The Holidays Aren’t Always Happy

While you are on winter break, you will likely be someplace with heat, hot water and food… So. Much. Food. For the most part, so will your students. While the majority of our students will be thrilled for all the joys accompanying winter break, there are some not looking forward to this time of year.

Picture the child living in a motel, sharing cramped space with a sibling, extended family member, or perhaps the son or daughter of the person their parent is currently dating; not knowing where they will live at the beginning of the month.

Picture the child living in a large home opening all the presents they asked for as their parents are getting ready to separate from one another the week after Christmas.

Picture the child spending winter break taking care of their four younger siblings all day because there wasn’t enough money for gifts let alone childcare; and picture the child who is terrified because they remember what happened the last time uncle Mark came to visit…

While the holiday season is stressful for all of us, we as adults have some control on how we cope with that stress or remove ourselves from it altogether. Our students don’t always have that.

While we can’t solve all of the world’s problems, we can acknowledge those students who may be going home to less than ideal situations. Depending on the relationship you’ve built with the student, you may be able to help keep them from a dangerous situation. The best thing you can do to support your students is to keep doing what you have been: working on building relationships with your students, and continuing to ensure they feel safe and welcome into your learning environment on a daily basis. Not sure what else you need to do? Ask a member of your administrative team, or your school counselor.

One of My FAVORITE Books Right Now

 So, this is my favorite book right now! I was at a conference last month, and I had the absolute PLEASURE of hearing Grace Dearborn speak, and everything she had to say resonated with me. When we share classroom management strategies with new teachers, we often provide strategies which will work with most of our students. However, our new teachers often don’t have issues with “most” of their students. This is why I LOVE this book. Rick Smith and Grace Dearborn provide concrete strategies and tools teachers can use to reach even the most difficult students. In my 20 years of working with students, mostly in “at-risk” settings, I’ve seen it all. This book pretty much has an answer for any classroom management situation.  If you want some tools to add to classroom management toolbox, get this book. It’s an easy read, and I guarantee you can take strategies you learn and apply them immediately.

To make it easy, I you can click on the link to visit the site to purchase, or you can click HERE.

New Job, New Vocabulary

Sometimes I use this blog to reflect upon things I’ve learned about. One of the best ways I process information, especially information new to me is by summarizing what I’ve learned. This is why at the bottom of this document, you will see links to resources I used to write this.

One of the things I like about my new position is the feeling I have about being part of something innovative. I was lucky enough to move my stuff into my office the day before I officially started. People all around were in the process of transitioning. Some were transitioning to retirement, others were transitioning to a new position outside the department or building; and then there were those like me who were transitioning to a new position within this organization. There were boxes everywhere along with pieces of furniture in the process of being transported from one space to another. That afternoon, I got my space set up to be functional, and then wrapped things up for the day.

Walking in the following Monday morning, I felt as if I was in a completely new environment from the one I walked out of the Thursday before. Furniture was arranged in a collaborative fashion and the space was minimally, but tastefully decorated. What stood out to me the most, though was a sign on a small conference room which read “Scrum Room”. Scrum room? That sounded like a locker room for a rugby team. I didn’t think much else about it as I had a full schedule of activities for my first official day.

The next day, however, the word “Scrum” would have a whole new meaning. Our director had pushed out a series of Lynda.com videos. The first one was entitled: “Agile at Work: Building Your Agile Team”. There were also two other videos regarding the Agile framework we were asked to watch in preparation for a departmental retreat the following week. According to the videos and some side research I performed, Agile is a framework with roots in the software industry, developed for the purpose of streamlining the software development process to expedite the delivery process of a high quality product to the customer. The Agile philosophy, however, is not necessarily exclusive to the software industry.  The terms collaboration, self organization, and accountability are noted as best practices of those practicing Agile. Scrum and Scrum Master were brought up regularly in the introduction and discussion of this framework.

