or I have failed you.”
Lessons #1: Brand matters
One immediate lesson is that brand matters. A lot.
Machiavelli was right. Perception—in the public domain–is more important than reality. How you’re perceived, and how your school, grade level, content area, and course are thought of, while possibly not be “true,” are all that really matters. More than anything else, your brand must be unmistakable and accessible.
The big ideas in your curriculum, your tools of classroom management, the opportunities for voice and choice and others all contribute here, but if they don’t all coagulate into a neat little icon of brand, you’re costing yourself engagement and credibility with students.
Lesson #2: Brand must be emotional
If there isn’t a strong emotion associated with your classroom that can lead to learning, you don’t have a brand. And if you do, it’s impotent and forgettable.
At the intersection of emotion and brand is really a matter of tone—and that tone is everything.
Where that tone comes from isn’t easy to pin down. It starts with the relationship between the teacher and the students, and what kind of fiber that’s made of. How you choose, package, and refine content plays a role as well. How do you churn standards into viable curriculum The students notice. That’s part of brand.
Ideally your brand will be grounded in curiosity and support, where an authentic need-to-know leads to curiosity, which leads to learning facilitation, which leads to a collaborative layering of student knowledge, all colliding to create the right content at the right time, with the right tone, in a way that honors the learner.
But on a larger scale, that tone and emotion must be a more immediate connection—not learner–>teacher–>content, but rather learner–>content—>application, where the teacher is simultaneously embedded and out of the way, central and peripheral.
If the classroom is a stage and the whiteboard a microphone, you are the brand, for better or for worse. If there aren’t immediate, charged connections between learner and content that absolutely vibrate, the onus is back on the teacher to entertain, play Jedi mind-tricks, do cartwheels, and enforce compliance.
And like that, the tone—and brand—change for the worse.
Lesson #3: Accessibility comes first
One of the functional lessons of branding is how it distills complexity into simplicity. There are hundreds of ways to “spin” a product. Take Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS. What makes it desirable to users is a complex collision of user-interface design and clever marketing, factors Apple spends tens of millions of dollars a year to refine.
But more than anything else, brand must be accessible to the end user. In the process of branding, the product is ultimately changed. Not simply how that product is perceived, but how it is understood and used. Steve Jobs was clear about the role of brand way back in the 1990s, when Apple was, while a top 5 brand in the world, still in transition from Macintosh.
“This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world. We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear of what we want them to know about us.”
What will your students know about your classroom? What can they expect and trust? And how have you made that brand accessible? How do they know?
Lesson #4: Brand is the product of an ecosystem
Brand doesn’t just happen. Rather, it’s the result of execution.
How intentional that execution is dictates how controllable the brand becomes. The assessment design, technology integration, grouping strategies, time management, and a dozen other factors combine to engender a brand that your students pick up on in the first week of school. Perhaps even the first day.
The lesson here is that though you may hang pop culture posters, embed snarky clip-art, and play music while students enter the classroom, those factors only begin to contribute to mood, which contributes to atmosphere, which begins to contribute to brand.
A brand is the product of an entire ecosystem of factors: your natural personality, your “take” on academic standards, your relationship with other staff members, your grading system, your insistence on—and definition of—rigor and authenticity, and so on.
Brand must be singular, but what produces it can’t be.
Conclusion
In the end, the most important lesson is for you to control the perception of your classroom. It has been said that learners may not remember much about what you teach them, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. That’s brand.
Ask an Apple lover what they love so much about their latest iWidget, and they’ll likely have a hard time coming up with a compelling argument based on logic or function. They simply trust the product and love participating in the brand. Which kind of makes Apple a cult, and in the consumer world, that’s unfortunately normal.
Marketing agencies can concoct powerful brands that can make sheep of us all, from the cars we drive to the logos on our shoes. Even which social media platform you favor. But there are lessons to be learned there. If you can make your content area have cultish appeal by creating a vibrant and inviting brand for your classroom, well, then you’re halfway towards a personalized learning experience. You’ve given the students a place to start, and something they can trust.
And you’ve opened the door to the infinite complexity of what you teach that they’ll carry with them long after they leave your classroom.
THIS WEEK AT A GLANCE:
Monday – PTA Board meeting – 8:45, Grades are due this morning, PDAS Window opens, PTA Council Meeting 7PM - HCTC
Tuesday – Bryan to Principal LEAD meeting, Progress Reports go home today, Liink meeting with Dr. Rhea for K & 1 – 3PM
Wednesday – Kelli to AP meeting, Drew out for PBIS training, Faculty meeting – CANVAS training with Cindy Tucker – 3PM
Thursday – Kelli, Drew, & I are all out today for Training on Dealing with students of poverty, Constitution Day
Friday – Passport Health here to give flu shots 11 – 1, Pep Rally – 2PM to kick off our Fund Run – Drew will be our MC.
NOTEABLE QUOTABLE:
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
SHOUT OUTS
* I want to thank Shanna Harlin & Kim Meadows for serving as our PTA reps this year. THANKS Ladies!
* Have you seen how cool the project lab (College Junction) is looking this year? KUDOS to Drew for hanging up the college banners - makes a world of difference & helps with instilling the college mindset in our learners! Thanks Drew!