Our EME Focus
- Tier 1 Instruction
- Belonging
- Define what it means to be an Art Focused School
Thoughts of the Week
The Right Stuff
One of the books I have been reading lately, called Hidden Potential, had a fascinating study. In the late 1980s Tennessee launched a bold experiment at 79 schools, many of which were low income. They randomly assigned over 11,000 students to different classrooms in kindergarten through third grade. The original goal was to test whether smaller classes were better for learning. But an economist named Raj Chetty Realized that since both students and teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms, he could go back to the data to analyze whether other features of the classrooms made a difference. The research suggested that excellence depends less on our natural talents than we might expect. The Tennessee experiment contained a startling result! He was able to predict the success students would achieve as adults, simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25 students that happened to have more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers. Chetty and his colleagues calculated that moving from an inexperienced kindergarten teacher To a more experienced one would add over $1,000 to each student’s annual income in their 20’s. For a class of 20 students an above average kindergarten teacher could be worth additional lifetime income of $320,000.
You’re probably asking yourself why do kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow 20 years later. The intuitive answer is that experienced teachers help develop better cognitive skills such as math and reading and build a solid foundation for students to understand numbers and words. Sure enough students with experienced teachers scored higher on math and reading tests at the end of kindergarten, but over the next few years they’re peers caught up. To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten to adulthood, Chetty’s team turned to another possible explanation. In 4th and 8th grade the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities.
- Proactive, how often did they take initiative to ask questions , volunteer answers, seek information from books, and engage the teacher to learn outside of class?
- Prosocial, how well did they get along and collaborate with their peers?
- Disciplined, how effectively did they pay attention and resist the impulse to disrupt the class?
- Determined, How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles?
When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. As did their eighth grade teachers. The capacities to be preactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with them longer and ultimately proved more powerful than early math and reading skills. When Chetty and his colleagues predicted adult income on 4th grade scores, these behaviors matter 2.4 times as much as math and reading performance on standardized tests!. Surprised? Although many people see those behaviors as innate, they are actually taught in kindergarten. Regardless of where students start learning these behaviors, they set students up for success decades later! It wasn’t that these teachers were better at teaching math and reading, it was that they had realized that the bigger bang for your buck was to teach kids the ability to be Proactive, Prosocial, Disciplined, and Determined. In the end, it is not about the experience of the teacher but the lessons taught. If are students are reliant on us teaching them all the cognitive skills they know, Lord help them! The true gift from a teacher to a student is not teaching them what to know, but how to learn! Creating life long learners is the most important thing we can do as educators. On a side note… I would not trade our Kindergarten teachers for anything!
The Coming Week
MONDAY
- Admin Meeting 6:45-7:15
- Holmberg Field Trip – Bend Science Station 9:15-11:15
- McClarty Field Trip – Bend Science Station 11:45-1:45
TUESDAY:
- Safety Meeting 7:00-7:30
- Sieh Field Trip – Bend Science Station 9:15-11:15
- Office Staff Meeting 10:00-10:30
- ICCL Meeting at Jewell 3:00-5:00
WEDNESDAY:
- 2nd Grade ELL Field Trip 8:30-12:00
- SIW – Teacher Prep 1:00-2:30
- 1st Grade MTSS
THURSDAY:
- MTSS building wide 2:30-3:15
FRIDAY:
- 5th Grade Field Trip 9:15-1:30
- Movie Night 6:00-8:00
UPCOMING DATES
- December 14 – Fire Drill 9:30
- December 20 – Natalie’s Birthday
- December 24 – Sue’s Birthday
- January 4 – Julia’s Birthday
Updates from Downtown
Reminders:
- Student Services:
- Monthly REQUIRED inclusion EA Trainings: Contact Krista Hough or Stephanie Smith for info
- Prevent, Teach, Respond information, PTR Facilitators Guide
- MTSS Tier 3 process
- Counseling: School Counseling Blog
- Safety: Updated SRO List as of 11/14/23.
New Notes
From Curriculum and Instruction:
- Life and Career Readiness: Please share these resources in your staff memo. Wayfinder has some great resources for Community Connection. Click on this link to get the directions on how to access the resources in Wayfinder’s Collections and the direct links.
- Update on Language Arts Adoption: EL Education by Imagine Learning is our finalist (not yet adopted) for English Language Arts Curriculum. Currently, we have 28 teachers teaching modules and providing feedback on implementation and professional learning needs. In January we will recommend to the board and then have a month to collect additional feedback. We will go back to the board in February to present feedback and ask for board approval moving forward.