Scrum is basically a process which insures the most valuable components of a project get completed in a reasonable amount of time. Scrum also employs the best practices of Agile to assist in the completion of these projects. From a leadership perspective, the facilitator of this process, or the Scrum Master may serve as an administrator, coach or trainer. Most importantly, the Scrum Master works to facilitate the process by pulling together the right people needed to complete the project; and then eliminates any obstacles or distractions in the way of completing the task at hand.

What makes me excited about this whole process is when I research them they are not synonymous with the field of education; which makes this innovative and exciting all at once. What’s exciting to me is that I get to be part of it!!! Interestingly enough, I have found a correlation to the Scrum process in a change model I’m getting ready to share with students this week known as the ADKAR model.  ADKAR is basically an acronym facilitating the change process:

• AWARENESS for change
• DESIRE to support change
• KNOWLEDGE of how and what to change
• ABILITY to implement the change on a daily basis, and
• REINFORCEMENT to keep the change in place.

Through this model, Scrum are part of the Action and Reinforcement stages. This is exciting to me because so often there are many obstacles which exist in the field of education. The leadership in this department has a strong desire to make a sustainable change, has the ability to implement those changes and the tools needed to keep that change in place, and I can’t wait to see how all of this unfolds!

Links to Resources:

• “Agile at Work: Building Your Agile Team”
• What is Agile? What is Scrum? The Everything You Need to Know Guide.
• Agile Frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming
• Change Approach Characterization Model
• Change Management – Description of ADKAR.
• Using a Change Model Like ADKAR

#ObserveMe

In true form of most of my ideas, I am stealing another from a colleague of mine. This past weekend, she posted a picture of a sign she had placed on her door. It read like this:

I’d love formative feedback on three of my professional goals:

• Do I keep student learning at the forefront of conversations?
• Do I value staff and student opinions by actually listening?
• Do my actions create a collaborative culture?

The sign also included a link to an observation tool individuals could use to provide feedback.

Upending some research, the idea comes from Robert Kaplinsky and he got the idea from a Tweet he came across.

To say the least, I AM ABSOLUTELY IN LOVE WITH THIS IDEA, AND WILL BE USING IT IMMEDIATELY! I’ve always found it very interesting we as administrators are so focused on giving feedback that we often forget to seek out feedback for our own growth. Consider a building principal who gets the majority of feedback from a superior who they see on a very infrequent basis.

If you want to participate, visit Kaplinsky’s website (Link Above) and post a sign outside your door. It’s an easy way to gain peer feedback and reflect on your practice!

Time to Reflect

Reflection is a very effective form of professional learning, one we aren’t always good about as educators. It always seems as if we need to move on to the next unit, the next activity; and little time if any is taken to reflect upon what we’ve learned.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a principal who was AMAZING about reflection. He had a theater background, and was a big fan of the “post-mortem”. While the term may seem morbid, the process can often breathe new life into what we are doing. Basically, once a large task is complete, the group meets and reflects upon what went well, and what needs to be improved upon.

In wrapping up a large event in my current position, I send a Google Doc to everyone who was involved, and give them editing rights. I ask them to answer four questions:

• What were our successes?
• How do we ensure future success?
• What can be improved?
• How can we improve it?

From there, we then meet to discuss what was recorded, and see what adjustments we can make.

Spring is a time of renewal. Even on cooler days, the sun is warm when its shining, and any rain falling is purposeful. It’s efforts are seen in green grass and sprouting flowers. Time flies! Take some time in this season of renewal to “stop and smell the flowers” –  reflect on your actions so far this year to prepare for those last weeks of school and beyond.

Data is Coming

Teachers have an enormous amount of data to sort through. A seriously enormous amount of data. With testing season beginning for many, teachers are about to get even more data on their students. Here are some examples of data teachers work with on any given day

• Test and quiz results – From state and local standardized tests, unit tests, benchmarks, common assessments, class assessments
• Warm-ups and exit tickets – Often collected on a daily basis
• Checklists – Data collected by teachers to monitor student mastery of letters, sounds, sight words and other skills
• Anecdotal data – Notes on student progress, logs documenting parent communication
• Discipline records – From student behavior charts, copies of office referrals written

…and this was generated after only a few minutes of brainstorming!

