Clif Notes 11/26/18
50 Years Of Equipping The State & Now Global Workforce!
DATES TO REMEMBER
This Week -
Monday - 8am Start for Extra Help
Tuesday - Cross Curricular Group PLC
Wednesday - ASVAB Testing Extra Help
Thursday - Academic PLCs
Friday - Steering
Upcoming:
12/4 Faculty Meeting; DOE New Skills Site Visit
12/6 Interim Report Date
12/7 PD Day
12/13 Junior Ring Ceremony
Winter Track Giving Back
Toys for Tots Drive
Delcastle HOSA Toys for Tots Drive going on now!!! Bring in your NEW unopened toys to your CTE area/SAC office. The CTE with the most donations will WIN a food incentive. Donations accepted 11/19-11/28!
The Giving Tree
Congratulations to the Students of the Month!!!
Fire Drill
I would like to thank the entire staff for an outstanding fire drill conducted before the break. The entire building was cleared in great time. The level of urgency displayed by our students and staff is impressive. Teachers, please continue to remember to bring your roll books. Great job!!!
Don't Forget Tech That You Learned
Additionally, there were a total of 34 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 are 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 peaks your interest, take a look at the materials to keep the learning going!!!
https://nccvt.schoology.com/course/1834042830/materials?f=143819266
Delcastle Instructional Focus
Interesting Read - Taking Action on Adolescent Literacy by Judith L. Irvin, Julie Meltzer and Melinda S. Dukes
Developing Vocabulary
Vocabulary development is intertwined with reading comprehension and content-area learning. Students need a variety of strategies they can use to learn and remember the many technical terms, key concepts, and academic vocabulary that they encounter in the study of various disciplines. There is no evidence that “assign, define, and test,” the most prevalent approach used in middle and high school classrooms for learning vocabulary, is effective in helping students to learn words. According to Allen (1999), teachers in each content area should implement purposeful vocabulary instruction to
- increase reading comprehension,
- develop knowledge of new concepts,
- improve range and specificity in writing,
- help students communicate more effectively, and
- develop deeper understanding of words and concepts with which students are only nominally familiar.
Struggling readers and writers and most ELL students also need purposeful attention to the study of words (root words, affixes) and the development of academic language (non-content-specific words found in printed directions, forms, textbooks, novels, and other publications). Throughout the literature, vocabulary development is stressed as a key component of literacy.
Generating Questions
Finally, students need to learn how to generate good questions. Questioning is effective for improving comprehension because it provides students with a purpose for reading, focuses attention on what must be learned, helps develop active thinking while reading, helps monitor comprehension, helps review content, and relates what is being learned to what is already known (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2001). Having students generate their own questions about a text has also been shown to be an effective strategy for improving reading comprehension—questioning becomes a vehicle for connecting the text to their own prior knowledge.
Questioning is a part of several other learning strategies. For example, writing-to-learn strategies, written responses to higher-order-thinking questions, engagement in Socratic discussion, use of analytical graphic organizers, inquiry-based learning, and collaborative routines for text study all involve asking and answering questions, and all have been proven effective in improving literacy habits and skills, including reading comprehension. Developing metacognitive skills requires asking oneself if a particular text is making sense, and if not, why not. Activating prior knowledge, described in the literature as an essential way to connect students with text and improve reading comprehension and the ability to learn from text, requires asking questions. Many stages of the writing process, from choosing a topic to developing an outline, revising, and publishing, also require the ability to ask questions. Completing research is highly dependent on identifying key issues and framing good questions to guide inquiry. Again, the premise that students need to be able to ask effective questions is not one that is found in many middle and high school classrooms, where the focus is typically on answering questions asked by the teacher or the text.
Explicitly teaching students these literacy habits and skills and providing multiple opportunities to practice them across content areas will ensure that students develop competence in these three areas. For example, teachers can focus on vocabulary development with each unit of study, or teach how to complete a research paper and present research findings through a focus on questioning. As the engagement-instruction cycle (Figure 1.1, p. 34) illustrates, this increased competence will further motivate students to engage with reading and writing tasks and will lead to improved student achievement.
Connecting Learning to Adolescents' Needs, Interests, and Dispositions
Adolescents are not passive recipients of information who have few skills. They are, instead, actively curious young people with background knowledge and a wide range of literacy skills that they may or may not be using in school. Improving their skills involves gaining their participation. Sometimes teachers and administrators spend considerable energy fighting with adolescents instead of harnessing their abilities and skills in the service of improving their literacy and learning. To help adolescents improve their academic literacy habits and skills, teachers and administrators can build on needs, interests, and dispositions that adolescents have, such as those presented in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2. Linking Instruction with Needs, Interests, and Dispositions
Adolescents' Needs, Interests, and Dispositions Possible Instructional Response
Need for control/autonomy Provide choices in
Interest in technology/media Use technology to support
Need to be heard Provide authentic audiences, expectations, and opportunities for writing/speaking for an audience beyond the teacher
Disposition to debate Plan many opportunities for
Need to make a difference Set up opportunities for
Need to belong Create a classroom culture and reinforce classroom norms that support the development of a community of readers, writers, and thinkers
Sense of accomplishment Teach students how to participate in
***More to read next week***