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.
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.
Monday 1/2/17 No school Tuesday 1/3/17 Students return from Winter break; Wednesday 1/4/17 Thursday 1/5/17- Friday 1/6/17 - Monday 1/9/17 Venture Collaboration Day...8:00 CPR training in Library ($10 for card) Tuesday 1/10/17 7:30 -2:00 SAT summit Wednesday 1/11/17 Thursday 1/12/17-
Friday 1/13/17 HUGE SHOUT OUT..... to Val, Angie,Whitney, and Heidi!!!! Thank you for the two AMAZING holiday dinners you provided for students, families and staff and guests! Thanks to your outstanding planning and preparation, the dinners were perfect. The cookies were such a nice bonus for families, and everybody loved the cupcakes! And... the tables were so pretty! I hope you all had a chance to see the hand painted invitations that Heidi made ... they were incredible! I know I speak for the entire staff when I thank you, Val, Angie, Whitney, and Heidi for the beautiful and thoughtful effort you gave to the holiday dinners.
Another HUGE SHOUT OUT... to Bryan Alexander and Angie!!!!
Thank you for volunteering your time to Heroes and Holidays. Thanks to the many people, like Bryan and Angie, many children enjoyed a fun holiday experience. We appreciate all you do to support our community!
A Must See Video about Whitney Elementary in Las Vegas...
This video, Click Heretells of a high-poverty school that changed the way they do business and became a high-performing school. We are implementing some of these strategies. I wonder if we might glean some ideas from Whitney Elementary.
Bus Duty: Thomas (PM) Hook (AM) Monday 12/12 7:00 cross district collaboration8:30Collaboration: Library; Agenda Tuesday 12/13 Wednesday 12/14 Thursday 12/15- Holiday Feast; activity schedule Friday 12/16 - Extended Learning and the Absent Student
If students are absent or are missing work for any reason, please remember to assign Extended Learning time for them. The form can be found here and is also linked on the right hand side of the page. If students aren't using extended learning time, please call home. If they are not taking advantage of the many opportunities offered to help them keep abreast of their work, then I can talk to them about whether this is the best placement for them. I believe most kids will follow through when they really understand how the program works. However, many kids will also try find loop holes in the system. This coming week is an ideal time to assign extended learning, call home if they aren't attending, and let me know if these efforts aren't working so I can follow up with students and parents.
Happy Holidays
I want to thank all of you for your patience and willingness to continue to brainstorm through some very complicated issues. Virtually nothing we do is "business-as-usual" in the traditional sense of education. We continually find solutions to problems that can feel quite insurmountable. Your persistence and determination make a difference. Thank you for your commitment to serve some of the most vulnerable people living in our area. Any school would be lucky to have you as part of their staff, but you chose Venture. What you're doing is good for the kids and I feel very, very lucky to be part of this staff. I wish you a week-before-Christmas that is less stressful than you fear, and a holiday that is much more relaxing than you'd hoped for.
Week of November 28 Monday 11/28 - No School/Non work day Tuesday 11/29- Kaiser, Beck, Higgs, Flieger, Hamill at a conference through Friday Wednesday 11/30 - Thursday 12/1 Friday 12/2 Monday 12/5 No School/Non work day Thursday 12/8 Parent conferences and Holiday Dine in Friday 12/9 Celebration Assembly Monday 12/12- Collaboration 8:00 Library Vocabulary Practice:
During our Collaboration time on Monday 12/12, please bring one vocabulary word relevant to your content area and prepare to teach it to your small group using the key points from the handout Diane shared with us on Nov. 14.
Following is a video demonstrating high-engagement vocabulary instruction. These are younger students, however, the strategies can be adapted to apply for our students.
New Attendance Policy The school leadership team has been working on an attendance policy that best meets the needs of our students. If ever there were a situation that defies the best efforts of policy makers, it would be attendance. Regardless of our intentions, high hopes, and final policies, something always comes up that didn't fit anywhere in our planning. However, we are a steadfast group and moved ahead with determination and enduring optimism to create the new....
Venture High School Attendance Policy
Students whose attendance exceeds 5 absences in any class per trimester will lose their credit. At the end of each trimester, a student will have the option to retrieve their credit by the following process:
The student will need to conference with their teacher.
The student/teacher will provide the designated admin evidence of mastery.
If a student cannot show evidence of mastery, the grade will become an “Incomplete”.
A student with an Incomplete will have 2 weeks to complete the requirements. If the requirements are not met the student will receive a failing grade.
What works about this plan:
There is still a motivation to stay in school and not withdraw at 6 days of absence.
There is a policy in place that we can refer to for other things like DOT and student driver's licences.
They aren't retaking classes for which they've already met all requirements.
It accommodates students with a variety of issues that interfere with attendance.
It maintains a focus on meeting standards and competencies.
What doesn't work about this plan: Probably lots of things that will be revealed over time, but we can move forward with this and adjust as necessary. More on Attendance:
Currently our attendance rate is critically low - in the past two weeks we've vacillated from 82% - 89% On the positive side, this number represents students who might have dropped out were it not for Venture. However, raising attendance is crucial to our students' success. It is painful to hear students ask, "do I need to come tomorrow, we aren't doing anything?" Obviously, students will say things like this when there is little basis in reality for the statement. However, we all need to work to ensure that every day feels like an important day to be in school. Things like movie days, make up days, game days etc. can feel like "skip days" to kids who already struggle to make school a priority. Mission Statement Thank you to everyone who contributed to our mission statement and is working with kids to make it meaningful for them.
At Venture High School, our mission is to help students...
Engage
Encourage
Excel
When talking about the mission we can use the attached sentences to expand on our thinking.
Senior Mentoring: Please be sure you've met with your seniors this week. We will have a short sharing time for highlights, suggestions, questions during our staff meeting on Monday.
Monday 11/14 - 7:00 Cross district collaboration; Venture Collaboration - Agenda here. Tuesday 11/15 - MTSS All day, Kaiser, Eastman, Chase Wednesday 11/16 - Thursday 11/17 - Friday 11/18 - Last Day of Trimester Monday 11/21 - 8-12:00 Grades due by noon Something to Consider with Student Feedback:
