Author: mrkobot

102 Review, ISSUE 35: “Kinesthetic Collaboration”

Posted on by mrkobot in Principal's Blog

It’s dangerous for a school to not have a clear vision and a coherent plan to attain it. When PDs do not align to teacher needs or when expectations for teacher practice conflict with mandated curriculum, teachers become frustrated and student learning slows.

102 will not have this problem. Our focus on student thinking is clear, and gives clarity as all of our decisions and expectations revolve around pushing thinking. On Thursday I shared with you some of our new curriculum, new expectations for teacher practice (Danielson Cheat Sheet), and new expectations for lesson planning (Thinking Generator). United by a common focus, each will support the others as teachers plan to teach for thinking, not just doing.

This is the work for next year, and it is already off to a great start. We received tons of great questions from teachers in every grade and every department, and a FAQ will be sent out in a few days to all staff. Teacher teams jumped into nuanced discussions around Thinking Generators, bringing a level of complexities to an instructional discourse that I’ve never seen at any PD. Special shout-outs to the middle school math and 3-5 STEM teams: seeing clear potential in TGs, both groups went right to work and even created TGs for the following day.

We’re thinking, and so will our students.

Things You Need to Know

June 14th is a regular school day for teachers regarding start and end time.

Optional PD will be provided in the gym for teachers who will be participating in the Staff/Student game. Bring your gear Monday and Tuesday if you’re interested.

End of year events are taking place almost every day from here on out. Please review our end of year calendar for more information.

District 24 will be honoring our Big Apple Award winner Marybeth Meenan on June 20th, 7PM at PS58. She will be recognized along with 4 other District 24 finalist, and I strongly urge all staff to go and support one of our own. Ms. Meenan is the first winner ever from our district; it’s going to be great.

Review, ISSUE 34: The Ms. Meenan Edition

Posted on by mrkobot in Principal's Blog

There couldn’t have been a better reason for the Chancellor to visit 102 Friday. Notifying us only a day prior and subsequently double and triple checking to make sure her visit–and the news she’s bringing–would be a surprise, it’s good to know that amidst all the political ruckus she still cares enough about people to put in all this leg work.

The Big Apple Award isn’t just a certificate declaring its recipient as one of the cities top 17 teachers. Big Apple Award winners–selected through a long, rigorous process that involves families, principals, superintendents, the chancellor, and seemingly everyone in between–will also be able to serve as advisers to the chancellor on policies and new initiatives. Lacking any of the cynicism and bicker that finds their way into far too many people who work with children in schools, I’m confident that Ms. Meenan will elevate any discourse as the voice of compassion and quiet fortitude. We’re all so proud of you, Ms. Meenan, and we’re honored to have you as our voice and colleague.

Things You Need to Know:

June 9th is the Chancellor’s Conference Day, and teachers will follow the regular Thursday start and end time. Before lunch we will all learn about how we can better drive student thinking, and how next year’s observations protocols as well as lesson expectations align with this push. Curriculum team members will be sharing their work with you, and I’m sure they’d welcome any feedback or comments. Department/grade teams will be able to gather/move/organize materials after lunch. Western Queens will be providing our entire staff with lunch at 12PM so please be sure to thank them.

Throughout the day APs and I will be meeting with individual teachers for End-of-Year conferences. We will discuss setting your professional learning goals for next year and we ask you to please share with us any feedback or concerns. Feedback is always bilateral!

June 14th is the Clerical Day, and teachers will meet in grade teams to organize class rosters for next year. More information to follow in a staff memo and you will have your teaching assignment by this day.

The latest edition of Staff Spotlight features our new assistant principal Ms. Mintiens. I think the middle school teachers crafted some of the questions–thank you!

Lastly, thank you to everyone for emailing me and the admin team regarding absences. It’s been very helpful and please continue to cc all APs and myself when you can’t come in. Additionally, morning line up has been much more effective, and I appreciate your efforts in holding students accountable.

One more thing: This is my first opportunity to work on the many end of year items as a school principal, and it’s been quite a challenge to learn as you go. I’ll get there this time next year but for now it’s taking up far too much of my time during the day. Please reach out to Teresa should you want to speak with me–I’d love to chat and I want to do so when I am able to fully attend to you.

