FYI #16 - Fun Friday for Staff!

This week’s Academic FYI is dedicated to the memory of Rosario “Rosie” O’Neill - A great colleague and a better person

I worked with Rosie for 12 of her 15 years here at Assabet Valley. She was a wonderful person and a great part of our academic department. There was seldom a day that Rosie was not smiling and in a positive mood. She was easy to talk and joke with and I remember her always willing to help me during my first years teaching here. She was a favorite amongst students and her classes were always filled. While 59 is way too young to leave us she made an impact on so many including myself and many students and staff during her time here.

She has three wonderful children, 2 grandchildren, and married her high school sweetheart Wayne.

Although I had not seen Rosie in some time I remember her fondly and feel happy about the wonderful tribute and fundraiser our Assabet Valley staff put together on the “Rosie Bowling Night” just a couple of years ago.

While we lost a great one her suffering is now over and she is in a much better place.

Rosie- You will be missed!

Students of the Month- March/April

Please join me in celebrating the following students who were named Student of the Month for March/April. Thank you for those staff who nominated these amazing students! If you see these students in the next couple weeks let them know how proud you are of their hard work!

David Pontes

Lucas Oliveira

Gabriela DaCosta

Ashlie Brooks

Savannah Christo

Tatiana Marcheterre

Yennifer Yaneth Gomez Tecu

Ashleigh Harrington

Victoria Silva

Hannah Silva

Joseph DeChellis

Kyle Kozlowski

Kelsi Taylor

Matthew Cochran

John Zouharis

Jared Brudner

Frankie-Ann Lovejoy

Alexia Munoz

Gabriel Zayas Fernandez

New Academic Department Bulletin Board Info coming Monday!

We will be putting up our new students of the month and new Teacher Shout-Outs this Monday. Please stop down to check out the new look and information.

Here is an example of our new Teacher Shout-Out sheet. I thought this one was especially thoughtful by freshmen Jared Brudner. First I have seen with multiple teachers on it. Statements kids make like this make it all worth it!

January/February Academic Winners:

Student Epi Lunch Winner: Alexandra Ortiz (pulled from a name of students either recognized as a January/February Student of the Month or a student who submitted a Teacher Shout Out!)

Staff T-Shirt Winner: Pulling today at lunch (pulling from a name of an academic staff member)

Winner will receive one our cool teacher t-shirts!

Student European Trip 2016 Blog

I have completed our European Trip Blog which now has our 2 days in London!

A big shout out to sophomore Ashley Valentine for helping me write the blog even though we got back to the hotel exhausted each and every night and just wanted to sleep!

A special thanks to Sarah McCann for doing an amazing job running the trip and our chaperones Andrea Nykiel, Julia Nogueira, Linda McGrath, and Nick Ghiloni for keeping our students moving and safe!

Please see our completed European Trip Blog here: http://avtravelclub.blogspot.com/

Count the F’s

At a recent professional development workshop I attended we were asked to count the number of F’s in the statement below. This all had to do with the overarching lesson that people see and interpret things differently.

Look at the statement below. How many F’s do you see? The answer may surprise you. Scroll to the bottom of the FYI to see the answer after you have looked it over.

6 is the answer- I got this wrong. Many people don’t count the F’s in the word OF. This is how some people's’ brains work. I made this mistake the other day. I was adamant that it was 3!

Have a Great Weekend and Thank you for all you do for our students!

AV Student Trip to Europe 2016- Check out the daily Blog!

38 AV students and 5 AV staff will be traveling to Europe over February vacation with EF (Education First) tours. 

The group will be flying from Boston to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Brussels, Belgium, Brussels to Paris and taking the "Chunnel" (underwater train) from Paris to London before flying back to the States. 

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity that Mr. McCann and sophomore Ashley Valentine will be blogging about each day. 

Ashley is a sophomore Health Tech student from Clinton and like a lot of the students on this trip this is the first time she will be traveling outside the US. 

The planning and preparation over two years is finally done and we are very excited for the trip to get underway. 

We hope you will follow our blog daily and see what our amazing students will be experiencing and learning! 

Check out the full blog here:

AV Travel Club Blog

FYI #14 How to Manage and give the best Retakes and Redo's

At a professional development I recently attended on inclusion practices the main theme of the entire workshop as it pertained to students was:

This is important.

You can do it.

And I won't give up on you.

What particularly resonated with me was in the "And I won't give up on you" session this quote on giving students retakes and redo's:

To insist that the original grade is the only one that matters sends children the message that education is about scores and deadlines. “These are the things you’re supposed to know, and if you don’t  know them on this date, then the time you put into trying to know  them was wasted, because because we're moving on.”

On the  other hand other hand, allowing students to retake tests sends the  message that what matters is learning. Students should be  encouraged to keep at something until they understand it, whatever  that happens on day one, or day one hundred.  - Jason Lukehart

Love the quote. Makes a lot of sense. Student learning should not have a deadline on it. With that said the large majority of academic staff here are great about students taking retakes- redo's- make-ups etc..

