By Kylie Butler and Sarah Zbornik Command, Shift, 5 is our new favorite shortcut! Have you ever wanted to video your screen while you were talking, but didn’t want to download screencastify? Now, it is super easy. And you can even capture your Smartboard (watch Jesse Lyon's video below). Steps for Screencasting Built-In Shortcut
You can even capture your Smartboard through this shortcut. Checkout Jesse Lyon and his video for his substitute teacher. How else could you utilize this short cut?
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by Andrew Ellingsen (Instructional Coach) and Denise Lee (DMS Collaborative Teacher) “The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it-and then dismantle it.” ~ Ibram X. Kendi I am not a racist. Am I? We certainly don’t think of ourselves as a racist, but participating in the book study this fall helped us to reframe the idea of racism. In Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, he sets forth the premise that being “not racist” isn’t enough – we must choose in our daily life between racism and active antiracism. In Kendi’s words, “the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it – and then dismantle it.” Kendi delves into topics including history, politics, physical features, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and survival. In each chapter, he describes scenes from his own life, sharing stories of when he (a black author) behaved in racist ways. The vulnerability of the author and those participating in the book study allowed us to analyze ourselves and the world we lived in. Below are several quotes shared by book study participants:
If you’re interested in reading How to Be an Antiracist, reach out to one of us or to anyone who participated in the book study – we would happily lend you our copies! Or if you’re interested in participating in next fall's book study, look for an email early next year from Andrew Ellingsen. The book we will be reading is Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane -- feel free to order it and get a head start on reading over the summer! By Shanna Putnam-Dibble, Elementary Learner Advocate Last year West Side, John Cline, and Carrie Lee adapted a new Social Skills Curriculum, Second Step, to teach students the skills they need to be successful at school and in life. At John Cline, with the generous support of our Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), we are now working to implement additional materials and resources to support the social emotional needs of our students including materials for Calm Down Corners in Classrooms, books for a social emotional read aloud resource center, and materials for a Sensory Hallway. Read (and watch) on to learn more about John Cline’s new Sensory Hallway and check out future Blog articles on how we are utilizing our Social Emotional Resource Center.
Many students struggle having to sit and be quiet for the amount of time that is often required in elementary schools across the nation. Sensory hallways can help while providing many additional benefits for our students!
As with anything, students needed to be taught when and how to use the Sensory Hallway. Check out the link below to get a full view of the hallway and to see a Video Model that is being used to teach students how to use it effectively. How do you get students moving in the classroom? Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e6jKMEZdo-V4ma65Ks8vgtxzme2baXE3/view?usp=sharing By Liz Fox, DHS Collaborative Teacher Along with my colleagues, I value building relationships with my students. When I first heard the (now possibly trite) dictum “Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” I thought, Yes - this!
I engage in light-hearted conversation with my students all the time, so I stopped in my tracks when I read the intro to Jennifer Gonzales’s podcast “The Magic of Validation” from her Cult of Pedagogy series. Here it is: “I have a multiple-choice question for you. Suppose you’re standing at your classroom door, greeting students as they arrive. One of them—let’s call him Gabe—comes through and sees that on the daily agenda, you’ve written ‘Choose topics for speeches.’ Right away, his shoulders slump. ‘Oh man,’ he says to no one in particular, ‘I hate speeches!’ What do you say? A. What? Speeches are awesome. B. You talk all the time! You’re gonna love it. C. Shocker! Gabe has another complaint. D. Gabe, we enter the room silently, please. E. What do you hate about speeches, Gabe? With options A through D, you’re arguing with Gabe, dismissing his feelings, attacking him personally, or ignoring what he said altogether. But with option E, you’re reacting with curiosity. You’re trying to learn more. With option E, you’re already on your way to validating Gabe’s point of view.” I could honestly see myself answering A or B, and that piqued my interest in the rest of the podcast. I’m really glad I took the time to check it out; it does an excellent job in discussing validation to improve the emotional well being of not only students but colleagues as well. I have been making more of an effort to validate my students’ feelings, and hopefully it’s making a difference in how they feel about school. The podcast was eye-opening for me, and I wanted to share this with others who may be interested. If you don’t want to listen (and you’d like to avoid the author’s sponsorship shout-outs), feel free to read the transcript instead. Even within our relatively small district, much separates us. We work in or between five buildings. Our students range from preschoolers to young adults. We teach a wide variety of content areas and courses. Despite these differences, as professional educators, we are united by a common goal: we are compelled to improve educational opportunities and learning outcomes for our students. A positive aspect of our situation is that we have talented people who want to improve our school system for our students. A challenge is that our efforts do not always align, which creates inefficiency and frustration. A New Approach The PDSA cycle provides a structure for continuous improvement. The framework guides collaborative planning, implementation of action plans, study and reflection, and decision-making. It is a powerful tool for learning from ideas that do and don’t work.