102 Review, ISSUE 33: Klay Thompson and SBO

Posted on by mrkobot in Principal's Blog

Superintendent Pays Us A Visit

Even in the shortest of exchanges, you can’t help but learn when you come across someone who’s just plain good at their craft. It was no exception last week when Superintendent Chan came to 102 for my first ever end-of-year Principal’s Observation. I’ve observed more than 10 classrooms with her this year in different buildings, and I’ve learned so much just by paying attention to the things she looks for in a classroom and how she gives feedback to teachers. No one sees a greater variety of teachers than superintendents, and she knows exactly how instruction at every level of effectiveness look and sound and what the teacher needs to do to improve.

Every feedback is a gift. But feedback from her also comes with urgency and license.

While she celebrated our collegial and collaborative culture, high student expectations, and effective use of resources, she made clear that our focus next year should be on increasing the rigor of our instruction by pushing student thinking. Good thing she didn’t ask us to focus on something else because we’re already knee-deep into that work. From curriculum to programming to professional learning to even air conditioners–more on that below–we’re poised to make significant improvements to our school. And we will. A sneak peek of the work ahead:

About 30 of our teachers are working overtime to create/adapt curricula that explicitly identify student thinking as an objective for every lesson. If our expectation for students is to think, then it only makes sense if our expectation for teachers in lesson planning also explicitly address thinking. Starting next year, every lesson plan will include:

1.) Focused and meaningful THINKING OBJECTIVE aligned to CCLS, assessments, and students

2.) How the teacher plan on GENERATING this thinking

3.) How the teacher plan on ASSESSING this thinking

Get ready to innovate because that’s exactly what we are aiming to do with a “thinking-driven” approach to lesson-planning. Sure, people talk about Bloom’s and they talk about critical thinking, but look at their lesson plans and most likely you’ll see one that’s still task-based. It’s always what students will do and not what they will think. If you disagree, try finding a lesson plan template with the above components for thinking. Go on; I’ll wait.

We will discuss this in greater detail on Chancellor’s Conference Day on June 9th. Be ready.

Things You Need to Know:

  1. Our air conditioners are installed in the nick of time! Let me know if your room is too hot or too cold. We’re trying to determine a best temperature for the units to be programmed. All APs, in addition to the custodians, have remotes to the units and let them know if you want to adjust the temperature.
  2. UFT will be conducting a vote next Tuesday for next year’s SBO regarding Tuesdays. The default option, should our SBO option not pass with a 55% majority, will have the school day start at 8:20AM and end at 3:55PM. Our SBO proposes that 20 minutes of the extended time on Tuesdays be in the morning, making Tuesday’s schedule for teachers 8AM to 3:35PM.
  3. Students will not be in attendance on June 14th and teachers are to adhere to our normal Tuesday start and end time.
  4. Promotion Portfolios for students who are promotion in doubt are due this Friday.
  5. Please take advantage of our morning announcements. We do a flurry of activities for our students each week but you could never tell from our morning announcements. I encourage you to have students publicize and/or report to the school before and after any worthwhile student activities. Field trips count too!
  6. “Klay-Thompson” sounds like a great middle name for anyone not living in Oklahoma. Paging Ms. Falesto?

102 Review, ISSUE 32: Promotion Portfolios

Posted on by mrkobot in Principal's Blog

One day I’ll begin the weekly review without having to comment on how busy of a week we’ve had. This is not that day.

102 came through in a big way this Saturday hosting our first carnival. It was absolutely mayhem, but our staff did whatever necessary to just make it work. I’d also like to take this project as an example of what’s to come: We listened to what families wanted, we took risks in trying to do something new, and we did so as a collaborative team from planning to execution, each of us learning and growing as we go. And then of course, there’s candy and more candy.

I am so grateful of all of the staff who gave up a precious Saturday to help and I want to thank each individual publicly. I’ll do a non-staff only write up soon about the event.

Things You Should Know:

Promotion: Please review the promotion portfolio materials and determine how best to support your PID students to promote in June by passing the portfolio requirements. You should use this week to go over skills students individual students need to complete the portfolio, and then use next week to assess them. AIS teachers will assist in this work as well. All portfolios must be completed and scored by next Friday.

Summer School: Please apply here. I will be providing teachers who have asked about the ENL summer program a hard copy of the program’s description soon.

Reduced-Teaching Positions: I will begin meeting with staff who have applied to have reduced-classroom teaching assignments this week. We are hoping to finalize assignments by the end of this month.

Free Microsoft Office: All staff can now download Microsoft Office for free. A message from central:

“All employees who have NYC DOE email accounts (Username@schools.nyc.gov) can now download Microsoft Office to their own computers and mobile devices for free. The software includes: 

  • Word 
  • Excel 
  • PowerPoint 
  • OneNote 
  • Outlook 
  • Access (PC only) 
  • Publisher (PC only)

For instructions on how to download, read the FAQs.

