A Day with with Janet Allison

Janet Allison, Director Commission on Public Secondary Schools met with steering committee, committee co-chairs and the entire faculty. Here are our notes, and here is Janet's presentation.


Big takeaways from meetings:

• The self-study report should reflect a common understanding of school-wide assessment practices. One suggestion was to use the same student evidence for Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment, which we are in the process of doing.
• Prior to the publication of the final draft, these three committees will share their finding to look for alignment.
• Steering committee will facilitate meetings with central office, support staff (NURSES!) and other stakeholders. A form will go out on Friday, March 16 prompting committees members to articulate their needs. The steering committee will schedule requested meetings.
• Each committee will go through the exercise of self-assessing using the NEAS&C rating guide as a group (these are now on the nchsneasc13.info website).
• We’ve appointed an editing committee for the final draft.
• We will be creating a student work portfolio for the visiting committee to review on Sunday night once they return to the hotel, Examples should be assessed by the 21st century learning expectations rubrics.
• Steering committee will appoint a coordinator to liaise with Endicott and track parent participation. May require some “nudging”. Student participation is scheduled for April.
• Would like to encourage faculty to update their committee’s self-study document (the one embedded in your standard page on the nchsneasc13.info website) with in-progress indicator work. We are aiming for transparency in this process. It is important for the committee to see drafts and revisions (document history) as you acquire evidence and apply it to the self-study as measured by indicators.
• School-wide rubrics and 21st century learning expectations: The visiting committee will expect to see that these are bring used throughout the school and across disciplines.
• The steering committee is compiling a list of community stakeholders to participate in committee work - not necessarily face-to-face, but certainly as a part of the the committee's electronic correspondence.

About Your Friend, the Rubric

Ever feel shackled by a rubric? Like rubrics are trying to drive a wedge between you and your students? NCHS teacher, unchain yourself! Rubrics don’t have that kind of power.

Rubric is one of those words that has a bum rap; just ask any teacher who knew that a project was a C+ when the rubric insisted it was a B. But perception isn’t reality, and rubrics aren’t just for assessment anymore.

More importantly, rubrics are for communication.

Think about it: we want kids to be effective problem solvers, clear communicators, responsible and productive collaborators, among other things. We also need to teach our course content. How do we know how to connect the important content we teach to the important skills they need to learn? Simple: listen to the rubric.

The bullet points in those boxes are the places where our learning expectations reside. They articulate skills that we have always assumed we were teaching, and they show us something we might not have known: that social studies teachers are asking kids to collaborate the same way they do in an engineering class; that science teachers are demanding the same clear communication as English teachers.

By breaking those skills into their constituent parts, and naming those parts, what we teach becomes clearer to us. And by sharing those expectations with students, they know exactly what they should know. That’s communication, baby.

Then, when students hand in their work, we use the rubric to let them know where they are in their understanding of our learning expectations, and give them a chance to tell us how they plan to improve. So the cycle of communication between teachers and students, with the rubric as common ground, continues to clarify and specify exactly what we want students to achieve.

And we all live happily ever after.

Community Resources for Learning Meeting Update

On March 6, 2012 the Community Resources for Learning Committee met in the NCHS Career Center. The purpose of the meeting was to assess our progress on evidence collection and begin discussion on writing a rough draft for the narrative. The following people attended the meeting and participated in the collaborative effort toward the Community Resources Committee tasks: Rachel Alpert, Jean Bakes, Katie Bakes, John Barone, Linda Brooks, Lisa Floryshak-Windman, Emily Hernberg, Amanda Langlais, Lori Lewandoski, Arri Weeks, Sandy Warkentin & Lenore Schnieder. After discussing the evidence collection, committee members met in small groups to delegate tasks relating to specific indicators. Evidence was organized, cover sheets were completed and new to-do lists were created for each indicator. Each group will start to draft a paragraph that will be added to the Community Resources Narrative. The purpose of the next meeting will be to continue to work on the narrative paragraphs.

