EAGLE MOUNTAIN NEWS & NOTES #12
NOVEMBER 2, 2015
EAGLE MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY
Email: bmclain@ems-isd.net
Twitter: @bmacEME
REAL QUICK:
I hope you enjoyed your extra hour this weekend & remembered to Fall back!
Our team leaders & Design Team came together last Thursday for a day of Instructional Rounds, & we really had a great day of learning. We saw many positive things in the lessons we observed, & I think it was more non-threatening than some expected. Be sure to ask your team leader or Design Team rep to share about it.
Wednesday is the 50th day of school. Feel free to dress 50's style if you would like to! I will be out Wed. morning to attend a Jr. Achievement breakfast but back a a little after 9.
This week on Thursday our Design team will be visiting Coppell ISD for a site visit at Lee Elementary.
Important Information this week!
- Our Eagle Mountain 25 #2 we ask you to focus on this week is: Make eye-contact when talking with someone.
- Our team leaders will meet on Wednesday – please let me know if you have anything you need me to add to the agenda.
- Please complete the counseling survey if you haven’t done so already. I re-sent the link to you on Friday & appreciate you getting that task completed right away.
· I trust you are working to schedule parent conferences. Remember how important this information is to parents! I’ll send a sample agenda form that one of our grade levels uses that you are welcome to modify & use if you would like to.
. Please remember when you receive a walk-thru in Eduphoria to sign it electronically as it will not show up as complete without your signature.
· We still have people who need to pay Sandra their Social dues.
· Please remember R-Time should be happening on Thursday mornings after announcements in grades 2-5.
· If you are willing to help with UIL, please let Brook Williams know.
. Karen Ray is providing GT training on November 19th. Several of our teachers will be attending - please make sure you sign up for it in Eduphoria ASAP.
· Please let me know if you do not have a Yellow Emergency sheet. They should be kept by your phone. I have a few extra & want to make sure our new staff members have them.
· The chart paper placed in the halls is for students to create their own original sentences using the word that’s posted above the paper. It helps if students sign their name & that way I can recognize some of them during announcements. I appreciate your help in getting this going.
· Please remember to display quality writing in front of the Author’s Wall of Fame.
. I am working on a parent newsletter that I hope to send home this Friday. If you have pictures from your Club please send them to me & I will include them in our parent newsletter.
· Andrea will be out for the next several weeks for surgery.
WORDS OF THE WEEK
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT VOCAB IS IN THIS SMORE
HIGHLIGHTING SOME GREAT TWEETS OF THE WEEK!
5TH GRADE
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
4TH GRADE
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
3RD GRADE
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
2ND GRADE
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET! W/VIDEO
GREAT TWEET!
1ST GRADE
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
KINDER
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
OTHER STAFF
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
GREAT TWEET!
SOMETHING TO READ ABOUT:
Great Teaching Means Letting Go
by Grant Wiggins, Ed.D, Authentic Education
My greatest learning as a teacher came on the soccer field.
We had been working for a few weeks on the same key ‘moves’ on the field related to creating ‘space’. After a few practices, the team looked good in the drills – they’ve got it! Next two games? Nothing: like we never learned it. Finally, in exasperation I yelled at my co-captain, Liz, one of the prime offenders in not using the moves practiced: USE what we worked on!! I yelled. Liz yelled back from the field: We would, Mr Wiggins, but the other team isn’t lining up the way we did the drills!!
There are two vital lessons here about learning:
- Transfer is the bottom-line goal of all learning, not scripted behavior.
- Transfer means that a learner can draw upon and apply from allof what was learned, as the situation warrants, not just do one move at a time in response to a prompt.
In a word: autonomy. You have to be able, on your own, to size up when to use what you previously learned, i.e. analyze the challenge, and judge what to do, mindful of a repertoire of prior learnings; then, implement a purposeful move, and assess its effect.
Put negatively, the more coaches and teachers prompt/remind/scaffold, over and over, without a deliberate and explicit plan for release of responsibility, the more students will flounder in situations demanding autonomy. We then see them act randomly, on the basis of what’s comfortable, or be paralyzed. Sound familiar?
Everywhere I go I see way too much scaffolded and prompted teaching – through twelfth grade. By high school, Socratic Seminar, Problem Based Learning, and independent research ought to be the norm not the exception: you have no hope for success in college or the workplace without such independence.
