Are you a marigold or a walnut tree?

Over the summer I saw this article online.  It is from 2013 but is so relevant each year at school, no matter how long you have been teaching, and in your personal life.

The article talks about finding your "marigold".  Marigolds are often planted near vegetable or other plants.  They are planted nearby because they protect many plants from harmful weeds and bugs.  Marigolds also help the other plants flourish and grow better than average.  In our school, a "marigold" is a peer who helps us grow throughout the year.  They may support us emotionally one day and with curriculum the next.  A "marigold" is the first person to pick you up on a bad day and help you get through it.  They are also the first person to celebrate a successful lesson/day/year with you.  You may have multiple "marigolds" depending on the day and situation. Seek out your "marigold"!  Our school is full of "marigolds".  Who are yours?

On the opposite end are walnut trees. Walnut trees are toxic.  They inhibit growth of plants nearby and eventually kill everything around them.  Many gardners try to avoid planting anything near walnut trees. All of us have our days/moments when we are "walnut trees".  But try not to live as a "walnut tree".  Some teachers are more "walnut tree" than "marigold".  Some teachers are more "marigold" than "walnut tree".

Surround yourself with many "marigolds" and grow.  We are all in this together and the more we are each others "marigolds", the more our students will benefit, which in the end, is the ultimate goal.

Welcome Back!

Welcome Back!

Hopefully everyone enjoyed their summer and is slowly starting to settle into the school year.

I am personally very excited for this school year.  The goals developed by the SAIL team for the school year will give us a great focus and help to improve North and our students for years to come.  As we develop our students to be well-rounded young adults, we need to remember to be well-rounded adults ourselves.  Being well-rounded adults means taking time for yourself and your family away from work.  Make sure to take time away from work each weekend and just enjoy! This will leave you refreshed and ready to put your best foot forward each day at work.  (My husband used to give me a maximum of 4 hours for the whole weekend to do work stuff. And then he would take everything away from me!)

As we start to get into the school year, feel free to stop in with things you need support with in the classroom.  I will do my best to support you in anyway I can.  If you want to schedule an appointment with me please use ktorzala.youcanbook.me to see when I am available.

I look forward to working with everyone throughout the school year.

Kristin

End of Year Educator Effectiveness

It's that time of year!  Time to finish your Educator Effectiveness work for your end of the year evaluation.

So what do you all need to do?

1.  SLO - For your SLO you need to give your final assessment to determine if your student group has met the goal you set out for them.  After the assessment, complete an ASW form.  Once you have looked at your data, fill out the end-of-interval section on the SLO document you started at the beginning of the year.

2. SLO Scoring Rubric - Your next step will be to think about your score for your SLO.  A scoring rubric is available on the Google Classroom for Educator Effectiveness.  Look this over before your meeting to gauge what you think your score will be.

3.  PPG - Complete your end-of-year review on the PPG document you started at the beginning of the year.

4. Self-Review - Look at your self-review from the beginning of the year and, informally, reflect on where you feel you are now.  During your end-of-the-year meetings, you will discuss with your administrator or myself your scores on each component. Know where you feel you are to promote good discussion.

5. Artifacts - Artifacts should be collected for each component in Domain 1 and 4, for your SLO, and your PPG.  Each year, whether on summary year or not, you will be collecting artifacts.  Come up with an organized system that works for you to collect your artifacts.  (Many different templates have been shared as ideas. If you want to see them, just ask or look on Google Classroom.) You should have a couple artifacts for each component but you can use the same artifact in multiple places.  Remember to identify the year you added the artifact.   Your artifact collector should be shared with your administrator by April 30th, so they can start reviewing them prior to your end of the year meeting.  Make sure all your links are able to be opened by your administrator.

Quality over quantity, keep that in mind.

6. Schedule meeting - You will need to schedule an end of the year meeting with your cooperating administrator if you are on summary year.  (Details regarding the deadline for this will be out shortly.)  If you are not on summary year, you need to schedule a meeting with me on ktorzala.youcanbook.me.

If you would like to meet with me prior to discuss end of the year stuff, please schedule a meeting with me at ktorzala.youcanbook.me.

As always, let me know if you have any questions!  The end of the year is near :)

A little bit of stuff. Part 2

Purposeful classroom environment
When was the last time you really spruced up the environment of your classroom? When did you last update the "things" on your wall?

Many teachers have gotten better at displaying student work on walls, creating word walls, and making student centered/created anchor charts.  But does everything on your walls have a purpose in your current unit? Or do you just leave everything up and not really change it?

When putting things up, make sure they have a current purpose in your classroom. Change things that are on the wall regularly.  Have the walls work for you and your students.  Make reference during lessons to what is displayed on the walls.

