The mission of Venture Academy is to equip students to achieve their highest potential through individual, flexible and structured educational experiences that enhance their academic growth and prepare them for lifelong learning and success.
Do you have students who are failing?
If so, then please call home. Communication with our families is not just our responsibility, but can also be an avenue for building parent trust and improving student outcomes. A couple of pointers about calling home (I know you already know this, but I'll repeat it anyway!):
Start with the positive- parents need to know that you care and that you LIKE their child
Be direct and frank about the issue. Describe the situation without judgment or editorializing. Try to use words that de-escalate rather than provoke. For example do not say: Johnny stole ten dollars off my desk" Instead say, "Johnny took a ten dollar bill off my desk and put it in his pocket." Instead of "Sally cheated." Say "Sally was looking at notes during a test, which is against the rules"
Ask parents for their ideas and input. They appreciate this and helps build trust.
Have a suggestion to improve the situation (staying during the extended learning time for two evenings a week)
End on a positive note.
Thank you, Whitney, for sending this link. We've talked about the subject, but it's worth a review.
Monday 1/16/17 Martin Luther King Jr. Day - No School Tuesday 1/17/17 Wednesday 1/18/17 MTSS Collaboration Visit. Eastman and Kaiser in Plummer Thursday 1/19/17- Friday 1/20/17 Monday 1/23/17 Non Work Day Tuesday 1/24/17 Wednesday 1/25/17 Thursday 1/26/17- Friday 1/27/17 ****IMPORTANT**** Students should NEVER be sent home by a teacher in the classroom. If they are sick or misbehaving, they need to be sent to the office. The phone call to pick up a student must always come from the office. If they come to the office, they can be seen by the nurse and we can make the relevant calls. The exception to this would be the extended learning time and calling for parents to pick kids up who are staying late. Upcoming Conferences
Trimester 2 parent conferences are scheduled for Thursday, February 16 from 4 -7 pm. We will notify parents via email newsletter and Heidi will send out a couple of email blasts to parents. If you have a student who is not passing, please phone home. Discuss the situation on the phone, provide some solutions (using extended learning time etc.) invite them to the conference, and make sure they know we value the student, the family and their input.
Conferences provide a perfect opportunity to showcase student work in the commons area. Senior projects, essays, encouraging class data (without student names), science projects etc. could be on display for parents to see while they enjoy the soup dinner Val is serving. Be thinking about some artifacts of student learning that could make for a display. Come see me if you have some ideas.
Accreditation: An accreditation external review team will be visiting Venture on February 7 and 8. They will be visiting classrooms, interviewing staff, students and families as part of their review. Heather has been leading the process of gathering survey data, achievement data and organizing Venture's work. We will be discussing this more at our next staff mtg, but I wanted to give you plenty of time to prepare your students and lessons for visitors.
Student Bulletin: Heidi has graciously agreed to read a student/staff bulletin on Tuesday mornings at the beginning of second block. I know this will take a few minutes from your class (3-5 is my estimate) however, the benefit of having one message that goes out to all students weekly is worth the time. Any information that you think could be included in the bulletin should be sent to me and Heidi each week. This can be anything from shout outs about cool things kids have done, to reminders of upcoming events, to inspirational quotes that you'd like to share. Heidi will also print the bulletin and put it in your mailboxes. Please insist that students are quiet and listening as the bulletin is read. If additional questions or concerns come up, they might provide some
Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How The Mind Works And What It Means For The Classroom
Chapter 2: How Can I Teach Students the Skills They Need
When Standardized Tests Require Only Facts?
Big Idea: Factual knowledge must precede
skill
Remember the quote attributed to
Einstein: “Imagination is more important
than knowledge”? The author contends
that knowledge is more important, because it’s a prerequisite for imagination
that leads to problem solving, decision making, and creativity. The author notes that a movement is underway
to avoid teaching of facts and that ridicules “knowing things.” However, the most respected cognitive process
– logical thinking, problem solving etc.- are intertwined with knowledge. Facts without skills are of little value, but
thinking skills cannot be deployed without factual knowledge.
Knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. Background knowledge allows chunking, which
makes more room in working memory, which makes it easier to relate ideas and
therefore to comprehend. Because knowing things makes it easier to learn new
things, and because children from underprivileged homes have a smaller
vocabulary and fewer experiences to build background knowledge, the gap between
privileged and underprivileged kids widens every year.
Background knowledge is necessary for cognitive skills. Background
knowledge makes you a better reader and is necessary to be a good thinker. Much of the time when someone seems engaged in
logical thinking, he or she is actually engaged in memory retrieval. Memory is the cognitive process of first
resort.
Factual knowledge improves your memory. People who have experience in a field, say football
for instance, and people without experience can read the same simple
story. Those with background knowledge
and experience will remember the story better, even though both groups
understood the story when they read it.
The more you already know, the easier it is to learn more. This is because when you have background knowledge,
your mind connects the material you’re reading with what you already know, even
when you’re not aware that it’s happening.
Implications for the classroom:
Evaluate which knowledge to instill:
1.Teach the material that the author assumes students
already know and left out. (The author of whatever text you're reading)
2.Teach the concepts that come up again and again.
Be sure the knowledge base is
mostly in place before you require critical thinking. This is really important, because asking students to use critical thinking too soon will turn them off completely.
Shallow knowledge is better than no knowledge.
Sometimes a brief explanation is
all that’s necessary for learning to continue. To much droning on about at topic is boring and defeats the purpose of filling in background knowledge so they can engage with the topic.
Do whatever you can to get kids to read.
Because it builds background knowledge.
Knowledge acquisition can be incidental.
Knowledge can be folded into the
school day. Stories, documentaries, math
problems, etc. can contain information that builds a knowledge base. Look for opportunities.
Start early.
Children who start behind in terms
of knowledge, will fall even further behind unless there is an intervention.
Knowledge must be meaningful.
Knowledge pays off when it’s
conceptual and when the facts are related to each other. Learning lists of facts is a curiosity
killer.
You may have already seen this in circulation on Facebook. If not, it's worth watching.
Monday 1/9/17 Venture Collaboration Day...8:00 CPR training in Library ($10 for card) Agenda Here Tuesday 1/10/17 7:30 -2:00 SAT summit Wednesday 1/11/17 Thursday 1/12/17- Friday 1/13/17 Monday 1/16/17 Martin Luther King Jr. Day - No School Tuesday 1/17/17 Wednesday 1/18/17 Thursday 1/19/17- Friday 1/20/17 Senior Mentors: Please talk to your students about the FAFSA deadline. The actual deadline is Feb. 15
I read a really good book over Christmas break, Why Don't Students Like School? We're at that time of year when reading time is at a premium (is there any other time of year???) So, I'm going to be pulling some key ideas out of each chapter and sharing them here each week. Don't tell the English teachers, but I'm not a good summarizer, so they are mostly sentences just pulled from the pages that seemed worthwhile to me.
My overview and thoughts about….
Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions
About How The Mind Works And What It Means For The Classroom
Chapter 1: Why don’t
students like school?
The book opens with the observation that while people are
curious, they are not naturally good thinkers and will avoid thinking unless
cognitive conditions are right.
BIG IDEA: People are naturally curious, but not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.
·The pleasure is in the solving of the problem.
Working on a problem with no sense that progress is being made is not
pleasurable – it is frustrating.
·There is not much pleasure in just knowing the
answer – so being told the solution to a problem is not fun.
·Even if there are too many hints given, the
pleasure is lost.
·Mental work is appeals to us because it offers
the opportunity for the pleasant feeling when it succeeds.
Curiosity is fragile.
Sometimes content can prompt interest, but it won’t maintain
it. The author shares a story of looking
forward to the eighth grade sex talk and then quickly being bored by it. He marvels at the ability of a teacher to
bore hormonal adolescents with the subject of sex. So, how can interest be maintained? First, understand how thinking works:
Four factors are required for thinking:
·Information from the environment
·Facts stored in long-term memory
·Procedures stored in long-term memory
·Space available in working memory
Thinking
is mostly about remembering and following a previous course of action. So, people find successful thinking enjoyable
and will selectively seek out challenges that seem solvable because those
challenges/problems lead to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. So, for problem-solving to be successful and
satisfying, the thinker needs enough information from the environment, enough
information stored in long-term memory, the right procedures stored in
long-term memory, and room in the working memory.
