Thanksgiving Appreciations!
Heading into our last week before Thanksgiving I am feeling SO APPRECIATIVE of all of you. Your hard work and commitment to serving our students at a high level despite the odds, your compassionate support for ALL of our students and their unique needs, the collaboration and learning together that is happening within our staff team is really awe inspiring and makes me feel proud and fortunate to work with you all! Enjoy reading through these and feel free to add 🙂
A Few Thoughts About Gradebooks
First – thank you in advance for the work you are all doing to keep/get your Synergy Gradebooks up to date this week…. I know it is a lot of work, and NOT usually anyone’s favorite part of the job!
Second – ACTION ITEM – this may be obvious (so if it is, pls forgive me) but I want to remind you all to take time in class this week, either during and/or at the end of classes, to explicitly communicate (on WebEx if at all possible) with students who are NOT CURRENTLY passing your class. The goal of this communication is making sure they know what to work to prioritize (tasks that might demonstrate proficiency on standards) and that they know how/where to find the resources etc.
Third – our current “fail rates” across grades and classes are still pretty high: On Saturday I took a quick tour of Synergy gradebooks with an emphasis on 9th and 10th grade classes. Before I go further, I know that the Synergy gradebook is NOT as up to date as reality, and that’s OK! Also, I want you to know that the purpose of my gradebook tour was to look at the variety and variability of gradebooks across the school in case there were any patterns that might be useful for us to consider.
ACTION ITEM: Please take a look at this data. I did not review EVERY gradebook, but a pretty good sampling across all teachers, all grades and all subject. Some themes I notice:
- We have “D/F rates” ranging from 15% up to 50%
- We have numbers of assignments scored in Synergy ranging from 8 up to 38 per class
- We have % of assignments currently marked missing ranging from 16% up to 41% missing
- 3 out of 4 courses with the highest D/F rates are 10th gr classes
This data alone might help you all think about your own grading practices. I am hoping that through the year we can keep sharing best practices in how we structure assignments and how we grade and report grades to encourage maximum learning and growth for our student. Let me be clear… our ultimate goals here, through analyzing our data, making observations and inferences and then planning action steps are:
- Strengthen student achievement… (then grades that reflect increasing student achievement)
- Slowly increasing our alignment around grade level definitions of rigor and best practices for grading
- Draw attention to our correct fail and missing assignment rates across classes
My goal is NOT to necessarily soften our grading practices or minimize the number of D’s and F’s without accomplishing the two purposes above!
Intensives! Now What?!
Based on the COVID-19 situation and feedback from lots of you, we are making adjustments to the Intensives Week plan. Sorry about the moving target on this one… it has been tricky! Jen and I need to do some “re-planning”.
Here is what we know so far:
- no “off campus fun” at PBZ etc
- shifting to a schedule that includes possibility of doing on campus Crew meetings instead as these could easily get shifted to WebEx if numbers continue to increase
- we have transportation requests in right now for two Crew visits during the week (M/W and T/TH) with Friday as a grading day
- we are retaining an emphasis on “no new content” and daily “catch up sessions” required for all students with D’s and F’s
- we are hoping to engage “on track students” in a choice of Independent Projects: Independent Service Project; Independent Honors Project; Independent Passion Project
Getting Your Project Ideas (Honors, Service, Passion) For On Track Students:
In our attempt to pivot, Jen and I could REALLY use your ideas and preferences for possible projects for on track kids. The idea is that all students who are NOT required to attend academic catch up sessions in the afternoon will choose to pursue a project from one of these three categories.
Here is the idea:
Honors Project – if a student has an A in one of the following Honors eligible classes then they could complete an independent project and thereby change the credit transcribed from standard to honors on their transcript. Honors eligible classes are: Biology, US Hist, Mod World Hist, Lit/Comp 2, Spanish. The teacher ask here would be to design some “project parameters” including possible topics, requirements, formats, and possibly a rubric. Students would do the heavy lifting!