Myself included I know that we have all benefited from retakes and make-ups in our careers. Just think about the number of times many of us have taken MTELs for example.

The following information is not only about the importance of giving students additional attempts at showing their understanding but also about better ways of going about it.

Here are some great articles about making the redo/retake process more valuable for you and your students. If you have other ideas I would love to share them.

12 Steps for Successful ReTakes and ReDo's

• The article above gives 12 great ideas for enhancing retakes. I particularly liked these these ideas:
• 
  

5.   If students are retaking a quiz/test, don’t use the same test. The idea behind redos and retakes is for the students to master the essential understandings not to memorize the answers (A, B, D, D, C, F, etc. or Rome, Caesar, Pax Romana, Increased, etc).

6.     Instead of using the same test, change the question style from a multiple choice to short answer or essay. PPT really good especially about 70% of college teachers allowing retests

Redo/Retake Slide Share

• This slide share above gives a lot of good information but I was really surprised and intrigued to learn that nearly 70% of the college syllabi in one of their studies showed that college professors are allowing for redo's/retakes
• One of the main knocks against giving retakes (especially for Honors and AP students) has been that they won't have this option at the next level. The most recent studies and data are not showing this to be true anymore. Honors and AP students also benefit from redo's and retakes just as much as students in lower tracks.

14 Practical Tips for Managing Redo's in the Classroom

• This is a GREAT article which really talks about managing the process of giving retakes.

Here are some highlights of the 14 tips:

3. Announce to students and parents that redo's are permitted at teacher discretion. This means that students and parents may not take the redo option for granted.

8. If the same student repeatedly asks for redo's, something’s wrong. The content is not developmentally appropriate, there are unseen issues at home, or perhaps there’s an undiagnosed learning disability. Investigate.

9. Choose your battles. Push hard for students to redo anything associated with the most important curriculum standards and less so with work associated with less important standards.

Again, when considering your retakes and redo's remember this important maxim:

This is important.

You can do it.

And I won't give up on you.

FYI #14 - Happy Thanksgiving! One thoughtful article- Tweets and Pictures

FYI #14 - Just some fun educational pictures and Tweets to think about from educational Social Media this week.

Happy Thanksgiving and Thank you for all you do                                         for our students! 

I can't imagine any of our staff would do this but its funny! 

Some great tweets. The first one made me think of our Atlas initiatives. We are doing great things but keep in mind that quality not quantity is the most important. 

Kyle Pace‏@kylepace

Make this year about quality not quantity. Don't get hung up on how much or how fast you're moving forward. The point is to move forward.

The two charts in this tweet are great. This is what the best teachers and learners do consistently.

Kevin A. Duncan  ‏@duncanka  Nov 22

Love these infographics by @on 21st century teaching & learning #21clhk #edchat #adedu

I have sent this out previously the past couple of years. This is great for everyone regardless of their profession and is also something great to share with students and remind them of each day.

I know we all strive to push our students and don't allow them to use the excuses on the right side. This is part of the Growth mindset that all of our students can achieve and learn. This graphic below puts it nicely.

Another graphic I have sent out previously but is incredibly important. Students who read consistently have more success than students who do not. If students are not reading at home let's make sure we are including some in our lessons.

This makes a lot of sense. Just getting students to write more is half the battle. Bad writing can turn into good writing as long as students START writing.

Special Ed Teacher Compliments Every Single Student Each Day, Gets A+ In Our Book

Just this one short article this week. This is a quick story about a Special Education teacher in Florida who spends the first minutes of class complimenting all his students. I am not suggesting we do this each day but compliments go a long way and sometimes motivate students more than anything else does. I found this article interesting and I drew a lot of parallels to our teaching staff who continuously build our kids up each day. 

FYI #13 - Student-Centered Activities- Form. Assessment- Reading Activities- A Teacher becomes a Student

This week: 

A simple feedback strip of paper that can help you with formative assessment (pic below),  a short article on a teacher shadowing students and her take-aways, some simple reading engagement strategies,  56 formative assessment strategies, and 60 Student-Centered activities. All good, quick reads which can be quickly implemented. 

Teacher Spends 2 Days as a Student
This is a quick and easy read about a teacher who shadows a couple of students all day and her take-aways.  A couple of her key take-aways were the amount of time students actually sit each day and the amount of time they actually just sit and listen to people all day. A good read.

Reading Strategies Ideas
This short article has some great ideas for getting students more engaged in what they are reading. Simple yet effective ideas like the following are easy to implement and use everyday:

1. Instruct partner A to tell partner B everything he or she knows about _____________; or instruct partner B to explain to partner A what just happened in the story; or instruct partners A and B to have 2-minute conversation acting like characters from the story. The options are endless.

56 Quick Formative ideas
The above link opens to a PPT presentation where each slide briefly describes a different formative assessment strategy. They are quick and to the point and all easily implemented. The 3x Summaration, Chalkboard splash, and the Metacognition chart (pictured above) I found to be the really interesting and helpful.