Email to committee co-chairs following March faculty meeting

Hello all, 

Thanks for all your hard work over the past few weeks! In anticipation of CAPT week, we would like to get all the evidence boxes down to the copy center to make sure that there are copies of evidence for each standard identified on the cover sheet. Michelle can coordinate that effort if you bring the boxes to the copy center. The link to the digital evidence submissions is on the evidence page at http://nchsneasc13.info.

We added "what to look for" for each indicator to the standards pages on the http://nchsneasc13.info website as well. You have this in hard copy - it was given to you during the January 20th faculty meeting as part of your packet. 

We also added the work flow timeline to the http://nchsneasc13.info website homepage. 

While completing evidence cover sheets, Many folks asked how to find their curricular standards. This issue was raised at the last department meeting, and we are formulating a plan to aggregate that information and make it more accessible. 

Finally, if you are looking for exemplars, there are sample narratives on the NEAS&C website.

Have a wonderful weekend, and thank you again!

nchsneasc13

Student and Community Involvement Subcommittee Update

After APs, when sufficient evidence is collected, and the drafts are nearing their initial submission stage, it will be important to expand your committee to include parents and students. Many districts do this from the get go, at the beginning of the self-study process. Our NCHS Student and Community Involvement Subcommittee is organizing groups of 14 parents and students - 2 of each for each standard committee - who will function as sounding boards as we progress through our self-study. We anticipate that we will be ready to integrate these additional members into our standards committees after the AP exams. While it may not be critical to include these community liaisons in your face-to-face meetings, it will be important to include them in standards committee correspondence, and to give them an opportunity to review the drafts.

Post by Christina Russo

While writing my PEGS mid-year reflection, it occurred to me how perfectly aligned the My Personal Wellness project was with the NCHS Core Values, Beliefs and Expectations, RTDC (responsive teaching for the differentiated classroom), and Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. This collaborative 9^th grade, health/ICT project gives students the opportunity to self-reflect on the 6 dimensions of wellness (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social and environmental), choose from a variety of resources for their own learning,  evaluate, analyze, and synthesize information to make healthy choices, set goals for a healthy and balanced life, communicate effectively, and become inpendent learners.

Reflection Rubric Revision Process

English Department Meeting
February 1, 2012:
Revision of Reflection Rubric

Process for piloting the reflection rubric:

At the January department meeting, members of the English department were charged with piloting the reflection rubric developed in a NEASC group. Teachers paired with another member of the department in order to debrief their findings before we met in February. We had approximately one month to design, implement and gather student feedback about the clarity and purpose of the reflection task and rubric. Approximately 600 students from thirty sections of classes ranging from freshmen to seniors participated in the pilot.

Reporting from teachers:

Hannah and Jim:

Hannah’s classes did a mid-year reflection on writing goals. She asked if the goal was achievable, did you reflect successfully on your own learning.

Insights from data:

Student reflections were not specific, and therefore students need to learn to reflect.

Students were confused on the meaning of the last two boxes on the rubric in which they were asked to reflect on the reflection.

Jim’s students were asked to reflect on the midyear exam as well. They were asked to reflect on the mid-year exam and articulate their strengths and weaknesses. He asked how they progressed from their last reflection.

Insights from data:

Students echoed the first reflection.

Kat and Aaron:

Kat’s junior classes reflected on the research process having completed the research paper.

Insights from data:

Do reflections sooner, frequently during the research process so students can modify their goals along the way.

The paradigm of ‘with minimal guidance” or “independently…” was hard to grade.

Aaron:

Seniors used the course reflection journals to evaluate their progress in the class.

Insights from data:

Students could evaluate progress because it was a regular part of the class.

At this point in the meeting, the discussion opened up to all members. Teachers began to focus on themes regarding student reflection. Here are some of the insights from that discussion.

· We need to teach students how to reflect. Reflections over time will increase student investment

· How do we teach them to reflect? Set goals at the beginning of the year or quarter. Knowing you will need to reflect, knowing that you will look at skills closely on a regular basis to understand how you have grown will help students increase capacity to reflect

· Reflection helps students be accountable for their learning. Students whether they are upper classmen or in honors does not guarantee that they know how to reflect

· Students need to take into account teacher and peer feedback when reflecting

· Important to reflect after formative assessment

· Concern about the current scale used on the NEASC rubrics because so many boxes fall below goal; need to understand the reasoning behind this

Proposals for the revision of the reflection rubric, based on student feedback and teacher observation:

1. Provide a brief context for the rubric by distinguishing between the two types of reflection it will assess.

2. Reorder dimensions of performance to mirror the logical sequence of reflection

• Gathering and evaluation of materials
• Drawing conclusions from those materials
• Setting goals based on those conclusions

3. A subcommittee of English department members will move forward and apply synthesized student and teacher feedback to the rubric before bringing it to the faculty.

