|
Thoughtful Education District Information |
Information current as of
September. 2007 |
|
|
|
Name of District |
Status for 2006-07; 2007-08 |
Trained in these Strategies |
Plans for 2007-08 |
Costs of Implementation |
Franklin
County |
Working on unit development for this year. Teachers are to complete at least two units. |
- Task Rotation
- Compare/Contrast
- Reading Meaning
- Vocabulary Tools
|
Continue with the unit plans. Possibly implement an additional strategy (Interactive Lecture for middle and high)
Held training on July 25-27 with Dr. Dan Moirao, Facilitators Training |
$750,000 for past 3 years. |
Owen County |
3 schools are considering implementing. Attended overview session in Gallatin County on Feb. 21st. |
None at this point. |
Best guess is that 1 school will be implementing. |
|
Gallatin
County |
Had an overview session with all staff on Feb. 21, 2007
Had 3 days of district wide training July 31-August 2. Trainers were Wigginton, Ebbs, Dewing and Sorace. |
1. Cracking Vocabulary Code |
Joyce Jackson coming October 5, 2007 to do half day coaching sessions. Have a follow up on November 6, 2007
Dewing and Sorace will continue as the trainers.
Monitoring of the strategies done at least each Monday as the team visits schools, part of Monitoring Mondays. |
|
Anchorage |
Met with consultant (Jamie Spugnardi) on Feb. 20 on Voc. Code. March 20th will be trained on Tools for Active, in-depth learning. April 3rd will work on Notemaking, Summarizing. April 3 will be trained on Extrapolation. May 8th trained on Concept Attainment. |
So far trained on Vocabulary Code. |
Will meet with Joyce Jackson in June to plan 4 topics for 07-08. |
|
Henry
County |
1-day overview with entire district staff on Nov. 7th. Had four more 1-day sessions with the ILT’s from all 5 schools, with Tom Dewing. Purchased Learning Styles inventories for all students except 12th graders and the Teaching Styles inventories for all teachers. Will use “Word Works” and “Tasks Rotations” |
Vocabulary Strategy and Task Rotations.
High school has done some work with The New American Lecture - will continue this year. |
Continue same plan; will have 5 day-long sessions for ILT’s with Tom Dewing, spread out across the year. Will use the 6 “district” hours of PD in 1- hour increments attached to (1-hour) Early Release days, for twelve hours dedicated to Thoughtful Ed strategies with PLC’s. Expand training to include: Note-making, Reading for Meaning, and Compare/Contrast.
Have a training session November 8, 2007. |
$50,000 for last year. |
Carroll County |
They have implemented two strategies this year. |
Trained in Task Rotation and Compare/contrast |
Plan to “roll out” Vocabulary strategies for all staff. |
|
Grant County |
Rep’s attended overview session at Gallatin on Feb. 21st. |
|
|
|
Bullitt County |
Several individual schools attended TEN meeting on Feb. 14th and are interested. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Featured Contributor:
Dr. Laura Palka
|
 |
Dr. Laura Palka
was an assistant principal, elementary school principal, and high school principal for ten years before becoming the
principal of Edward Town Middle School in Sanborn, New York. She holds a B.S. in Education from Miami University, an M.S. in Administration from Xavier University, and a Ph.D. in Literacy
and Administration from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
|
About the Principal:
Tyrone Olverson
|
 |
For more than fifteen years, Tyrone Olverson has served urban and suburban school districts as a social studies teacher and principal. Tyrone holds a Bachelor's of Science Degree in Comprehensive
Social Sciences from The Ohio State University and a Master's Degree in Educational
Administration from the University of Cincinnati. He is currently the principal of Waggoner Road Junior High School in Reynoldsburg, Ohio.
|
|
Dear Tina,
Thank you for subscribing to Lessons From Thoughtful Classroom, our email newsletter for educators who Make Students as Important as Standards! We hope you find the downloadable tools, book reviews, and short articles by fellow educators useful and inspiring. Please let us know what you think!
|
|
Ten Smart Moves to Create a School
of Thoughtful Educators
 by Dr. Laura Palka - Principal, Edward Town
Middle School in Sanborn, New York
The Thoughtful Classroom has been a cornerstone of our improvement at Edward Town Middle School, focusing our attention and energy on student learning like never before. Over the course of our four-year journey, our entire faculty has dedicated itself to reaching our students in the most positive and effective ways possible, and together we have emerged as more thoughtful educators and leaders. Here are ten of the most important lessons we've learned at Edward Town Middle School over these four critical years.
1. Build a library. Make sure every teacher receives top publications for his or her own professional library so that the message is clearly sent that The Thoughtful Classroom is for everyone. A good Thoughtful Classroom library starts with core texts like Tools for Promoting Active, In-Depth Learning and The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson.
2. Staff development takes time (and planning). Provide planned, intentional, and sustained staff development that supports the overarching school purpose. Be prepared to layer deeper learning each year, empowering teachers to become leaders who guide and support colleagues. Use school district dollars to focus staff development around a comprehensive program and stop sending small groups of teachers to multiple and disconnected workshops.