Collecting Artifacts
Have you started collecting artifacts for your end of the year evaluation?  Collecting artifacts doesn't have to take a ton of time if you spend a little time each week working on one.  Schedule fifteen minutes each week to pick an artifact, assign it to components, and write the reflection.

Always remember it is quality over quantity.  For example, a project thoroughly laid out, showing differentiation for students, and project objectives, could hit every component in domain 1: planning and preparation.  You need to collect artifacts for domains one and four.  You only have to collect artifacts for domains two and three if you feel it is necessary.

Collecting artifacts is a large part of your evaluation.  Even if you are not on summary year, you must be collecting artifacts.  During your summary year, your evaluator will look through your body of work, over the full three year period, to determine your "score" for each component.

How you collect artifacts is up to you.  Just be sure everything is able to be viewed by your evaluator.
If you want help with collecting artifacts, feel free to contact me or your administrator.

A little bit of stuff!

Often teachers ask questions about the walk through feedback or just questions on general topics in our building.  So here is a little on a few of the topics that have come up recently.

Anchor Charts: Many teachers have drastically improved the creation and usage of anchor charts in their classrooms. But are those anchor charts still relevant to what you are doing today, or are you just leaving them up because they are pretty? Now that you all are comfortable with creating them, push yourselves to find ways to have your students create them or co-create them with you.

Increasing the "I do": Model your thoughts. Model your way of doing something. Activate prior knowledge.  The more you model, the more successful our students can be.  Check out my blog from November 23, 2015 on this topic.

SAMR and the ONE Conference: Now that the ONE conference is done, what are you doing to level up?  Start with "leveling up" one lesson, in one class, and expand from there.  If you currently "live in" Substitution, start moving more of your lessons into Augmentation.  Remember you can't always live in "Redefinition", visit there when you are ready.

All of us fill out an "I commit" tag.  What did you commit to doing? Are you actively working to committing to what you wrote?  What can you do to accomplish the commitment you made?

Conferring vs Touching Base: Conferring and "touching base" with students are very similar things.  The main difference is the purpose of the conversations happening.  When conferring, you have a specific content focus.  There tends to be more teacher:student collaboration when conferring and the
student drives much of the conversation.  The picture to the right shows the roles of the student and the teacher when conferring. When you "touch base", it may be just a quick check in, "how are you doing?", "Your grade is this and this is what you need to do to improve it".

Check out this article for more on conferring!

Leveling up: Getting ready for the Waukesha ONE conference

Waukesha ONE is getting closer!

If you were here at North two years ago, we hosted this conference for all district secondary schools and it was a huge success.  Now we are in the second year for the conference with all schools contributing. A lot of work has gone into making it even better than the last.  You will get to see YOUR colleagues present on things they are doing in their classrooms with students just like yours.  (Not somebody from somewhere else, with much different students and much different technology.)

The theme of the One Conference is "Level Up".  Presenters will be sharing how they have Leveled Up! in their use of technology. But what does it mean to "Level Up"?

Level-ing up comes from increasing the SAMR level of a task.  SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition.  SAMR is designed to show how teachers have infused technology into teaching and learning in their classrooms.   If you are using technology in your classroom, you are on a SAMR level, but often we are asked "how can I increase my level?" or level-up.  (It is important to know that throughout a lesson or unit you could be hitting different levels of SAMR.)


Go to this site to learn what it means to be on each level or search SAMR technology for more great resources.

The Waukesha ONE conference website is ready to be viewed here.  Make sure to look at this prior to heading to the conference on Friday.  You can build your schedule on the site so you remember where you decided to go and also have other options in case the session you choose is full.  Talk with your PLC teams and other colleagues to see what they are doing.  Divide and conquer.  Don't just go to a session because your friend is going.  Go to different sessions and share the knowledge with each other.

SLATE 2015: Some things I learned

The last two days I have been at the SLATE conference in the Dells.  When I go into sessions I hope to learn one thing I can use in my role and one thing I can share with others.  Here is me sharing.  I think these are two untapped, valuable resources that can increase the literacy across our building.  AND increase the variety of text in our classrooms.

Google Cultural Institute
The Cultural Institute is an amazing site where you can take students to places you couldn't before.  You have access to art exhibits and museum exhibitions.  It includes online exhibitions showing the story, both pictorially and written, of historical moments in ways never done before.  There is music, science, history, english, science, art, and the list goes on.

Google Books
There are some great classics on this site to download, for free, if you can't access them anywhere else.  The coolest part of this site is the access to magazines.  This site has EVERY edition of many magazines for free, including Life, health-based, Popular Science.  The magazines don't just include the articles but every advertisement and picture in the magazine originally.  You could have students study how advertising for certain products have changed over time, from cameras to cars, from fruit to cigarettes.  You could have student research other things that were going on in the world at the same time as a huge event in the "social media" of that era.  For example, what else was going on in the world when we landed on the moon or when JFK was assassinated.