Post-Meeting Discussion

The reflection rubric plays the role of supporting skill-specific expectations in subject areas; in and of itself, the rubric is a cross-disciplinary measure for the reflective habits of mind that serve as a schoolwide 21^st century learning expectation.

Within a discipline, "Advanced" performance on reflection will tell the students and the teacher when it is time to develop more challenging expectations. Students may then seem to go backward in their reflection practice, when in reality they may be making the adjustment to a new set of expectations. The rubric should be designed with the a sense of increasingly challenging expectations in mind.

• In short, the purpose of the reflection rubric is to help students develop the skills/habits of mind to successfully deal with increasingly challenging expectations in their courses.
  

NCHS Faculty Meeting January 19, 2012

Post in progress

Changes to the nchsneasc13.info website

Example of personalization

If anyone is looking for evidence of student work that integrates reading, writing, speaking and multimedia; if anyone is looking for evidence of personalization; if any is looking for outstanding application of technology to curriculum, have I got a website for you.

Check it out, but beware: there is a bit of salty language here and there.

www.plogbost.tumblr.com

Mike

Evidence collection & more

We spent some time today planning for evidence collection.

We placed evidence boxes in four department offices. Each box is labeled with its respective standard. We will add more as we collect more boxes.

We also revised the evidence submission cover sheet, merging elements from the CAS-provided template and the form used by the science department during its recent Tri-State visit.

We set up a YouTube channel, and cloned our blog, giving all certified faculty editing rights.

We also created 60 posters of our Core Values/Beliefs and Learning Expectations - one for each classroom. We will distribute them to the department chairs at next Tuesday's meeting.

Finally, we are working on developing a digital companion form to the hard-copy evidence submission cover sheet. There is still some debate as to how this will be used, but we feel there is sufficient justification to warrant creating the form.

Question of the Week: December 19, 2011

What does personalization mean in your classroom?

Post-faculty meeting NEAS&C activity

After the faculty meeting today, Mike explained that we are officially moving into the self-study phase of our review process. To this end, he introduced our NEAS&C activity for the afternoon.

We distributed the standards booklets, and introduced the 4 Themes 4 ED (see image on left). This was one of the activities from the Connecticut Association of Schools' (CAS) NEAS&C workshop we attended last week. 

Grouped according to standards committees, the faculty identified which theme(s) were association with which standards indicators. Then we passed around the mic to share out which indicators addressed the theme of personalization (there is an audio record of that).


We introduced the NCHSNEASC13 blog as a vehicle for continuing the conversation between meetings. We have a limited number of face-to-face meetings left this year, but we hope to use the blog to share anecdotes about our teaching and learning experiences with students to help our colleagues better understand what we do in our daily practice that addresses the NEAS&C standards. Mike posted an example in the last blog entry.


We aslo discussed plans to start collecting evidence after the winter break. It is important to start this process soon so that we have a full year's evidence when the visiting committee arrives.


Next up: January 19th faculty meeting with our NEAS&C Director,  Janet Allison.
After that: The community survey
Handout: NEAS&C First Newsletter
Resource: NEAS&C website



4 Themes 4 ED by mluhtala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at nchsneasc13.info.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://nchslibrary.info.

Mike McAteer's Pick a Poetry Project Project

While I hate the “no wrong answer” bias that students bring into poetry class, I also know that I have no single right answer about what poetry is. Some students are drawn to traditional poetry, some are drawn to children’s poetry, some are inspired by performance poetry, some want to read epic poems, others just like to be subversive. Taking all these factors into account, and knowing that any study of poetry has to involve some combination of reading, writing and speaking, I’ve developed my Pick a Poetry Project project. In this unit, students have to find their own resources, organize their time, and have an outcome in mind. While they may not all end up on task every moment of the day when we’re working on this project, it has resulted in some very provocative work.

