Making Learing Visible

We had three great presentations of student learning in the last 12 hours at TBS!

Last night the students in Strawberry Creek (4/5) shared their Famous American research projects with the community. Each student stood by his/her display and essay, and answered questions from parents and visitors. The room was alive with a joyful buzz. As a parent, I was thrilled to watch my child speak confidently to other adults about what she had learned, and the choices she made creating her project.

At the same time, the students and families in Wildcat Creek (6th grade) gathered for a class feast in the depot, where a student band performed.

Finally, this morning the students in Blackberry Creek held a publishing party. The event began with a class performance of "Octopus' Garden"; children and families then split up into groups, and each child presented and read from his/her "All About" book on a marine mammal. The event finished with a gallery walk of the great animal models that were hanging around the room.

Division Head Assessment Device

The various assessment tools that I distributed as part of my NAIS Fellowship of Aspiring Heads were hugely helpful in identifying areas of professional and personal growth to focus upon this year. And, one of the ways I identified to measure improvement in my work towards those goals - improving my communication, recognizing what's right, improving my EQ, and improving my leadership of meetings - was by having the 21 faculty and staff I supervise assess me on these (and other) areas of my leadership.

To create this tool, I asked members of my Fellowship cohort to send me any devices they used, and reviewed the collected examples for categories and approaches. I then took one I liked especially, and edited it to better fit my precise scenario. One important change, helpfully suggested by Mitch  (our Head of School), was to use the language of progress reports and assessments that we use with children - mastering, effective, competent, developing, and emerging.

The device has six sections: a mission-based approach, division administration, work with individuals and teams, curriculum and instruction, personal leadership characteristics, and open-ended responses. You can click here to see the assessment device. My plan is to gather this data over the next few weeks, aggregate and analyze it for patterns and narrative threads, and then present those findings, and some targeted professional and personal development goals for next year that arise from those findings, at a faculty meeting during our work week in June.

Writing Workshop in Strawberry Creek

Today I watched a writing workshop in Strawberry Creek. While many workshop periods follow a formula of mini-lesson and then open work time for writing, editing, and conferring, this particular workshop moved from a mini-lesson on a particular rhetorical concept to a directed work period.

The first 20 minutes of the period featured a lesson on analogies. Jeff introduced the idea with the analogy go:green as ______ : red. Student ideas initially focused on surface similarities, such as the first letter of each word, before moving on to a nuanced understanding of the concept. The open-ended possibility of the conceptual linking was explored in further examples; for instance, wheel:bike as tire:_______ was answered by motorcycle, car, and truck - all of which have a claim to being right. The example meow:cat as _____:_______ further raised the issue of conceptual connection; when talking:humans was proposed as an answer, the class discussed the idea of onomatopeia and whether blah blah blah:humans would be a more accurate answer.

In the next phase of the period, Jeff introduced a worksheet for students to gather information for the bibliography of their science research reports. He reviewed the different information necessary from different types of sources (books with one author, books with many authors, articles, and websites being the four primary types used by students for this project), and also where and how to find that information within each source. Students then returned to their seats and compiled the necessary information. This is a great example of how our teachers use the writing workshop to explore writing ideas across the curriculum.

Scenes From This Morning's Classrooms

Laurel - Continuing their ongoing "Here I am in the month of" project, Julianne worked with students to create self-portraits in the style of...

Blackberry - During a literacy workshop, students worked on either word sorts or "lift the flap" books, while a small group of students worked with Fundations.

2nd math - Drawing on the TERC Investigations curriculum, students worked with creating and predicting numbers based on pattern trains, and then solving and creating addition and subtraction sentences with multiple operations per sentence.

3rd math - Drawing on the TERC Investigations curriculum, students worked with the idea of "close to 100", both on worksheets and playing the actual game (six cards are dealt, and each player tries to make two two-digit numbers that total as close to 100 as possible). This was preceded by conversation about the difference between a guess and an estimate, and the relative certainty between them (teachers created a scale that read "no clue/guess/estimate/certainty" in increasing order to illustrate this).

5th math - After a lesson and activities on classifying triangles (scalene, obtuse, acute, right, isosceles, equilateral), students moved into the Show Me 1/2 curriculum to develop their skill with fractions and decimals. Today's "exit ticket" was identifying two attributes of a triangle from among the set given by the teacher.

Strawberry - Extending their marine biology science unit, students used books and websites to engage in research on an aspect of the oceans, choosing from among animals, topography, or mythology. Each child had generated a list of research questions and took notes in his/her science notebook.