60 Student-Centered Activities
This site nicely sets-up 60 different student-centered activities with a short summary and if you click on the hyper link it opens up a larger and longer description on how to implement this into the classroom.

FYI #12- Teacher Appreciation Week! The Best PD I ever had --- A Writing Video ---- Resource Round-Up

 from Hallmark: 

• People in the United States started celebrating National Teacher Day in 1953 when Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded Congress to set aside a day to recognize educators
• In the United States, 3.7 million people work as elementary and secondary teachers in public schools. (Source: National Center for Education Statistics, 2012)
• About 45% of teachers leave the profession in their first five years. (Source: National Education Association)
• About 40% of people entering the profession in the United States are coming from other careers. (Source: National Education Association)
• UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) declared October 5 as World Teachers’ Day in 1994.

The Best Professional Development I Have Ever Had 

Around the Holiday I covered three classes for teaching staff with the idea that staff could either allow me to bring in a lesson of my own or leave one for me to implement. Luckily for me I was given both options and worked in some very different classrooms. Here is a short summary of the Best Professional Development I have ever had as an Administrator:

I have taken over 30 classes the past five years, attended countless workshops, and read hundreds of articles. However, nothing has given me as much insight and appreciation to the teaching profession as going back to actually "teaching".

This will certainly be something I  plan on doing for years to come and will suggest to my colleagues that it is beneficial for all Administrators. There is no substitute to understanding the importance of teaching children until you are in front of them for 58 minutes straight.

Some quick observations:

• Kids love to talk to you. Its a great part of the job but many of them would just like to do it all class. Its tough to reel them back in once you get going. 
• I almost forgot how many times you need to explain to them what to do.  How much constant prodding and redirection some students need.
• ELL students are just like any other kids. They want to show us how smart they really are. I  enjoyed learning some new words in both Spanish and  Portuguese. 
• 58 minutes is a long time to keep kids on task and attentive every minute. Not everyone can do it. 
• We have some amazing and extremely likable kids in this school. Kids that are willing to help you and  others and genuinely enjoy doing it. Why can't they all be like that?
• Many of our kids have a tough time writing. Writing a good solid paragraph takes a long time for many students. 
• We have some funny kids. Great personalities. 
• Teaching is a really, really hard profession. I needed to be in those classrooms to remember just how important and how difficult a job it can be at times. 

The Teaching Resource Round-Up 

The link below is a one stop shopping area for a  variety of topics: classroom management, lesson planning, dealing with parents, building relationships with students. If you enjoy reading articles on how to better your teaching this is a great collection of short and to the point articles:

Teaching Resources Round-Up


Small Group Writing Video 

This is a great 4 minute video from the Teaching Channel on how to exactly go about a small group writing for 9th through 12th graders. Easy to implement and a great way to get the students to think and write.

Teaching Channel

FYI #11: Interesting Pictures, an ELL Activity, Silent Reading, Getting Student-Centered, Laughter in the Classroom

This week in the Academic FYI:

- A picture that really makes you think about how important education is to some people in other countries, an ELL activity, some SSR- Silent- Sustained reading activities, making sure your classroom is student-centered, a  & the power of laughter in the classroom.

Here's an interesting picture during MCAS season to remind us just how important high-stakes testing is to people in some other countries. These family members in India are actually climbing up the school walls to give their children cheat notes so that they can do better on state exams that could change the lives of millions growing up in poverty. This became a major scandal in one town in India. 

 PHOTO: Family members and friends climb walls to give answer sheets to students undertaking exams   

1- Think Aloud: Your Turn for ELLs and any other students! 

Below is a picture I took during my last SEI-RETELL class. I think it is a really good activity for a few reasons. 1- it involves reading 2- it is student-centered and 3- you can use it with your ELL students or in any class including Honors and AP Level. It really makes two students focus and engage in this paired activity. Try it out!

2 - SSR- Silent Sustained Reading Activities
http://goo.gl/3TJLek

Here is a great downloadable PDF on ways to promote Quiet Time reading. As a teacher I used to think that chalkboard dust had to flying and heavily engaged students discussing things out loud was needed every minute of class. While that is still important there is certainly a place for silent reading activities. This is a great way to support and reading skills and get kids to relax and really think about what they are reading. That is a great form of engagement in itself.
This is a particularly good way to start or end a class to give you some time to organize everything else you have going on as well.

3- How Student Centered is your Classroom?
http://goo.gl/yATHNp

This article probably takes 2 minutes to read but has a great list of guiding questions to ask yourself if your classroom is truly student-centered. This is a great quick read.

4- April Fool's Day & Classroom Laughter

This timely article written more in an elementary sense still can remind us of the power of laughter in the classroom. Some of the best classes I have seen use laughter as a hook for student learning. 

Next week: 

I will be breaking down the lessons I learned from covering those classes for teachers after the holiday. I am calling the blog entry the "Best PD Any Administrator Can Have".  It was a great reminder of what it is like to have students in front of you for a full 58 minutes. It is something that every Administrator IMO would benefit from doing at some point.