One Picture = Thousand Words: How to express this first week of school!

Anybody know where this is?

To ponder this first week of school, it was tough to express the feedback, till this picture came along!  Four components are key in this picture that convey the ideas and successes we saw at Winfield Middle School during this first week of the 2012-13 school year.

To begin, the creek at the bottom alludes to a primitive form of travel or communication.  Rafts, boats and walking all remind us of strenuous effort necessary to build this country, across the frontiers, facing daily continuous dangers of the unknown.  Often times, it is the fear of the unknown that far surpasses the actual danger.  Communication that takes us literally seconds via technology would take weeks at best through mail being carried on foot and delivered by hand.  For our students, the fear of coming to the middle school seemed to melt by the end of the first day and by the end of the third day, students expressed the desire to be here, verses home.  (itself another commentary for another post)

Above the creek, the road symbolizes the advanced efforts of the assembly line that solidified during the early part of the industrial age, where we mechanized our efforts and looked to machines, electricity and efficiency to make our lives easier.  Communication through the form of telegraph and electrical circuits lacing the country side made our connections even quicker and more efficient.  We still needed an interpreter that could help us articulate our thoughts into the most sparse of messages as we sent telegraph messages into the Morse code and back to letters and words again.  A school metaphor may indicate the need to have multiple types of communication to meet multiple types of learners.  So many teachers used so many various forms of communication and connection and students had multiple opportunities to respond in every class.  This came through an engaging staff willing to combine technology, their own personalities, establishing a secure environment where students felt a risk was worth taking, especially an educational risk with a true demonstration of tough love and safe boundaries.

The train tracks parallel to the road, infer our communication became standardized as the width of most of the tracks in the US became  the constant four feet and eight and one half inches across.  Thus folks joined the norm, benefited from the commonality of community and improved their lot.  Communication wise, the telephone removed the need for an interpreter to translate things into and out of the code of dots and dashes, sort of like a computer translates everything into zeros and ones.  At school our connection becomes the way the curriculum adjusts so educations across the communities become equitable, fair and balanced.  neighboring communities can benefit through the communication enjoyed by all.  Students enjoy teachers at WMS that share common passion for helping, caring and reaching into their native generation that uses technology for much of their personal interaction.

Finally, the bridge represents the successful connection built from one side to the other, from one generation to another, from one individual to another.  Like Green Eggs, it begins with one party reaching into the life of another, demonstrating a true interest in helping and showing what it means to display unconditional live for a person, separate of their actions.  Like the person but not what they are doing!  The bridge crosses the gap, saves time and energy by not going around and forms a direct link over the chasm.  The staff at WMS have begun a very successful building process, laying a foundation for huge leaps and gains in so many students. Thank you, to any that may read this!

Can I express how well this first week of school went? 
         Not in a thousand words, due to my lack of articulation skills, but maybe this picture will help. 

GREAT JOB Winfield Middle School.   We are on the map!

Anybody know where that picture was taken?

How was your first day of school?

Here on the second day of a great school year, some students and I were discussing their first day of school.  I asked them "how was school yesterday."  I actually heard one say “I did not want to leave!” and then 3 more agreed.  This did not sound like a normal answer so I asked another and heard “I could not wait to come back today!” 

 

We had attendance rate of over 98%, on day one.  Six students out of 311 were missing!  These children seemed to be excited to be at school.  They felt like their teachers cared they were there.  They seemed to enjoy the positive interaction with the support staff as well.  Their bus behavior was outstanding both to and from school, even with the bridge out and one bus having to take the very long way home.

Students seemed to respect the struggling newcomers to the building, even offering aid opening lockers and finding classrooms. Technology was in use everywhere: the classrooms, the library, even the commons during PE and before school while waiting to go to class.  It seemed like everyone was working to speak to these technological natives in their own tongue.  It’s like, we went to reach them on their level!

We were only Winfield, now we are on the map!

How to be a good Middle School Principal?

Ensure you are surrounded by good middle school teachers.

I woke up last night at 2am. I wondered what I had to worry about because it was the first day of the school year. I considered the wonderful staff in the building, and fell back asleep till 5:30!