Service Project – students could work independently or in pairs or small groups to complete and document a service project of their choice. This would allow students to fulfill their annual service hours requirement! The teacher ask here would be to help come up with possible service project ideas to “feed” to students and then to help work with kids to land on and pursue service ideas… small is mighty here!
Passion Project – in some ways this category might be coolest but also trickiest. My idea here is that students investigate a topic of their choice and produce SOMETHING (a video? something else?) by the end of the week to document their learning. This one could be REALLY open and inspiring, IF we can shape example ideas.
ACTION ITEM: JEN AND I WILL KEEP WORKING ON THIS, BUT MY ASK FOR NOW FROM EACH OF YOU IS TO POP INTO THIS TAB ON OUR INTENSIVE PLANNING DOC AND POPULATE AN IDEA OR TWO THAT EITHER YOU COULD FACILITATE, OR THAT YOU THINK MIGHT BE GOOD FOR KIDS!!
After School Clubs & Tutoring To Start After Intensives Week
Draft plan includes:
Fitness Club – Dart/Tomsic. Mondays & Thursdays. 4:00 – 4:45
Games Club – Yen Ling. Tuesdays. 3:30 – 5:00
Math Tutoring (11th/12th) – Zach. Mondays.
Non Math Tutoring – Karla. Start date and Day of Week TBD.
Writing Support Center – Anita. Start date and Day of Week TBD.
Secondary Instructional PD Blog From Dean Richards
Not feeling we’ve had enough “distance learning PD”? Dean Richards and the folks downtown are putting together weekly resources to help teacher improve our practice in distance learning. The first two blog posts (each includes a short video) tackle using WebEx more effectively to teach. The nice thing about these is they are “bite sized”, which I appreciate! Here they are:
- 1st one is on USING THE CHAT to build a culture of FREQUENT student engagement throughout the lesson
- 2nd one is on various small “NAVIGATION TIPS” to make your classes in WebEx smoother
2nd Trimester Course Planning
Planning COMPELLING and well scaffolded curriculum that tackles real world problems, weaves in community experts, engages students in tasks that have authentic audiences and/or “professional formats“, and/or an actual “make a difference in our community” element is COMPLICATED WORK! Making that curriculum coherent, rigorous AND accessible to all students just makes the challenge exponentially greater. AND…. I know that for all of us, it is this kind of curriculum and teaching that pulls us into this amazing profession AND is what has drawn you, specifically, to Realms High School!
As we head into 2nd trimester we have some planning in front of us. I would like to ask all of our teacher to again submit “course planner” documents
2nd Trimester courses that are NEW offering to RHS students this year are:
- Anatomy and Physiology
- Part 2 of Environmental Science (incl AP our 1st strand!)
- Psychology
- Lit & Comp 4
We also have a NEW 9th Grade Expedition being planned to round out our 9th grade set. The 9th grade expedition team has identified the subject area standards they need to tackle and has landed on a “theme” so far of SURVIVAL. Their next step is to narrow this theme down to a focused expedition topic.
ACTION ITEM and $’s AVAILABLE: I am asking folks to have their “course planner documents” complete and submitted by the end of Winter Break (Tuesday Jan 5th). I am also offering some curriculum rate planning dollars to our 9th grade expedition team for the left they are going o be doing in planning this new expedition AND to those teachers who are designing a new 2nd trimester course for us (see above). The exact amount won’t (UNFORTUNATELY) be huge, because it will be split across 4 individual “new course” teachers plus 1 “new expedition” team. It will be in the range of 2-5 hours per person or per course. STAY TUNED _ I have to consult the banker!!
Staff Meetings This Week
No on site staff meetings this week – due to COVID, we will go to WebEx meetings!
Wednesday meeting this week. Instead of a Students of Concern meeting this week we will be meeting to make sure we have a plan for Intensives that feels good, given our changing landscape!
SIW this Wednesday will be teacher directed and I will leave time for you to work on Intensive Planning, 2nd Trimester Course planning, and any other work that is currently pressing for you. STAFF can invite meetings with each other as needed!
THURSDAY afternoon Heidi, Zach and Kat would like to INVITE everyone that is able to attend together to share the results of the Canvas Search and Study