Tag: clear expectations

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?

March 18th, 2016

“What is the criteria for my child to become a student of the month??”

-Dolphinblue33, commenting on Instagram

 

Clear expectations are vital for success;  all the will and skills in the world wouldn’t matter unless we know exactly what we should be doing with them. My priority this first year is to seek out the expectations we must continue to maintain, and then identify new expectations that should be put in place for next year.

Adhering to the concept of “Power of Simplicity” as laid out by Schmoker in Focus, all of 102’s expectations—old and new—will be framed by the following three questions:

1. What are we teaching? (Curriculum, expectation for students)

2. How are we teaching? (Instructional practices, expectation for teachers)

3. How will we monitor student learning? (Accountability for results, expectation for school)

We need to organize ourselves for maximum impact before we can answer these questions. I will meet with each grade team to discuss our vision for next year, and teachers will be receiving next year’s preference sheets soon after.

Weekly Highlights (Materials Edition): 

$500 Discretionary Funds for All Teachers: All teachers will be allocated $500 of discretionary funds to purchase supplies for their classrooms. This is made possible by the money we received as a Title I school (we serve low-income families), and you should consider purchasing items that can make an impact for our families. More information will be given later this week.

All Technology Requests Approved: All technology requests from last week’s survey have been approved and will be purchased shortly. You should not use the $500 discretionary funds for these items.

 Air Conditioning for All: A/C units will be installed in all classrooms in 102’s historic wing. We are pushing to have them installed before it gets warm, and I’ll make an announcement once a date is set. For those of you who’ve taught for years without air conditioning in a NYC room with 32 students, I thank (and salute) you. It won’t happen again as long as both you and I are at 102.

 

New Interactive Flat Panel TVs: 13 rooms will soon be equipped with new interactive flat panel touchscreen TVs. Speech and SETSS rooms will receive re-purposed Smartboards. Install date TBD. (Note: Smartboard’s predatory business model is no longer viable for our school, and we will continue to replace them with better and cheaper alternatives.)

Things You Should Know:

 Please complete the Learning Environment Survey tomorrow during the afternoon before meeting with your grade/ department teams at 3:20PM. Receipts for completing the surveys should be submitted to Ms. Delvecchio mailbox by 4pm.

The following two Mondays, 3/28/16 and 4/4/16,  will both be self-directed PD days; please plan accordingly.

Supervisor for Grades 3-5. Effective Monday teachers in grade 3 will report to Mr. Borelli and 4 and 5 to Ms. Mulé. They will address issues in these grades until we have a new AP.

February 5th, 2016

A Word (or many words) on Math

For this midyear issue, let’s talk about math–specifically, Common Core math. Students continue to fare poorly on math state exams across the country because they’re tested on CCLS skills they were never adequately taught. And we cannot possibly expect schools to fully teach CCLS math unless we all know exactly what CCLS math is and what it isn’t. CCLS Math isn’t just a reorganization or a repackaging of standards; CCLS Math isn’t about injecting literacy in math; and CCLS math is absolutely not about adopting abstract, new-agey, non-sensible math methods as people on Facebook would lead you to believe.

What’s new about CCLS Math is that it targets the development of both foundational math skills AND problem-solving and critical thinking practices. It retains the expectation for students to be “book smart” (know rules, procedures, etc.) while attending to the “streets smart” practices that allow one to apply what they know to navigate and problem-solve in new or unfamiliar contexts. Here are the 8 math practices highlighted in CCLS:

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
• Model with mathematics.
• Use appropriate tools strategically.
• Attend to precision.
• Look for and make use of structure.
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

CCLS math practices pose significant challenges to schools because they require new ways of teaching, learning, and assessing. Doing more of the same math instruction long routinized in schools—whether as AIS or test prep or remedial learning—does nothing for students to acquire these practices. So what should we do? In “Mathematical Practices for Deep Understanding”, Ceri Dean and Susan M. Brookhart explain:

“These eight mathematical practices¹  are the antidote to teaching mathematics as a series of “plug and chug” procedures (“Do this for this kind of problem”). Students who make sense of word problems don’t start by asking, “What kind of problem is this?” They start by trying to figure out what the problem means. What does the problem ask? What information is given, what needs to be found, and which mathematical procedures will lead to that information? Students will approach word problems with questions like these once they master the mathematical practices. They’ll not only be able to solve mathematically rich problems, but they’ll also appreciate math’s usefulness.

Students won’t master the standards for mathematical practice overnight, even after schools begin implementing the Common Core State Standards. The practices address habits of mind, thinking processes, and dispositions that help students develop “deep, flexible, and enduring understanding of mathematics” (Briars, Mills, & Mitchell, 2011, p. 20). Teachers will need to both give students problems that require them to use the practices and create environments that support student discourse and risk taking. And students will need a steady diet of feedback on their performance.”

Math educators will need to change three things to nurture these practices. Besides changing instructional strategies and materials, teachers will need to change their assessments (so items measure mathematical practices as well as computational skills), and make their feedback focus on students’ mathematical reasoning, modeling, and other practices—not just on correct answers. Instruction, assessment, and feedback will all need to focus more on higher-order thinking skills, communication, and collaboration.”

We’re not going to be able to do this work overnight, but it’s important we start learning and thinking about it when we plan lessons as we get closer to April. Reading the full text here is a good start.

 

Things You Need to Know

NYS Exams: The ELA exam for grades 3-8 will be administered from April 5th to April 7th, and the Math Exam from April 13th to April 15th. NY state has announced that Questar, not Pearson, will create the test questions and the test will be shorter and with no time limit for all students. More information to follow once I receive them.

ELA Scorers Needed April 18th to April 22nd: We will need to send 3 elementary teachers and 5 middle school teachers to score the ELA exams. Please email me by Wednesday 2/10 if you are interested in scoring. This is for ELA only.

Off Site PD Requests: As we count down to state testing, it is important for us to prioritize and protect instructional time for our students. Approvals for off-site PDs will only be given to mandatory sessions, and you should discuss with me in person prior to submitting such a request.

100 Days Celebration (K-5 Only): Yet another 102 celebration where I can offer little expertise, Mr. Borelli has graciously stepped up to lead the efforts along with Theresa. He will be sending out more information to all staff shortly.

New Prep Schedule Effective 2/9: Please find the new prep schedule here.

Happy Lunar New Year!