Please don’t download the software at school/work. The DOE will roll out Microsoft collaboration tools (OneDrive, Skype for Business) later this year after network infrastructure improvements are completed.”

102 Review, ISSUE 31: Summer Opportunities

Posted on by mrkobot in Principal's Blog

“The only way to achieve our full potential is to channel the talents, ideas and contributions of every person in the world.”

–Mark Zuckerberg

There’s nothing groundbreaking about people working together. We each have our strengths and weaknesses and the need for us to rely on one another is obvious. When team members share a common vision and trust one another, magic happens. Case in point: 102.

Exhibit A: In just two months, many of our at-risk K and 1 students in the lowest third for literacy saw incredible gains working with Ms. Rosenberger (see photo below) and will most likely move to the next grade reading at grade level. The significance of their growth cannot be overstated–it’s potentially life-changing for these kids to not fall behind early and this is a team win that we should all celebrate. Although it’s Ms. Rosenberger who carried the baton to the finish line, none of this would’ve been possible if others didn’t also win their respective legs. From the classroom teachers who patiently chisel day in and day out to sculpt readers out of any students sitting in front of them, to Ms. Jenal who took on the added responsibility in analyzing data to identify target groups on top of supporting an unprecedented number of new teachers, we all have to do our jobs before students can succeed at theirs. (See image above)

Exhibit B. Washington D.C. Trip: Was it just last weekend that 1/9 of our school went to Washington D.C.? That I never doubted things would go exactly as planned for a project with this many moving parts speaks to the trust I have in the entire middle school team. It’s fitting that Ms. Mulé is the middle school supervisor: they’re all flow charts up there.

Exhibit C. Earth Day: Thank you Mr. Weiss, Ms. O’Donnell, and everyone else who contributed to make this year’s Earth Day possible even when nature itself wouldn’t cooperate. It’s not easy to reschedule so many times due to rain but I’m glad we did it.

Exhibit D. Field Day Extravaganza for 3rd and 4th grade: Thank you Mr. Mac, Ms. Devito, and Mr. Bianculli for doing such an amazing job bringing field day to our 3rd and 4th grade. And to all the teachers who covered classes last Monday without even a hint of complaint, thank you.

Exhibit E. Art Expo: The talent on display at the Art Expo can only be overshadowed by the confidence also on display. Our students are fearless by the time they graduate and our art department has a great deal to do with it. You can’t achieve unless you first believe you can, and it’s delightful to see how our art and music teachers tease out confidence from our students each day.

Exhibit F. This all happened in a week.

Things You Need to Know

Buy Your Tickets to Lion King: You won’t regret it.

Non-Promotion List: Please electronically complete the final non-promotion list and submit to me by Tuesday. APs will conference with you next week to consider all factors in determining the best decision for the child.

Title III ENL Summer Program: In addition to hosting summer school for students who did not promote in June, 102 has been awarded a new summer program where our ENL students can receive additional support. We should be passing out flyers next week to ENL students and you should strongly encourage parents to have their children enroll. Students will be engaging in learning in ELA, STEM, and even stop-motion animation learning.

Apply for Summer School: Traditional summer school offers retention rights for teachers, and it may be difficult for you to secure a position for the first time. With the new ENL program, we will be able to hire more teachers who will teach summer for the first time and to help them receive retention rights. For more information shoot me an email and I can go over the dates and programs with you. STEM teachers in grade 3-5 especially should consider teaching summer as you can try out the STEM curriculum we will be using next year, Engineering is Elementary.

Algebra For All Middle School Training: Middle school math teachers should consider joining a special program to engage in summer training (1 week) as well as additional support throughout next year. Let me know by this Friday if you are interested and you can find more info here.

5/16 Professional Learning: 3-5 STEM teachers should head over to room 405 for professional learning to learn more about next year’s STEM curriculum. F&P will be a key component for our literacy program next year and all K-5 ENL/ Classroom/Humanities teachers should meet in room 305 for a refresher. Volunteers for the carnival will meet in the art room to discuss and plan for Saturday.

Adjust Morning Line-Up Behavior: Students should not be having difficulties lining up straight and remaining quiet during morning line up. With Ms. Mintiens on board, we will be diverting more resources on culture and discipline and we need everyone to tighten up on following school rules. Teachers: please refrain from engaging students in conversation during line up as it severely undermines our school expectation.

P.S. I should be receiving my observation this week from the superintendent, so don’t be alarmed if you see Ms. Chan and me at your door.