Keeping this amount of data organized and synthesizing it into something useful within a timeframe which would have the greatest impact on student achievement.

Amazingly, little research exists on the concept of teacher management of student data. However, there are lots of blogs out there which discuss solutions for managing student data. Once again, amazingly, the majority of those blogs don’t discuss leveraging technology to manage student data. A few things to keep in mind if you want to be a master of your class data.

Know what data you are responsible for collecting

In most cases the big data like state and district assessments will be gathered and sorted by members of your administrative team. Hopefully your administrator will have discussions with you about your data throughout the school year and provide guidance on what you are looking at. While this is important data to understand, as it can show where your students begin, where they may at mid-year, and how they end

The key to leveraging student data to improve academic achievement is to make sure you are aware of the data you collect, your data collection is purposeful, and you use the data in a way which has a positive impact on student achievement.

Be Intentional With Your Data Collection

The process of collecting data should be meaningful. For example: Don’t give an exit ticket just to give an exit ticket. That little bit of data can tell you a whole bunch about a student’s progress, but only if you have the time to go through it. Furthermore, if you aren’t adjusting your teaching based on what you learn from that exit ticket, you are wasting your time for having just gone through them all, and the student’s time to complete it.

Be Transparent With Your Data

It can sometimes be scary when sitting in a PLC meeting reviewing results of the last assessment your team gave and you notice your scores are lower than that of your colleagues. You have two options: lie or learn. You can sit there and lie about how your students did, or learn from the scores. What techniques did your colleagues use that you didn’t? What suggestions can you get for grouping your students for remediation? What if you all did poorly, and had to evaluate the whole lesson? You may sometimes feel as frightened to fail as your students do. Don’t be. Share your results, make adjustments to your instruction, and move on.

Data isn’t going away anytime soon. If you make data analysis part of your regular routine, you will get better at it; and that will translate into your instruction.

You make an impact

There are sooooo many factors out there which impact student achievement. There’s this guy out there named John Hattie who was able to identify 138 of them. Once he identified them, he gave them a numerical value. Anything receiving a numerical value of .4 or greater made a significant impact. I’m sure you can probably guess some of these factors.

Here are a few which come up in conversation more than others:

• A teacher’s education – Dr. Hattie gave this a .41. It definitely has an impact.
• A student’s motivational state – .42 – Higher value than a teacher’s education.
• A student’s beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions toward learning – .47 – pretty good compared to that .41

Looking at the research from this perspective it would appear a student’s belief in their own potential has a greater impact than the amount of education their teacher has…that would be correct.

Let’s look at this from a different perspective. Remember when I said Dr. Hattie indicated anything at a .4 or higher indicated significant impact? Here is another figure for you:

• A teacher’s belief in themselves they can accomplish the job, and can exude that confidence in front of a group of students, has the highest impact on student achievement. 1.57 – way above a .4!

This is why, as an administrator who sat on the opposite side of the table during teacher interviews, I learned not to give priority to the amount of education a teacher has, rather to their passion for teaching and belief in children. A teacher can have all of the content knowledge in the world, but none of that matters if they can’t connect to children.

The coming weeks are going to be hard. It’s a long haul between now and spring break. You will make it though! Just remember: Believe in your students, believe in your team, believe in yourself!!!

New Year vs. New Semester

As you wrap up your lessons before heading off to winter break, be sure to take some time with colleagues to reflect on what went well, as well as what could just some “tweaking”. While you will have 17 days of winter break, your students will as well; and it’s likely there won’t be a whole lot of structure at home in the coming weeks. When your students return to you in January, they may not have forgotten all of the procedures and routines you worked so hard to establish, but they will CERTAINLY check to see if you have.

