“Every time you think of calling a kid ‘attention-seeking’, consider changing it to ‘connection-seeking’ and see how your perspective changes.” – Dr. Jody Carrington
2020 Winter Culmination Planning Survey – survey window will be open until Friday, November 15. (If you or your team need more time to plan for this, please just let me know.)
Upcoming Meetings:
- Tuesday 2:45-3:30 Design Teams
- Wednesday 1:30-3:00 Equity & Excellence Review – All staff invited to participate
Core Effectiveness Meetings
The next Core Effectiveness PLC is scheduled for Tuesday 2/18. This is a little more than 9 weeks out, but there are number of vacations and short weeks in between. At that meeting, we will be able to look at the Pathways to Progress from fall to winter to see the impact of your work on moving more students into the 3 or more star-growth area. Please know that I am not advocating that you work on any one area only – the purpose was to show you what was getting in the way for some of your students to reach the 3 stars or better. It’s also important to remember the majority of the group of students are already at or beyond grade level.
SLGs
Thank you for selecting your goals and getting your SLG forms into me. If you selected the writing goal, please remember this is intended for your entire class and be sure to re-visit the way the goal is written to make sure it matches your scoring for both the beginning and the end of the year.
If you are using either the Dibels or EasyCBM goal, please remember these goals are specific to the students who are below benchmark/some risk or lower. The intention of these SLGs is to promote a plan for instruction within the classroom that targets these students for support, in addition to intervention groups. So please make sure you know which kids are being tracked for your goal.
Looking to the future…you may have noticed Goal D involved using the Core Effectiveness Form and Procedure…my hope is we might be able to use this process effectively this year and use it in place of one or both of the other goals for future SLGs.
PE- activities spreadsheet for classroom teachers.
Sites & Facilities Survey – if you have not already done so please respond to the survey from last week’s post.
Dreambox – On November 6th district SIW there will be a training webinar. All elementary Dreambox users (⅔ and ⅘ teachers) at your school will be required to participate in the webinar. This webinar will focus on accessing data and using the Dreambox dashboard.
PTO funded Release Days for Storyline
I was asked to share some guidance on our PTO-funded release time after our leadership conversation last week:
The most ideal situation is to use these funds as the line-items as titled “Subs for Release Time”; release days with subs. Full days are much cleaner and easier in terms of accounting and tracking. Two of the days are intended for team-use and one day is intended for individual use (however it can be a 3rd team day).
Whenever we use these funds to directly compensate teachers at an hourly rate, we get onto thin-ice in terms of professional standards from district-perspective and auditing standards from the PTO accounting side. There are a few days that can be considered the exception to this guideline; there are a select number of non-work days in August that are not part of your contract days (for example, Monday of startup week or the Tuesday prior to the first day of school). Technically we can also use the week after school in June, however, that is tricky just due to the timing of our budget cycle. To be a little more clear, these funds cannot be used to compensate on weekends or vacation days.
I know planning for a substitute teacher is a lot of work, however, it is a necessity of our profession. It’s healthy for you [and your students] to routinely work on providing quality lesson plans for your absence. My hope is by getting this information out now, we can work to avoid a lot of conflicts and prevent any shortages of subs.
I tried to be thorough and hopefully this answers any questions out there, but if I missed anything, please see me if you have any questions.
Recess– Watch this short video on the importance of Recess.
Dyslexia: Myths, Look-Fors, and Classroom Strategies
In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez confesses that when she was a classroom teacher, she was “woefully ill-equipped to support students in my room with special needs – those who arrived with a formal diagnosis and those who didn’t.” She followed students’ IEPs, which usually involved shortening assignments, giving extra time, and sometimes reading material out loud, but didn’t see those strategies as very helpful.
Of course every school has trained special educators, but since they have limited time and many students with IEPs are spending an increasing amount of time in regular education classes, Gonzalez believes it’s important “for the rest of us to step up our game.”
She believes a good place to start is dyslexia, and interviewed Lisa Brooks of the Commonwealth Learning Center’s Professional Training Institute in Massachusetts. Brooks started with two common misconceptions:
• Myth #1: Dyslexia is uncommon. In fact, experts believe 15-20 percent of students are affected to some degree, which means in a class of 20 students, three might have some symptoms. Missing a dyslexia diagnosis – perhaps saying a student has attention problems or is developmentally immature – can delay important interventions.
• Myth #2: Dyslexia means the child reads or writes backwards. It’s actually common for children up to age six to write letters backwards. This isn’t what dyslexia is about, says Brooks: “It’s really a difficulty in the phonological component of language, and that means children having difficulty with the sounds of words.”
So what symptoms of dyslexia should teachers look for? Two are particularly important to spot in the primary grades, and dealing with them early can make a big difference in students’ future success:
• First, a student’s struggles in reading and writing are unexpected because he or she is strong in other areas. If a child has a good vocabulary, speaks in paragraphs, and loves books but has trouble remembering a letter or a letter sound, that’s a clue.
• Second, the student has difficulty with the sounds of language – for example, identifying the first letter when sounding out a word; blending sounds into words; segmenting words into sounds; pronouncing multisyllabic words like specific; rhyming; performing rote memory tasks like remembering songs or the days of the week; correctly repeating words; or spelling a word without representing all its sounds (for example, writing butterfly burfly).
Gonzalez and Brooks suggest several effective strategies to support students with dyslexia:
– Direct instruction in phonics, teaching students to crack the code of language.
– Overlearning – these students need a lot more practice with skills than other students do, even if it seems boring.
– Learning experiences that involve using more than one sense simultaneously – for example, naming a word, tracing the letters, segmenting it, and writing it.
– Sound, music, and rhyming games – these are fun ways to give students more practice.
“How to Spot Dyslexia, and What to Do Next” by Jennifer Gonzalez and Lisa Brooks in Cult of Pedagogy, October 13, 2019, https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/spot-dyslexia/