As we build shared understanding of continuous improvement cycles, we are better equipped to align our efforts on clear, common goals. No matter the group--students, PLC teams, building staff, district staff--the PDSA structure aligns individual efforts in a way that makes long-term, organizational improvements possible. Many teachers have expressed interest in how the PDSA cycles are playing out in various buildings. Below are links to quick snapshots of PDSA work around the district. This fall, high school teachers reflected on the need to focus on homeroom and flex-time planning and implementation. These parts of the day were new to the schedule last year and teachers wanted to use them in an impactful way. Teachers also wanted to increase the focus on the social-emotional learning that could occur in this setting and spent time identifying topics that could help them to develop lessons in this area. They have worked in their grade level groups to discuss and refine these lessons. While this was done outside the initial PDSA implementation, focusing on homeroom and how we could incorporate social-emotional learning in this time fit well when considering other data points from the Conditions of Learning Survey taken by students last spring.
First, the staff identified the "Drivers and Preventers" of homeroom using a Force Field Analysis. This brought up many positive attributes of homeroom while allowing staff to voice some issues they have been working through. The HS Admin/TLC team then took those preventers and created like groups. The goal was to then find "Root Cause" using an Interrelationship Digraph. After robust collaborative discussion, Teacher Training/Planning and Student Voice were identified as the "Root Cause" preventing homeroom from being the best it could be. Our next venture was brainstorming HOW to collect student voice. What tools could we use to incorporate student voice into the activities chosen for homeroom. It was clear after many ideas came, we needed to take some time to refine what we wanted to ask the students. To do this refinement, we went to what students were already telling us in the Conditions of Learning Survey. This is where we have spent the last few weeks. Through this process so far, we have confirmed assumptions, engaged in productive dialogue, and reflected on the climate and culture of the high school. All valuable things as we continue our work with the first phase of the PDSA implementation. Defining the Problem The process began with silent, individual brainstorming. Teachers and paraprofessionals responded to the following prompts:
Then, small groups created Affinity Diagrams to organize their responses. Each Affinity Diagram was posted, so the groups could reflect on all ideas offered.
Establishing the Aim Based on the Affinity Diagram results, teams began addressing the probletunity.
Each PLC team worked through a Bone Diagram to address the following prompts:
Then, teams completed the morphing step of the Bone Diagram in which they brainstormed the needed steps to move from their current state to the desired state. Sharing Strategies Using the guiding question -- What’s different about the student experience? -- middle school teachers engaged in team learning to deepen their understanding of standards-based education and effective instructional practices and tools for improving the student learning experience.
Next Steps
At this point in the PDSA cycle, DMS teachers transitioned from the large group back to PLC teams. To help focus their PDSA work, teams worked through a planning document to 1) determine the specific results they would like to accomplish by April 30th and 2) establish a plan for how the team will go about achieving the agreed upon results. Reflection After April 30th, teams will reflect on their work and assess the progress made in moving towards the ideal state of learning they envisioned for their students at the beginning of the improvement cycle. The PDSA process at Carrie Lee began with defining the purpose of our collective work. The next step was to give everyone a voice in developing a common vision for our building. In order to better understand our path to creating a vision, we took the following steps as a collaborative group of teachers and paraprofessionals.
