December 11th, 2015
“What are you thinking?”
-All 40 district 24 principals to our students next Friday
Exciting news: 102 will be hosting the December principals meeting next Friday on the 18th, and all 40 principals from district 24 will be visiting our classrooms along with Superintendent Chan and her team. As a teacher I’ve always relished the opportunity to show the world what my students were doing and learning, and I am just as excited now as principal to open the doors of 102. Great things are happening here and people need to know about it.
In teams of 5-7 during periods 2-4, our guests will visit classrooms across all grades and subject areas to observe instruction at 102. To focus this work, I will be asking our guests to think about one question as they go from class to class: “What are the students thinking?”
Students learn best when they engage in activities that allow them to construct new understanding themselves through active inquiry and thinking, and not when they passively take notes or parrot information given by the teacher. It is crucial that you plan for every lesson, every day—not just next Friday—activities that facilitate the learning process via student thinking, discussion, and deep understanding. See Ms. Green’s exemplary practice of this approach below in the “Weekly Highlights” section.
Active student thinking is an effective approach to ensure core academic subject mastery, but it is perhaps the only viable method to help students develop a host of critical 21st century skills such as creative thinking, emotional intelligence, and teamwork. Our instructional focus for the school year reflects our commitment to support this work.
PS/IS 102 Instructional Focus
All students will acquire both core academic subject mastery as well as critical 21st century skills by engaging in rigorous thinking tasks that explicitly target the development of metacognitive skills in creative thinking, problem solving, teamwork, emotional intelligence, and civic responsibility.
2015-2016: DEFINE thinking rigor through common tasks, assessments, and projects in each grade and subject area. Inquiry groups will research, create and/or select exemplar tasks for each content area in every grade.
2016-2017: DELIVER instruction that attends to the instructional shifts necessary in providing access for all students to engage in rigorous thinking tasks. Inquiry teams will review student outcomes to discover effective teacher practices in promoting CCLS and 21st century skills.
2017-2018: DETERMINE a uniform set of best practices and curricula to support rigorous thinking in every lesson. Administration will align all school systems and expectations for teachers and students to create an environment designed for active learning through thinking.
We will come back in January to unpack this work in inquiry groups. More information to follow.
Weekly Highlights:
After assigning her students to use new vocabulary word “variant” in a sentence for homework a day earlier, Ms. Green expertly facilitated a small-to-whole class discussion activity to monitor student understanding and to scaffold learning for the students who need it. Patient and astute in her approach, Ms. Green guided her students to learn through discovery as they attend to her questions and counter-examples, building on one another’s understanding and thinking deeply about the term variant in meaning, form, and connotation. Her students were given the opportunity to construct new learning themselves and will have far greater retention than if they had learned by passively listening to a teacher’s explanation.
Things You Need to Know:
- Staff Spotlight: The first installment of our “Staff Spotlight”is up! To help the community better get to know our amazing staff, students will interview teachers for this bi-monthly series. Please feel free to nominate a colleague you feel is deserving of the “Spotlight”. See here for an interview with Ms. Zwillickby Laura Umana of class 8-409.
- Kind and Caring Wednesdays: The “Caught Being Kind and Caring” campaign is up and running. An initiative for students and teachers in grade 3-5, three students will be celebrated each week on “Kind and Caring Wednesdays” over the PA in the morning. Throughout the week students will be filling entries for classmates who have been caught doing something kind and caring, and we will randomly select three to highlight.
- Write-Ups After Going on Trips: Please email me a blurb of any trips you take with your class along with some photos. 102 provides students with such a well-rounded and rich learning experience and I want to share your hard work with the community. I will use the write-up to create an entry on our website. See here for an example: http://ps102q.org/category/student-life/
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