Yet, practically no district curricula are written to signal, explicitly and by design, the need for increased student decision-making and independence in using their growing repertoire as courses and years unfold. Rather, the work just gets harder but is still highly directed. Endless worksheets, prompts, reminders, and ongoing feedback keep co-opting the development of student autonomy.
Why, then, are we surprised when students sit in a testing situation – where no prompting or reminders can be provided – do poorly, looking like they seemingly never were taught the content? I think this is a key reason why people blame tests for being invalid.
But, Grant – surely with little kids…
No! The approach I am describing is the essence of Montessori where executive control over decisions is central to the methodology. I recall my son, Ian, as a 4-year-old, pondering which ‘work’ to do that day, on the way to school: food work? sewing work? Or drawing? Well, why might you choose one or the other today? I asked. And he proceeded to do a cute think-aloud with little furrowed brow, about the pros and cons (based on recent choices and his skill deficits). At 4 years of age.
Misinterpreting The Gradual Release Of Responsibility Model
Making matters worse, various people trying to help have wrongly interpreted the Gradual Release of Responsibility model to mean that the last step is “Independent Practice.” This is misguided. Independent practice is still scaffolded, prompted, and simplified activity in which the student knows full well what single move we want them to use. The acid test comes when we provide a text or a problem and simply say, with no advice about which strategy to use, figure this out. (Here and here are some helpful resources on genuine Gradual Release).
Which takes us back to soccer. The beauty of soccer coaching (unlike most other sports) is that as a coach you cannot call time out and you cannot script behavior. The sport demands from the start that you coach so as to signal that autonomy in playing winning soccer is the goal.
And in practice you must therefore build in ways (typically via regular scrimmages) to see whether or not kids can draw effectively from their repertoire without your advice, under game conditions. Most of the time you are humbled by how hard the transfer of learning really is, but that only makes you re-double your effort because game success demands it.
Coaches know that release of responsibility has to happen daily, not “gradually” in the sense of over months and years. I was taught the following mantra by pro soccer coaches in clinics: every practice must go through cycles of the following: game-related, game-like, game.
The same is true for reading: far too many teachers prompt for a specific reading strategy and provide guided “independent practice” in using each strategy but spend nowhere near enough time watching quietly (and later de-briefing) kids as they handle a reading passage cold, to determine which strategies they used and why (just as we would do daily in a soccer scrimmage). Even if I have only modeled three strategies, I should test to see which of the 3 they use – if any, like my soccer story! – and have us discuss what they did, why, and what did and didn’t work.
Do you see, therefore, how test preparation done right would mean that students gain practice in drawing from their repertoire with no teacher prompting, i.e. where there is no prior warning about what specifically is going to be on the test? Because that is the formal testing situation as well as the soccer situation. Give a slightly-beyond-level reading passage, non-routine math problem, or dueling accounts of the ‘same’ historical event and just see what they do. That’s the true meaning of formative assessment, not a typical quiz on the content just learned.
But Grant, surely you are not saying we shouldn’t cue, scaffold, prompt, or simplify things for learners!
Of course I am not saying that. Every coach must provide helpful scaffold, just as I did in my practices. But every coach also knows what many teachers seem not to know: unless you back off completely, on a daily basis, in scrimmages as well as games, to see whether or not students draw appropriately from the repertoire in a timely and effective fashion in challenges that demand it, you really have no idea what they can do on their own.
Furthermore, if you tape your own classes you will find that you are providing endless advice on how to do things and more often than not co-opting the development of judgment – the sine qua non of transfer.
I understand, this is difficult. It’s counter-intuitive to say: please teach less and help less, in order that performance might become more successful over time. Our instincts as teachers cause us to over-help rather than under-help. But our kids deserve to become autonomous learners. We need to develop the self-discipline to keep quieter, to build in no-stakes “tests” to see what they do under performance demands, to provide challenges that have no obvious next steps, and to de-brief results.
Co-incidentally, in our visit to School of the Future we noted this as our only concern. We saw nothing but great teaching in each classroom – focused learners doing intellectual worthy exercises. But we were made uneasy but how heavily directive much of it all was. While only there for a day, we saw little evidence that all this teacher help was going to be considerably dialed back soon.