I got to school and folks were already setting things up, preparing for students and looking forward to success. #endthemeetingnow The staff had investigated technology and some even posted their first tweets. #winwar (Winfield Warriors)  Technology was everywhere.  www.polleverywhere.com and www.dropbox.com are just the beginnings to the technological natives in our seats.

Of course, we all understand Dr Seuss was talking about relationships when he wrote Green Eggs and Ham and without a relationships, we would have little impact and less influence on the people around us, the wards under our care, or even the children in our classes or the kids in our family. All day was filled with activities that are designed to intentionally engage students in their own learning process.  Worksheets don't grow dendrites and we worked accordingly.  Well done, middle school staff.

Reflection: Today was the first day of our SY and as we walked the halls and popped into classrooms, we saw many great practices. We saw teachers allowing students to interact with technology in front of the entire class. We saw smiles and heard laughter. We had over 97% of our registered students show up. Staff were engaging with students on both a surface level as well as an intentional deeper level for future interactions of deeper levels of knowledge. We observed and overheard evidence of students wanting to attend school to see what their teacher had thought up for them. Parents came to check things out and even popped into classrooms with us. We saw the foundations for success. We are preparing to put Winfield Middle School on the map.
If today is any indication of where we are going, we are reservedly excited and I think everybody will be back tomorrow! Well done staff.
We were only Winfield, but now we are on the MAP!
PS. Did anyone see our high stakes testing scores released from DESE last year? Out of the park!  Kudos again.
PPS. How to be a good Middle School Principal? Someone said one trait was being a little goofy!  I say surround yourself with good middle school teachers!

Success by chance or choice?

Success by chance or choice!

What a great bunch of staff.  If first impressions are lasting impressions, we are going to be on the map.  It is inevitable.  There seems to be no obstacles to preventing huge growth and great success.

A premise of J. Collins in Good to Great is getting the right people on the bus.  Assembling the right group of people becomes the priority.   It has been done.

The great interactions, the earnest conversations, tweets of #timetoworkinclassrooms and #endthemeeting, and exploring Outlook, SMART boards, technology and discussing what it means for our students and their future as well as ours.  The quotes, the binders, the www.polleverywhere.com stuff, Literacy, www.twitter.com, blogs around the world, does technology reduce relationships? It was a wonderful first day back to school!  The cookies and donuts, the laptops and EVERY SINGLE PERSONS great attitudes. Thank you.

Students do NOT have the right to fail.  Not here.

Winfield Middle School is going to be on the map!

Fun quote for later:  If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space!

Student Centered or Teacher Centered lessons...

How about a story? 
So there we were. Two of us were just assigned a co-teaching assignment, aka CWC, where there were two teachers; a content teacher and a Special Education teacher; to serve a very diverse group of students.  We wondered what it would look like.  During some effective professional development, we were introduced to six techniques for working as a team. 

Our Favorite:  TEAM TEACHING.  In team teaching, both teach at the same time, interacting together in front of the entire class and talking through the content.  The results were often dynamic and interactive after some practice, but tough to pull off if insecurities and competition exist between the two professionals.

While teaching one day, I was standing in the back of the room, "playing" dumb while the other teacher was explaining things to me while I roamed the room and we presented the lesson.  IT WAS WONDERFUL.  The next hour however, I missed the benefit of the co-teacher in the room and felt like an ingredient was missing.
Then it hit me.  I COULD HAVE A STUDENT ACT AS A CO-TEACHER, standing up and writing on the board.  I could continue to roam the room, watch students working at their desks, and "play" dumb in the back of the room.  This evolved into students sharing in the actual instruction, connecting with their peers and actually taking ownership in the learning. 
It was a step away from a teacher centered classroom to a student centered classroom!  It was also fabulous.

Suggestion: Take a risk this year and commit to trying a few new techniques.  Then provide feedback to peers and celebrate successes and failures! 

I heard once, "a wise man learns from other peoples mistakes!"

We may be only Winfield, but we are going to be on the map.

CONTENT: SWBAT...

STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO...

Our leadership team has rallied behind these 7 Cs or our Core Beliefs.  We see these as pivotal components for a successful school, where we measure success by the success of our students...