3. Focus your team's efforts. Focus on a limited number of key strategies by introducing no more than three strategies a year. It is important for teachers to build a repertoire of effective instructional strategies, but it is also important to allow teachers time to collaboratively plan, implement, and refine new strategies using student work and peer observation to focus discussion. The Thoughtful Classroom Portfolio Series™ is a great way to guide meaningful discussion and to reinforce the idea that school improvement resides with each educator.
4. Target the learning styles of students and teachers. Make sure everyone understands the concept of style and how style influences the way we learn and teach. To identify students' and teachers' predominant styles (as well as weaker styles), we administer both the Learning Style Inventory for Students and the Teaching Style Inventory. Teachers use the information from these instruments to create large, colorful display boards in their classrooms where students write their names and draw pictures to represent their preferred style of learning.
5. Start early; plan ahead. Start developing a format and schedule for instructional faculty meetings over the summer, and then plan these meetings for the entire upcoming school year. These meetings allow presenters to model key strategies while providing sufficient time for review and new learning. Purchase all necessary materials in advance for specific training.
6. Build a team. Develop a strong School Improvement Team that operates solely for the purpose of improving student learning. Initially, the principal must be the leader of this team; however, once the focus is clearly established, teacher-leaders should then work with the principal as co-facilitators. To sustain high levels of commitment from the staff, meetings must be results-oriented. Teachers want to accomplish goals that have a significant impact on student learning throughout the year.
7. Insist on meaningful and collegial collaboration. In order for teachers to truly collaborate, they must have time to work with colleagues, focus on a clear and specific purpose, and incorporate what they are learning into their classroom instruction. Do not waste your teachers' time. If teachers have the opportunity to work together, then their work and subsequent discussions will be more meaningful, deeper, and more reflective.
8. Timing is everything. Set aside time and organize opportunities for Teacher Rounds, Book Clubs, in-house training, and data collection that enhance instructional practice and deepen the Professional Learning Community. Principals and teacher-leaders must be aware of staff (and student) stress levels and recognize the most demanding times of any given school year, balancing when to challenge teachers and when to provide time for teacher reflection.
9. Praise publicly, but critique privately. Consistently give attention to those educators who are helping move the building forward. Keep everyone in the instructional loop as to what good teaching looks like, sounds like, and so forth. Praise teachers publicly! Give private, specific advice and feedback to teachers on what they need to improve and how it can be done.
10. Shuffle your team's lineup. As soon as your school has a small army of effective teacher-leaders, allow these leaders to move to other teams and work in new situations. Changing groupings and teams facilitates continuous learning. Nothing creates more success than educators sharing their expertise with one another, designing instruction together, examining student work, and remaining focused on the goal of improving student learning.
Click here for more information about The Thoughtful Classroom Professional Development Program.
|
Teachers want to learn, plan, and implement instructional strategies with positive results. The Thoughtful Classroom
has allowed Edward Town Middle School to focus our
efforts by creating both the means and the opportunity
to become a school of Thoughtful Educators. In four
short years, our statewide test scores in English/Language
Arts alone have risen from 43% proficiency to over 70%
proficiency. While we have not yet reached our full
potential, we are clearly on solid ground and moving
forward in the right direction together with a deeper
understanding of both the learning process and the
diversity of all our learners.
What an adventure!
- Dr. Laura Palka
|
S U C C E S S S T O R Y
SOARing to New Heights
A school's commitment (to high expectations for all)
leads to award-winning achievement.
 by Matthew J. Perini
Reynoldsburg, Ohio is a community in transition. Over the last decade, Reynoldsburg has witnessed a population explosion as more and more families from the city move to suburban Reynoldsburg. In that time, the student population has nearly doubled, with sharp increases in English Language Learners and students who qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch. One sign of this rapid growth is the 18 modular classrooms set up outside Reynoldsburg High School-a school of roughly 2300 students in a building designed to accommodate only 1300.
Faced with this kind of community-wide change, schools often struggle to maintain academic performance. But in Reynoldsburg Junior High School, student achievement is doing more than holding steady-it is increasing dramatically.
On November 12, 2007, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Batelle for Kids recognized Reynoldsburg's achievement by presenting the school with the prestigious SOAR Award. SOAR (Schools' Online Assessment Reports) recognizes exceptional improvement in schools. To give you a sense of how difficult it is to receive a SOAR Award, consider this: Out of 435 eligible Ohio schools, only 15 schools received SOAR Awards in 2007. That puts Reynoldsburg Junior High in the top 3.5% of Ohio schools making exceptional growth.
Take the change in seventh-graders' math scores as an example of this growth. Between 2006 and 2007, math scores rose dramatically and in two distinct ways-horizontally (comparing seventh-graders' scores in 2006 and 2007) and vertically (following the same class of seventh-graders and examining their scores again as eighth-graders). Horizontally, seventh-graders' scores jumped almost 20 percentile points, from 59% proficient in 2006 to 78% proficient in 2007. Vertically, scores went from 59% proficient to 76% proficient.