- Winter DIBELS Schedule (check your scheduled date)
- Upcoming Professional Learning: Here are a few dates next week where classroom teachers may be out of the building for professional learning:
- 12/4- Math Leadership Academy -12-4 at Miller Elementary (Teachers from North Star and Miller)
- 12/5-Co-Learning Studio -ALL day at Pine Ridge (only teachers at Pine Ridge)
- 12/7- Literacy Lab for 1st and 3rd year new hires-12:00-3:15 (Teachers from across the district)
- 12/4- Admin/ICCL meeting -3:15-5:15 -Jewell Cafeteria
- 12/7- Kindergarten Innovation and Design Team meeting- 4:00-6:00. Boardroom
Medical Moment:
- How to Register for CPR/First Aid Training/Renewal Course for BLS Staff
- UKG > My Info (drop down menu, 3 stacked lines upper left side, above your initials) > My Career > My Learning > Access Learning (upper right side) > Training (top black menu bar) > Courses > First Aid (on right side) > Click on First Aid Link > Click on green Enroll Now button
- Online Course: Once staff have registered for the CPR/First Aid course, staff will receive an email with a link for the online course portion of the training. (If you do not receive a link within the next business day, please check your junk email. If it is not in your junk email, please email Michelle Spetic at [email protected])
- In-Person Skills Training: Once the online portion of the training is completed, staff will receive a Google form to sign up for the 20 minute in-person skills training.
- Certification Card: Staff will receive an email with your CPR/First Aid certification card within 1-2 business days after completing the in-person skills class.
- List of Certified CPR/First Aid Trained Staff at Your Site: Stephanie Bend sends out quarterly reports to all schools that include cpr/first aid certified school staff names.
- OAR 581-022-2220 –Each school shall have, at a minimum, at least one staff member with a current first aid/CPR/AED card for every 60 students enrolled, as set by ORS 339.345, and 342.664 and who are trained annually on the district and building emergency plans. Emergency planning will include the presence of at least one staff member with a current first aid/CPR/AED card for every 60 students for school-sponsored activities where students are present. (This includes field trips.)
From the Office of DEI:
- Upcoming Dates:
- Thurs, Dec 7th: First night of Hanukkah. Please avoid scheduling events this evening. Also, there is a public Menorah lighting at the Old Mill the evening of Dec. 7th—details here. Please consider attending and/or encouraging your staff to attend if interested in supporting this community celebration.
- Tues, Dec 12th: Our Lady of Guadalupe Feast Day. This is a holiday celebrated by many within the Latino/Hispanic Catholic community in particular. For your awareness and scheduling, this includes evening church activities that many of our families attend.
- Family Liaison Team: Here is the updated information about our team of linguistically- and/or culturally-specific Family Liaisons: English version, Spanish version.
Inclement Weather: HERE are the Inclement Weather Guidelines for the 2023-2024 school year, which detail the guidelines and procedures to be followed in the event of severe weather conditions. To stay informed and receive timely updates, please subscribe to BLConnect so that you can receive notifications via text. To learn more about how weather-related decisions are made, visit the BLS inclement weather page: https://www.bend.k12.or.us/district/news-events/alerts-updates
TLC Update: November 29th TLC Update about Wayfinder, movement, and reserving coding robots!
From IT: Google recently made a change to their sign in mechanism that better complies with federal CIPPA rules. Beginning this week, they require school districts to verify any applications or websites that require students to sign in with Google. In readiness, our district performed this pre-verification work beginning last summer. Because our primary methods for signing into applications are either Microsoft or Clever (for most student applications) our list for Google was very short. In fact, Google has never been our preferred sign in authentication provider for any application or service.
In IT we anticipated that there would be users who would need direction to alternative log in methods. Unfortunately, there were two other factors that were more difficult for us to predict:
- Students and teachers were accessing our known licensed apps using Google regardless of the instructed preferred methods. This is understandable, as there can be a bit of automatic reaction when you see “sign in with Google” vs lesser-known alternatives.
- There were a multitude of applications that were neither known by Instruction or IT in use in our schools. These applications were not pre-verified.
I hope that this helps many folks understand the situation and I would encourage you to review the preferred log in methods for essential applications that you use in your classroom or position. If this method is not known to you, reach out for support in the following order:
- Check with a colleague who also uses the application.
- Look for guidance from training materials or the Instructional Tools website.
- Reach out to an instructional coach or the IT Help Desk.