Implications for the classroom:
·Make sure there
are problems to solve.
Problems = cognitive work that poses moderate
challenge – things like understanding a poem or thinking or novel uses
for recyclable materials.
Avoid long strings of teacher explanations with
little opportunity for students to solve problems.
With each lesson, consider the cognitive
work the students will do. How often does this work occur in the lesson?
Does it get intermixed with cognitive breaks at least every 15 to 20
minutes?
Will the problem or
challenge be satisfyingly “solvable” or frustrating?
·Respect
students’ cognitive limits.
Do they have the necessary background knowledge
in memory to consider the question? If they lack the appropriate
background knowledge, they will quickly judge the question as “boring”.
If they lack the background knowledge to engage with a problem, save it
for another time when they have that knowledge.
Remember working memory limits. People can keep
only so much information in mind at once. Multistep instructions, lists
of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long,
and applying a just-learned concept to new material (unless quite simple)
overloads working memory. If students already struggle with reading or
writing, the working memory is already under considerable stress.
The solution to working memory overload is to
slow the pace, use memory aids like writing on the blackboard that save
students from keeping too much information in working memory.
·Clarify
problems to solve.
How can you make the problem interesting? Curiosity gets provoked when we perceive
a problem that we believe we can solve. So, what is the question that will
engage students and help them want to know the answer?
Sometimes we feel so anxious for our students to
know the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the questions.
But the questions pique people’s interest. Someone’s telling you an
answer doesn’t do anything for you.
When planning a lesson, start with the
information you want students to know at its end, then consider what
might work best as the key
questions that will have the right
level of difficulty to engage your students while you respect their
cognitive limits.
·Reconsider when
to puzzle students.
Sometimes questions are used to draw a student
into the lesson. But consider
whether you might use these after
they have learned the basic concepts. If students don’t know the basic
principles behind a demonstration it seems like a magic trick. They get a
momentary thrill, but their curiosity to learn may not be long lasting.
Another strategy might involve doing the
demonstration after students know the principle involved. Every fact or demonstration that
would puzzle students before they have the relevant background knowledge
has the potential to become an experience that will puzzle students momentarily later, and then lead
to the pleasure of problem solving.
·Accept and
act on variation in student preparation.
You do not need to accept that “some students
just are not very bright” and so we ought to track them into less
demanding classes. But, its naive to pretend that all students come to
your class equally prepared to excel. Students have different
preparations, as well as different levels of support at home. They differ
in their abilities. To the extent that you can, you will benefit your
students and yourself to assign
work to individuals or groups of students appropriate to their current
level of competence. Naturally, you need to do this in a sensitive
way, minimizing the extent to which some students will judge themselves as
behind others and create helpless beliefs by attributing this to
permanent, unchangeable personal characteristics.
·Change the
pace.
We all lose the attention of our students, at
times, and this happens more often when they feel confused. They mentally
check out. Happily, we can fairly easily get them back. How?
Change
grabs attention. When you
change topics, start a new activity, or in some other way show that you
have shifted gears, virtually every student’s attention will come back to
you and you will have a new chance to engage them. So plan shifts and
monitor your class’s attention to see if you need to change things more
often or less frequently – about 3 times per class.
·Keep a diary
or lesson notes. T
The core idea in this chapter involves the fact
that solving a problem gives people pleasure, but the the problem must be
easy enough to solve yet difficult enough to take some mental effort. (Think Goldilocks - or better yet, think Zone of Proximal Development, or think Productive Struggle)
Your
experience in the classroom serves as your best guide: whatever works, do
again; whatever doesn’t, discard. But don’t expect that you will really
remember how well a lesson plan worked a year later.
Whether a lesson goes brilliantly well or down
in flames, we tend to think at the time that we will never forget what
happened; but the ravages of memory can surprise us, so write it down. Even if just a
quick scratch on a sticky note, make a habit of recording your success in
gauging the level of difficulty in the problem you pose for your
students.