In de-briefing our visit, the Principal agreed, and sent out the following e-mail to her staff:
Grant offered us two considerations – 1) that we get students to “scrimmage” more often, requiring more and more integration of their repertoire of skills and integration of concepts, and 2) that we engender more awareness on the part of students about what the complex ‘game’ is.
What does this look like in our practice? Here are some questions to consider as you coach students towards integration and independence.
3 Questions To Guide Your “Letting Go”
1. Do students know what the complex ‘game’ is that they are preparing for on any given day? In the short term, do they know what the big performance is for which they are preparing?
2. Do you have an intentional plan for taking away the scaffolds and making it more game-like? What is the plan to take away the leading questions on the worksheet, the instructions and reminders? Are you too often afraid of messiness and overcompensating with scaffolds? Rather, how might you better prepare students for performance uncertainty and messiness instead, or use such messiness as teaching opportunities?
3. Can you make more lessons more scrimmage-like? Can you require a bigger repertoire of skills and more integration of essential questions by the learners on their own?
This article was excerpted from a post that first appeared on Grant’s personal blog; Grant can be found on twitter here; image attribution flickr user woodleywonderworks; Great Teaching Means Letting Go
TECH DO'S
1st WEEK – TWITTER – We all have accounts & need to be tweeting out what is happening REGULARLY in our classrooms. . I EXPECT this to be happening weekly & regularly..We have told our PTA as well as other parents that our teachers are tweeting & that they should follow us on Twitter in order to see what is happening in our classrooms. I understand that not EVERY parent will follow us, but that's ok - we need to do a better job of educating our parents about the benefits so they will WANT to follow us! We are beginning to move away from just purely INFORMATIONAL tweets to more genuine LEARNING tweets which is exciting to see! IT's a PROCESS!!!
3RD WEEK - SKYPE - All of us should have an account by now. I expect all of us to Skype with one classroom in this building by the end of the 4th week. Some teachers have already done this and you can get help from them, if you need it.
5th WEEK – SKYPE WITH ELKINS - More info to come
7th WEEK - SKYPE OUTSIDE THE DISTRICT - More info to come
9th WEEK - Mini-Rise coming in 2 weeks
THIS WEEK AT A GLANCE:
Monday – PTA board meeting – 8:45, Diabetes FundRaiser Kick-off, Play It Safe program for all grades today during their Block, PLC’s meet, Meet & Greet for Baby Lawson - 3PM
Tuesday – Picture Retakes, Possible Fire Drill, Spring Creek Night – 5-9- Thanks to all of you who signed up to work a shift!
Wednesday – 50th day of school - you are free to dress 50's style if you so choose, I'm out this morning for a Junior Achievement breakfast but should return close to 9AM, Kelli, Sophia, & Chase to attend Boys In Crisis training, Team Leader meeting – 3PM
Thursday – Teacher Design Team visits Lee Elementary in Coppell ISD, R-Time for grades 2-5
Friday –Eagle Mountain University Clubs –7:50-8:35, Liink on campus for assessments, Drew to Region 11 for RTI behavior training
NOTEABLE QUOTABLE:
SHOUT OUTS:
- KUDOS to Madeline Tittle, Kim Meadows, Lynnette Darden, Cindy Griggs, Catherine Massie & Drew for decorating the lounge for our luncheon! Ya’ll outdid yourselves this year & the festive decorations certainly added to our staff luncheon. Thanks for the work that you did to make it fun & festive for all of us!
- I very much appreciate the work our Team Leaders & Design Team did with our first Instructional Rounds day last week! Many thanks to Kim Meadows, Madeline Tittle, Donna McBride, Janet Dickerson, Candice Martin, Karyn Cooper, Debbi Roest, LaRae Witsaman, Nala Beal, Dedra Jones, Regina Wrzesinski, Tim D’Amico, & Kelli Shipp for being “on-board” with our learning. Great discussion ensued as we now have a deeper understanding of Instructional Rounds. One teacher commented how beneficial it was for her to see the vertical alignment from the other grades, so we felt it was time well-spent! Thanks to all! I am eager for you all to get to experience this!
- Thanks to Janet Dickerson, Candice Martin, Pam English, Shanna Harlin, & Sandi Bowers for letting us enjoy second grade's pumpkins! They are creative & colorful & look great in the front foyer. Thank you for sharing with us!