Weekly Update - Friday, November 22, 2019

Happy Friday, McKinley!

American Education Week:
A huge thank you to each of you for what you do for our students!  As you know, each of you are "educators" - you play a role in educating our students.   Our staff is the best - passionate, dedicated, and truly cares about our students, families, and each other.  I am honored to work at McKinley and work beside each of you.   Thank you for the energy, heart, and hours you put into this career.  I appreciate you! 

If you haven't had your picture taken & would like it taken, see Steph today.  Thank you!

Problem Solving:  
Our Problem Solving Team is scheduling out into late December at this point.  If you have students to bring forward, please complete the referral form as soon as possible.

Also, just a reminder - you do not need to wait if you have concerns with students.  We don't expect you to have completed a period of interventions, or anything like that.  This team is here to support you - and the students.  If you need to, please take the two minutes and complete the referral today!

Communication Home:
Just a friendly reminder to be keeping in contact with families, regularly.   If you have a situation occur - or a concern - please, please, please make contact with the family.  I am dealing with more situations were families say, "this is the first time I've heard of this."  When I talk to staff, I'm hearing "well I told them next time I'd be calling home".  If you have concerns about a student - behavioral, academic, social-emotional, a call home is needed.  I often think of this analogy with calls home - During a physical, a doctor is concerned.  She finds a lump.  Would I prefer she connected with me regarding next steps or just waited until it happened again?  I know I'd appreciate the communication - ASAP.

On the other hand, we have done a lot of work around making positive commnication occur - High 5 letters, Call of the Day, Positive Office Referrals, McKinleyStrong slips.  These are all in the "Hub" and are great ways to connect with families in a positive way!

The Power of Formative Assessments!

As we know, the day-to-day checks for understanding have such power.  It creates responsive teaching - students are showing what they know and teachers are being responsive by providing next steps of instruction.  Sometimes formative assessments are often think of as "exit tickets".  However, there are so many other ways to do this check for understanding.  Below is a document, from Teaching and Learning, on some unique ways to do those formative checks.

Formative Assessment Ideas 

Building Weekly Newsletter:
Click here to access the building weekly newsletter (November 25 - 29

Click here to access the building weekly newsletter (Dec 2 - 6)


There will be no blog next week - so Happy Thanksgiving, also!
Enjoy your time with those you love!
-Justin

Weekly Update - Friday, November 15, 2019

Good morning! Happy Friday!
Thank you for the extra hours this week with Family-Teacher Conferences.  It's great to have families in the building!  

Labels:
I saw this on Facebook this week and loved it.  It also reminded me of the power of labels - "low kids", "Special Ed kids", "bad kids".  Your words become your beliefs and actions.  What words are you using?  Believing?  Acting on?  

American Education Week:

Next week is American Education Week -  a week for us to celebrate all the people who educate our students.  As I have said in the past, we are all educators - we have a role in the education and development of our McKinley students.  Below is a link to some special events for next week's American Education Week!  

Click here to access the events next week

Mindful Art - Guest Bloggers Amanda Gislason & Annette Warner:

Mindful Art group uses the creative process involved in making art to:

• Increase self-awareness
• Help students relieve stress and anxiety
• Help students explore choices
• Help students develop social skills
• Help students process traumatic experiences

Benefits of Mindful Art:

Mindful Art provides a visual and verbal approach to access and address student’s unique emotional needs.  Mindful art gives students a means of externalizing the complexities of their emotional pain. It allows students to express themselves in ways that are less threatening that verbal communication.  

Students who benefit from Mindful Art:

We have found great success using mindful art for students whose emotional instability impacts their education.  For example, students exhibiting symptoms of depression, anxiety, grief/loss and/or PTSD/traumatic experiences.  

Following are statements/comments from students who have participated in mindful art. What I like about Mindful Art:

• We can put on music and be calm
• Gives me time to meet others that are sort of like me
• I loved the dolls we made (worry dolls)
• That I can relax in so many different ways
• It is calming
• It gave me other things to do when I am mad at other people and things
• It helped me with my family deaths
• By talking with others I got a chance to try new strategies
• It helped me feel more confident
• “I am a very closed in person.  I don’t talk to people about my feelings but when I joined I wanted to talk and so it helped me”

MSU Placements:

As you may know, Owatonna is a partner district with MSU-Mankato... this gives us an opportunity to provide field experience hours and full-time student teaching placements. Your partnership and expertise is critical in helping develop our future colleagues! If you are interested in hosting a beginning teacher in your classroom in some way, please share your information using this form: Cooperating Teacher Interest.

*Completion of this form does not guarantee nor require acceptance of candidate placement, it simply is to gather an interest bank. Final placements are at the discretion of the University and District Administrators.

Contact Katie Coudron or Jane Sorensen (TOSAs with MSU-Mankato) with questions.

Why set goals using the Literacy Continuum?

