To articulate the building goals and make connections to other professions

To reflect on professional learning opportunities this year and how strategies have helped lower expectancy students grow

To provide strategies for your group to help a lower expectancy student achieve an upward trajectory of growth by the end of the school year

MS Staff Meeting4.16.15

Learning Targets:

Stand up and circulate around the room until the music stops. Then find a partner for Question #1:

1) With your partner, articulate in your own words what our two most important building goals are for YMS. Be ready to share out.

Circulate

Now circulate again until the music stops. Then find a partner for Question #2:

2) With your partner, name and/or describe specific instructional strategies that you have learned and/or used this year that have helped us progress toward these building goals. (2 times)

Answers1) Most Important Goals:• To show growth in achievement for low expectancy students (especially

students with IEPs)• To develop higher level thinking and problem-solving skills in all

students

2) Strategies That We’ve Learned/Used to Achieve These Goals:• Higher level questions –adding “why”• Kagan strategies• Real world applications (making content relevant to students’ lives/engagement)• Reading strategies – chunking• Questioning games• Differentiated Instruction training• Chromebooks, TI training, technology• Strategies learned from Instructional Rounds• SBAC prep training• Reciprocal Teaching UPCOMING TRAINING: Cold Call, No Opt Out, Strech It, Right is

Right

The use of scales and differentiation in the P90X3 fitness videos

Modifier (Level 2)(Below standard but working toward standard using a ball instead of a weight)

Demonstrating the model (Level 3)(At standard, lifting the weight from calf to shoulder)

Teacher/Trainer(Checking for understanding, providing feedback and coaching)

Intensifier (Level 4)(Above standard but provided a more challenging task to continue improvement, lifting the weight from floor to above head)

Modifier (Level 2)(Using a block as a “scaffolded” way of performing the task)

Demonstrating the model (Level 3)(At standard, reaching down to the ankle)

Intensifier (Level 4)(Beyond standard, placing the entire palm on the floor)

Teacher/Trainer is continually checking for understanding, formatively assessing progress, providing feedback, and coaching. He directs students to “write down your goals and track the number of reps and weights used” (progress monitoring).

Equity not only means differentiating instruction and providing what each student needs to access the learning but it also means doing those things with the expectation that students will show adequate growth toward standards.

EXIT TICKET

Review your commitments from the exit ticket in March.

Are the strategies you have listed Instructional Strategies?

• If yes, how have you measured the effectiveness of the strategies? Will you continue to use these strategies over the next 8 weeks or identify what you will do differently?

• If no, what Instructional Strategies can you try to put the students on an upward trajectory of growth leading into the summer? How will you measure the effectiveness of the strategies?

ANNOUNCEMENTS (if time allows): • NEXT TWO THURSDAYS – Trainings on 4 Strategies from Teach Like a Champion• SBA Pep Talks

For a future training: Four quotes that demonstrate the need for accountable talk in classrooms . . .

“[From birth to age 4], an average child in a professional family would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated experience with 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated experience with 13 million words.”-from “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3” by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley

“[From birth to age 4], the average child in a professional family would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback (6 affirmations to 1 prohibition), and an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements (2 affirmations to 1 prohibition). But an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated 125,000 more instances of prohibitions than encouragements (1 affirmation to 2 prohibitions). By the age of 4, the average child in a welfare family might have had 144,000 fewer encouragements and 84,000 more discouragements of his or her behavior than the average child in a working-class family.”

-from “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3” by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley

“Language [. . .] is how we think. It's how we process information and remember. It's our operating system. Vygotsky (1962) suggested that thinking develops into words in a number of phases, moving from imaging to inner speech to inner speaking to speech. Tracing this idea backward, speech—talk—is the representation of thinking. As such, it seems reasonable to suggest that classrooms should be filled with talk, given that we want them filled with thinking!”

-from “Why Talk Is Important in Classrooms” in Content-Area Conversations by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg

"In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary people--lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen--the children's ears become early familiarized with wide vocabularies. It is natural for them to pick up any words that fall their way; it is natural for them to pick up big and little ones indiscriminately; it is natural for them to use without fear any word that comes to their net, no matter how formidable it may be as to size. As a result, their talk is a curious and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by the heavy-artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows. Sometimes the child gets a wrong idea of a word which it has picked up by chance, and attaches to it a meaning which impairs its usefulness--but this does not happen as often as one might expect it would. Indeed, it happens with an infrequency which may be regarded as remarkable."

- Mark Twain's Autobiography