Content, Culture, Collaborative Teaching, Collective Decisions, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Communication
These 7 topics will form the basis of a series of blogs devoted to student's success, improving teaching and creating great schools from good schools.  Check back regularly for their interpretations.
Content, rigor, fidelity, standards, curriculum, are all terms that describe our subject matter, the things we are mandated to teach and the things students learn.  There are multiple types of content:  Written content, mandated content, planned content, actual content, taught content, tested content, learned content and remembered content, all describing what a student actually "learns" while at school.  As educators, our responsibility is to align these together as tightly as possible.  Our pedagogy should strive to ensure all these adjectives describing our content, with the teaching addressing a thought, idea or content appropriate for our students.  We should strive to teach what the students "need" to know.

The educational PLC model even begins with the corollary question of "What do students need to know?"  At first glance, this seems simple enough.  Teach math. Teach communication arts.  Teach behavior.  Teach procedures.  TEACH PEOPLE.  Help them with what they will need to know.  Equip them with the tools they will need for their futures.  This is where a masterful teacher wants to spend the majority of their time.

Effective teachers are efficient and align all these characteristics but not without struggle.  Not without conflict and not without collaboration and not without help from others.  But that is another C! - Collaboration

Here at Winfield, we have an acronym SWBAT - "students will be able to..."  This expression reminds us that worksheets are only activities and they do not develop dendrites.  What we want students to know is not the same as what we want students to do.  We want them to know, interprets or understand the causes of the Civil War, for instance.  We may use a skit to portray the actions of the Lincoln.

For example:

SWBAT ...  understand the political issues of the middle 1800s  (this strives to describe what the students will learn)

AGENDA...  assign actors to play various roles of that era... (this describes what they will actually do)

SWBAT...  worksheet 4.3  (this tells us nothing about what the students will learn that day)
We put these on the boards, in student friendly language that they can understand, not for us, not for the principals but for the students!

How can we improve what we are doing?

Where could we use extra training?

Beginning the articulation process actually helps define areas needing extra attention.  Self-reflection is key for adult learning as well as student learning...

We may be "only Winfield," but we are going to be on the map!

How do we define good teaching?

What does it take to be a good teacher? 
How do we measure teacher effectiveness? 
"I taught it but they did not learn it!"

There are a few components necessary for students to learn.  Of course one of them is a relationship with a caring adult.  This may not necessarily be with the actual teacher but often times, especially in challenging situations, the teacher must build a bridge into a struggling students life to be able to influence the student to change.  A master teacher often pulls from past experiences many tricks and tools for eliciting the best from students,  lighting the spark of intrinsic motivation and confronting without being confrontational to the point of antagonism, and getting more from the student than others.  This is the relational component and vital for sustained growth.

Continuous assessment for student learning is also vital to determine the pace of instruction, the depth of the content and expectations of higher standards.  Gone are the days where we can administer a single exam and hinge an entire semester or annual grade on that event.  Frequent formal and causal assessments provide a better pulse or picture of student learning.  A pre-assessment, followed by multiple formative tools and wrapped up with a summative component that assembles all the various parts.  Thus we can claim "we taught it" after we verify "they learned it!"

All content hinges on literacy and reading.  These become the backbone, foundation and in some cases a predictor of future success.  A student that lags in their reading will often portray avoidance behaviors that prevent that confrontation that tends to make the struggling reader feel even more discouraged and the cycle continues to exaggerate itself to the point of perceived hopelessness.  Remember hope is another vital component for effort and intrinsic motivation and without hope, there is no reason to try! 

These trends are aligned with the Common Core State Standards ( CCSS ) and there seems to be a direction towards some component of teacher accountability.  From our federal government (NCLB, although Missouri received a waiver) to state provided evaluation documents for teachers and principals, discussions about what it means to be a good teacher are becoming more and more common.

DESE (department of elementary and secondary education) supplies these three resources to articulate in what it means to be a good teacher and expect districts to incorporate similar if not matching rubrics for evaluations.

http://www.dese.mo.gov/eq/ees.htm  (EES = educator evaluation system)

 http://www.dese.mo.gov/eq/documents/eq-ees-teacher-evaluation.pdf  (the teacher evaluation tool)

 http://www.dese.mo.gov/eq/documents/eq-ees-principal-evaluation.pdf   (the principal evaluation tool)

Educators in Missouri would be inclined to review these above documents as provided by our state department of education. 

How do we define good teaching?  Good learning!