While experiencing great gains in student academic achievement, Reynoldsburg Junior High School has also gone through a significant organizational transformation. As a result of the increased population, Reynoldsburg Junior High split into two schools for the 2007-2008 school year-Baldwin Junior High School and Waggoner Road Junior High School.
Our teachers do a great job here. The gains were
not made by administrators; they were made by teachers working with children in the classroom.
Tyrone Olverson, former principal of Reynoldsburg Junior High School and current principal of Waggoner Road Junior High School, relates the school's commitment to achievement and the high expectations for all students in this way: "A's and B's are expected, along with the occasional C. If you get a D, you have to talk to me." For the 20 or so students who are failing, Tyrone meets with them every Friday morning during first period. Tyrone also selects five individual students to monitor throughout the day to make sure they are performing well in each of their classes. While taking an active and personal approach to school administration is second nature to Tyrone, he credits his faculty for the school's resurgence: "Our teachers do a great job here. The gains were not made by administrators; they were made by teachers working with children in the classroom."
At Reynoldsburg Junior High, teachers and administrators work together to improve learning for all students. To assist their efforts, the school began implementing The Thoughtful Classroom Professional Development in 2005. Teams of teachers meet with administrators and teacher-leaders in Thoughtful Classroom Learning Clubs on a regular basis to discuss and refine research-based strategies, design assessments, and analyze student work. For their first round of Learning Club meetings at Reynoldsburg, educators selected The Thoughtful Classroom Vocabulary's CODE model as their instructional focus. Using vocabulary strategies such as Association Triangles, Vocabulary Organizers, and Word Walls in their classrooms, Reynoldsburg teachers helped students master key academic vocabulary and raise academic achievement.
Also in 2006, as a way to help reach a diverse population of students, Reynoldsburg Junior High School administered the Learning Style Inventory for Students™ (LSIS) to every student. The LSIS provides teachers and administrators with deep insight into the learning styles and motivational patterns of all students. With this information, teachers are able to differentiate instruction, design more powerful lessons and units, and work with the administration to organize courses. The wealth of information obtained from the LSIS has inspired the school to start a program of administering the LSIS to all incoming students at the end of their sixth-grade school year.
It is not only the faculty that's committed to academic success. Reynoldsburg students are also getting into the act. Students run a Peer Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations to faculty on behalf of all students. More recently, students developed a program called REACH (Receiving Extra Academic Classroom Help), which provides after-school tutoring to interested students. Students have also been challenging themselves by enrolling in more advanced classes. In 2006, only 5 out of 1120 Reynoldsburg Junior High students took high-school level Geometry; but in 2007, that number jumped to 31 out of 600 students at Waggoner Road alone. A similar attendance surge occurred in Algebra and especially Spanish, with 220 students enrolled in 2007 versus just 40 in 2006.
Growing population, shifting demographics, significant increases in English Language Learners and students receiving free or reduced lunch. Changes like these do not need to signal a downturn in academic achievement for schools. In fact, sometimes just the opposite happens. Just ask the administrators, teachers, and junior high students in Reynoldsburg, Ohio.
|
|
|
|
|
The 2008 Thoughtful Classroom Summer Institute
is being held in Reynoldsburg, Ohio!
This institute will provide educators with the tools they need to develop more powerful lessons, plan more thoughtful curriculum units, and more effectively manage the change process in every classroom.
Attendees will learn:
- The eight critical skills that separate high performers from the rest
- The six best research-based strategies for raising student achievement
- A powerful and manageable model for differentiating instruction and assessment
- A simple and deep classroom curriculum process that helps teachers maximize learning and motivate all students
- Strategies for organizing professional development so that all teachers receive the support they need
EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT!
Pay only $350 per person
when you register by June 30th!
(Regular Admission Price $395)
Includes:
Admission to sessions, continental breakfast, refreshments
and the following Institute Materials:
Space is limited and seats fill up quickly!
NOTE: You must enter the special offer code OH-NL1
during the checkout portion of your online registration.
Click here to register online.
To register by phone or for more information,
call Alexis at 1.800.962.4432
Call for group discount information.
*ASHLAND UNIVERSITY
GRADUATE CREDIT INFORMATION:
Making Students as Important as Standards (MSIS) Institute
attendees can earn one (1) semester hour of Graduate Credit
through Ashland University.
(click here to read more about earning graduate credit) |
|
| Offer Expires: June 30th, 2008 |
FREE SHIPPING
on your
entire order when you purchase
The Strategic Teacher!
Use offer code TST-0608NL
when you order today!
|
The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson
Written by Harvey F. Silver, Richard W. Strong, and Matthew J. Perini
In The Strategic Teacher, you'll find a repertoire of strategies designed and proven to meet today's high standards and reach diverse learners. Twenty reliable, flexible strategies (along with dozens of variations) are organized into five groups of instruction: Mastery, Understanding, Self-Expressive, Interpersonal, and Four-Style strategies.
#TST001 (Grades K-12)...........................$27.95
Click here to place order your online today!
To order by phone, call 1-800-962-4432.
|
| Offer Expires: July 15, 2008 |
|
|
|
|
|