Luckily, just like many of us, your students will also have taken some time to reflect upon what went well this past year, and what they could resolve to do better. You may want to even ask them if they care to share their New Year’s Resolution. This is the perfect time to harness this commitment to change, no matter how short-lived and use it to your advantage!

In the first week back from winter break, the best thing you can do is to treat that first week like the first week of school all over again. Your students will need to be reminded of the procedures, routines, and expectations you taught them what seems like “forever” ago; and they will need to practice them as well!

What’s great about this first week back is it can also be seen as a blank slate. If you had something in place which wasn’t working for you and your students, this is the perfect time to throw it out, and establish a new procedure, a new routine! Not sure if this new procedure is going to work? No worries! The end of the semester is only a few weeks away, and with it, time for another clean slate. The great thing about teaching is the fact we get to show students the importance of learning from our mistakes, and that the world isn’t going to swallow them whole if they make one. The same goes for you. Don’t feel you have to live with a procedure, routine, or expectation until June. You can certainly change it; especially if your plan to improve supports your students and more important; your sanity!

Parent Conference Tip Sheets

From the people at Harvard, Parent Teacher Conference Tipsheets were developed members of the Harvard Family Research Project, and provide some good tips for teachers, parents, and administrators.

Navigating the Parent Conference

On conference day, organization and preparedness are going to be your best friend. As a conference is scheduled, set up a folder for each student which includes a current copy of the student’s grades, a log of any contacts you made with the parents, and some artifacts which can show some “glows” and “grows”. Many buildings also have a conference form which provides a place for notes and a follow-up plan with action steps for the teacher, parent, and student. Having a printed agenda to follow can also help keep things running on time. In addition, take some time to make sure your classroom is well organized, and that there is a comfortable place for parents to wait outside.

The meeting space in the classroom should also be comfortable for the parents. While a round table is best, a few desks pushed together works just fine. Just avoid sitting at your desk while your parents are sitting at desks which are way too small for them!

When the conference begins, be sure to greet your parents warmly, introduce yourself, and ask them to have a seat. Take a moment to review the agenda, remind them of the timeframe, but also be sure to inform them follow up at a later date can be scheduled if needed.

Once introductions take place, go down the agenda; reviewing grades, sharing artifacts, and providing recommendations and suggestions supportive of learning. The most important thing to remember is to make sure the parents feel they are part of the team. It should be a two-way conversation. Ask questions, get their input, address their concerns. At the end, fill out the conference form, and inform parents a copy will be sent home the next day.

There will be times when conferences don’t go as well. If you anticipate this, ask your building administrator to sit in. If you feel things didn’t go well, reach out to follow-up or schedule another conference, with an administrator if needed.

Parents can be your greatest allies in education. If they feel included in their child’s learning, the sky’s the limit when it comes to academic success.

A Few Thoughts About Halloween

In schools, the days surrounding Halloween will feel like Christmas, especially with it being on a Tuesday night this year. Kids will have spent the weekend getting excited and some may have even attended a Halloween party or fall festival. This will carry over into Monday when the candy begins to show up in the lunchbox. The excitement will continue through Tuesday afternoon as thoughts of dressing up cloud all academic thinking. There will be a little lull Wednesday morning – Prepare for irritability due to late bed times, followed by a sugar buzz around lunch time, which will continue through the rest of the day as students sneak candy they transferred from their lunchboxes to their pockets, pencil pouches, or binders. Student brains will continue to malfunction due to the lack of protein. You will experience papers smeared with chocolate, sticky computer keys, and an aversion to work requiring any degree of focus. Hands-on activities requiring collaboration will be your best friends during this time!

This week will feel like you’ve been through a battle, especially if you haven’t nailed down those procedures and routines. You do have an ally in this fight, though…the reminder to students report cards will be coming soon, and parent-teacher conferences are just around the corner. Stand firm, stay positive, and use your resources!