NEAS&C Seminar CAS 12/5 & 12/6

Just spent two days in a NEAS&C Steering Committee seminar at Connecticut Association of Schools in Cheshire. It was daunting. Most attendees' visit is scheduled for 2014, and at this point, we have a lot to do.
My notes look more like a giant ToDo list. Mike and Bryan took notes also. One thing I would like to focus on next is merging our notes and putting together a timeline starting backwards. I think it will reduce some of the anxiety I currently feel about time.
NCHS sent a team of 5: Anthony Bloss, Kris Goldhawk, Bryan Luizzi, Mike McAteer, and Michelle Luhtala

Message to faculty about rubric development

Hello Colleagues,

Thank you all for the hard work you put into rubric writing last week. While we received a lot of positive feedback, we also know that this process is not at all easy. As we follow Thursday’s faculty meeting with rubric revision time, it’s important that we maintain perspective on the current task.

When we unanimously passed our statement on Core Values, Beliefs and Learning Expectations, we stated that we want our students to be “active participants in their learning,” by which we mean that we want them to choose resources, set goals, self-monitor, self-assess and reflect. In order to achieve this goal, we need to provide concrete information about our expectations, and that’s where the rubrics come in.

The Process

Now, the process is messy, and where we are right now is near the end of the first stage of a three-stage process:

1. Stage one: We draft rubrics.
2. Stage two: We use them in pilot form to communicate with students about the work we’re asking them to do, and then ask the students to assess their work using the rubric, while we do the same. From this, we identify the challenges and advantages of using the rubrics to communicate with students and assess student work, and we make recommendations for changes.
3. Stage three: We revise the rubrics based on the data collected from the pilot experiment.

A Pressing Concern: Assessment

If there was one overarching concern expressed on our PD Day, it was, “But I can’t see how I’ll use this rubric to assess my students.” If you were one of the ones saying this, you’re probably right.

But this raises misconception number one: that our NEASC rubrics are for assessment. What we are working on are analytical rubrics, not assessment rubrics. While they will be used for assessment, their primary function is to clearly communicate expectations. If we think of them as communication of our learning expectations so that students can be “active participants,” the writing may be a bit easier.

In addition, you may not ever use the problem-solving rubric, for example. But if we can all speak the same language and communicate the same expectations when students are solving problems in our disciplines, you can imagine the effective habits of mind students will develop as they go through all our subjects in ninth grade, in tenth grade…you can see where we’re going. The clearer we are about what we want our students to do, the more quickly they will internalize our school’s standards for their performance.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. If we can understand the stages of the process, our work can be much easier on Thursday.

See you then.

Your Friends on the Steering Committee

Professional Development Day - Rubrics

Click on picture
to see slideshow

We spent election day 2011 developing rubrics for our 21st century learning expectations. We used the NCHSNEASC13 website rubric page to access the instructions and rubric template, then brainstormed to develop indicators for each expectation. This is slide show of our day's activity.


 
 

Leadership meeting

The NEAS&C Steering Committee met with the Standards Committee co-chairs to assign expectations to standards committees and determine which departments would pilot which expectations rubrics.

We also reviewed the agenda for the Nov. 8 Professional Development day, and articipants gave feedback on the NCHSNEASC13 website's new rubric page.

It was recommended that we remove the points, values and total columns and rows from the NCHS rubric template to minimize confusion.

NEAS&C activities for November 8th PD Day

The faculty sent in several more rubrics this week, so we reassessed our meeting needs and called a quick twenty minute after school meeting with steering committee and committee co-chairs on Monday, November 7th from 2:15-2:35. At the meeting we will review the following day's activities.

As PD leaders, Cathy and Chris offered to develop a Checklist for the PD day, which was quite helpful.

Steering Committee meeting canceled

A freak October snowstorm set us back some. Since two school days were canceled, our scheduled November 1st steering committee meeting was also canceled. Our original plan to review and filter NCHS rubrics with the steering committee was deferred to the PD Day on November 8th. Mike emailed the steering committee about the new plan.