Recently, the idea of finding the time to set goals for each reader and group using the Literacy Continuum was brought up, as some are questioning if it is worth the time now that we have the Guided Reading Classroom resource from Fountas and Pinnell.  Here are my own thoughts as to why setting goals using the Literacy Continuum is well worth the time:

1. If you don’t set goals, how do you know which introduction, discussion and teaching points to use from the lesson?  I so often hear when planning with teachers, “They all look good.” or “I want to do them all!”  To which we can take a look at the goals for the readers in the group and determine which questions or prompts the readers in that particular group need.  Without those goals, for me, it doubles (or triples) the amount of planning time it takes to plan each guided reading lesson, as I really don’t know what kids need to move them forward.
2. When you set goals for readers, you identify what is holding them at their current level, which gives specific information to focus on during prompting and teaching.  My ultimate goal is two-fold: kids LOVE to read and kids can read whatever they want to read.  Therefore, I want to continue to support their growth and advancement in what text they are able to process independently.  If I find those four or so goals for them, then I can prompt while they are reading at the group (when I bop in to hear them) or when I confer.  It can guide which students I call on during group for which questions. Therefore, they have more opportunities to grow in that goal. While the goal is not just to push them through the levels as fast as we can, the goal is to continue to grow in our reading so that they can access any text that they might encounter.
3. How will we know when to move a group on if we aren’t tracking specific goals?  The Literacy Continuum provides so many goals at each level, we can’t possibly track all of that information. If we focus our attention on tracking what has kept them at that level, and then they begin to become solid in those goals, we can confidently move students to the next level without fear that they don’t have every single goal mastered in that level.  

As our students grow in their goals and the level of text, we must continue to revisit the goals we set and add new ones and remove mastered goals based on our reading record data and anecdotal information from guided groups.  Even today, after doing a reading record with a student on an O level text, I had to go back to the continuum to see how the goals for summarizing are stated in that level. In level O, one of the summarizing goal shifts from “Summarize the important information in the next, selecting the information that is important.” to “Summarize the important information in the text in a clear and logical way without extraneous detail.”  The student I had read with had done a great retelling of the story with a lot of important information, but she really had not eliminated any detail. If I had not gone back to both the comprehension rubric, and the continuum, I would not have realized that this is about the level where students need to start really honing in on what is truly critical in the text.  

If we want to have our students receive the most targeted instruction possible, it is critical that we continue to set and revisit goals using the Literacy Continuum.  

Building Weekly Newsletter:
Click here to access the building weekly newsletter


I hope you have a great, relaxing weekend - enjoy the 40 degree heatwave!
-Justin

Weekly Update - Friday, November 8, 2019

Happy Friday, everyone!

Problem Solving Team:
Click here for an awesome video on our Problem Solving Team process (thank you, Libby!)

Just a friendly reminder of our Problem Solving Team!  This team is available to assist you (and ultimately students) throughout the year.  As we have learned from previous years, our team's requests fill up pretty quickly in January (after winter brenchmarking).  If you have a student you are concerned about - due to teacher observation, assessments, or progress monitoring data, please request a meeting with our team below! 

Problem Solving Team Request Form 
Problem Solving Team Process

Winter Gear:
Please remind students to bring in winter gear.   I have posted some requests on social media, too.  If you have students who did not bring gear, we have hats and gloves in the office.  However, we will not be a regular distributor this year.  If a student continually borrows gloves, we will ask you to make a call home to remind families that they need the gear.  If the family is in need of support, please connect them with Annette. 

October Office Referral Data:
Below is a link to our October ORD.  Our McKinleyStrong Team met last night to look through this data.  Overall, our referrals are down by 47 majors from last year.  That is a great thing!  As we know, less time in the office means more learning time!  Our physical aggression data is higher than normal.  We are going to pull the data deeper and share with teams, by grade level.  Look for this information in the next couple of weeks. 

Click here to access the data

Building Weekly Newsletter:
Click here to access the building weekly newsletter

Have a great weekend, everyone!
-Justin

Weekly Update- Friday, November 1, 2019

Happy November, everyone!  It's the month of Gratitude!  I hope you are all joining on the Twitter challenge - yes, all of you!  What a great way to build a community of gratitude, appreciation, and reflection! 

Just a reminder - our McKinleyStrong Celebration is today at OHS.  Please see the schedule and be on time for the bus.   Thank you! 

I Will Never Forget that Cup of Coffee... well worth the view!  
Take 5 minutes to watch a powerful video about happiness and your mindset.   This is a great lesson about how we show up in spaces, how we choose our happiness, and our mindset on the work we do.  Pretty powerful - take some time to listen to Ryan! 

Are you a Warm Demander?
Do you build deep, meaningful relationships while holding students to high expectations?   The more I reflect on this, the more I realize how hard this is!  Often, teachers are really great at relationships, but may lower their expectations a bit due to a students' background, ability, disability, etc.  Or, they have high expectations but struggle with showing kids how much they love them.  A "Warm Demander" does this - balances relationships with holding all kids to high expectations.  The below article is a great reminder of what you can do as a warm demander. 

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/warm-demander-equity-approach-matt-alexander

Building Weekly Newsletter:
Click here to access the building weekly newsletter


Have a great weekend, everyone!  - Justin