Week One: Leaders of the PDSA process gathered information on our current reality through the use of two tools. The Tracking and Assessing Cultural Shifts survey from Solution Tree was administered to allow us to measure where we currently rank ourselves in regards to focus areas, such as collaboration and school improvement planning. This measure will help us to track the progress that we make over time in focusing on the overall culture of the school. The SWOT Analysis was also used to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats at Carrie Lee. Week Two: Next, as we began the steps to develop a shared vision, the following question was asked: “Who do we want to be as Carrie Lee?” We used the Affinity Diagram tool to identify topics that were deemed as most important. This included a list of 12 items. Staff then used a 1-3 ranking system to pare down the list and identify the most influential focus areas. These guiding principles included the following:
Staff also had the opportunity to review and reflect on the compiled information from the SWOT Analysis. This information helped us identify areas that needed to be addressed. Week Three: We looked more closely at the weaknesses that were identified in the SWOT Analysis and used the Hot Dot tool to identify the most influential obstacles in our building. Six of the most influential obstacles were identified. We used the Interrelationship Digraph to understand the cause and effect relationships between each of our barriers and to identify the root cause. Staff completed these digraphs in small groups, and the information was compiled. Week Four: Using the information compiled from the Interrelationship Digraph, the root cause of our weaknesses from the SWOT analysis was identified as “Clarity in Leadership”. However, as clarity in leadership is a district-wide probletunity, we focused on the next identified root cause: “Defining How Decisions are Made and Who is Responsible”. The next step was to figure out how this probletunity was affecting our ability to meet the needs of the whole child, our main guiding factor. Staff had the opportunity to reflect and respond as a large group. Week Five: To better understand our guiding principles, we also needed to better define what our principles encompassed. Using the Affinity diagram, teachers took time to define what meeting the needs of the whole child looks like to each of us. This information will help us to better understand our vision and guide our future steps. Defining the Problem
When staff members from John Cline and West Side gathered together, teachers and paraprofessionals sat in groups that intentionally mixed buildings, grade levels, and job responsibilities. Using the Imagineering tool, staff members brainstormed responses to the question, “Assuming that we are doing our part to empower students for the future, what would the key characteristics of our school be?” The work began silently, and ideas generated were each written on a separate sticky note. Table groups then worked collaboratively using the Affinity Diagram tool to find common themes in the ideas generated at their table. Though many ideas were generated, staff members identified which of those ideas to prioritize using the Hot Dot tool; a list of six rose to the top.
Table groups then completed Affinity Diagrams for these six topics. The topic of Building and Physical Environment was quickly identified as having the greatest impact of the six. Mr. Lane came to a meeting to share an update on the work currently happening at the district level. Because we as a staff wouldn’t be able to impact that process much in the next ninety days, we tabled the topic and chose to focus our efforts on the topic with the second highest rated impact, Collaboration and Leadership. Establishing the Aim Once Collaboration and Leadership was identified, we worked in building-specific table groups to create a Bone Diagram mapping out the Current State and Desired State of Collaboration and Leadership at John Cline Elementary and West Side Early Childhood Center. Using this as our starting point, we broke the topic into four sub-strands: School Board and Superintendent, District Administration Team, TLC Team (Instructional Coaches, Collaborative Teachers, Mentor Teachers, PLC Leads, Learner Advocates), and WSECC/JCE Staff. We identified actionable steps that could be taken by each of the four groups to help us move closer to our Desired State. Ideas generated for the School Board & Superintendent, the District Admin. Team, and the TLC Team were shared with Mr. Lane and will be shared with others, and we are now working to identify specific actions we can commit to take as staff members to move closer to our Desired State. Our next step is to look at the ideas we’ve generated using the Potential Impact Matrix. We will use the Poll Everywhere online tool to anonymously rank the Potential Impact and the Do-ability of each of the ideas generated. The room’s votes will be anonymously collected and projected in real-time for the staff to see. Using this information, we’ll identify the work we can commit to and move into the DO phase of the PDSA cycle! This year we have taken the NWEA MAP test earlier in 2nd semester than in the past. One upside to that is that we can use that data to work to meet the needs of our students yet this year. Here is a summary of some of the reports available to you on your classes that you may want to use. Class Report This report will provide overview and drilled down data on the students in each class. It can display the number of students in each quintile based on the normed data for both the overall test and each goal area. The second page of this report shows the scores for individual students. |
AuthorsDCSD Teachers, Instructional Coaches, Learner Advocate, and Collaborative Teachers Archives
April 2024
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