Punctation Saves Lives

Christmas Ideas for Kids

Differentiated Reading Groups

We are a few weeks into our differentiated reading groups project, and the feedback is very positive.  The students are doing well, and improving upon their individual reading abilities, and the teachers are loving working with same-ability groups.

To summarize:

• We created a literacy support team consisting of 4 classroom teachers, 1 LAT teacher, 1 teacher-librarian, and me, the Principal.  
• We focused on grades 2 and 3, but have added in a grade 1 student who is excelling in reading, and some grade 4s from a 3-4 split class. 
• The grade 2s and 3s were split into groups differentiated by ability, and then the grade 1 and some grade 4s were added to the groups where appropriate. The grade 3-4 teacher kept her strong grade 4s.
• We meet 3x per week, for 1 hour a day.
• The groups with strong readers are bigger (up to 18 students) and the groups with the struggling readers are smaller (down to 5-6).
• The students have already been tested for their reading level.  For example, my group has readers who are all exceeding expectations.  That being said, the Lit Group leader is spending 3 hours a week with those kids, so that person will provide a written comment to the classroom teacher for reporting purposes.

While the teachers with the most challenging readers have a tough job, the really appreciate the small groups and the time that they get to spend with their readers.  I like being able to really challenge the readers in my group where we practice reading out loud and to small audiences, where we work cooperatively with each other and where we challenge them to really push themselves with their reading, their comprehension, and their fluency.

In the future, I will post about some of the projects and the focus of each of the groups. Until then, keep reading!

The Calm Following the Storm

 

Wow, have things been busy lately.  Not necessarily bad, just busy.  It's when things get this way that it becomes so hard to see through the storm, and so easy to feel overwhelmed, under appreciated and--well--sorry for ourselves.

To a person, my colleagues feel the same way.  We all feel like we are busier than we have ever been, like we have no time to fit anything in.  For me, this is most evident late in the evening when I am not ready to go to bed, yet unable to switch my brain into another gear.  I don't want to blog, read a book or watch TV, and my usual brain-break hobbies--tying flies, reading, listening to music--seem to have lost their mojo.  Every time I get a small reprieve from the storm I seem to flop down and fall asleep.  I lose focus easily and the fun things become mundane.

But there is hope.

The more times I get caught up into these hurricanes, the more I realize that "this too shall pass".  I know that I have to fight through and continue to challenge my brain because there is always light at the end of the tunnel.  I have even learned that by poking, and pushing, and prodding that I can sometimes break through the dark wall faster.  Ahead of schedule, you might say.

This is a very important realization.  perhaps even more important than the "this too shall pass" mantra we have all heard over and over.  To self-realize that we can craft our day, that we can affect the outcome that we desire, that we can make chicken salad out of...well, you get it.

I sit here, typing away, taking stock of the mess around me and I realize that things are good.  Really good, actually.  Things will get busy again, and that will cause stress but stress is what brings the character out of us;  action out of stress defines us far more than an okey-dokey, summer vacation decision.  So, to any colleagues out there who are feeling overwhelmed, please remember:  this too shall pass (and, more importantly, you are in control of what kind of day that you are having.  If you don't like the way things are going, make the changes that you want to see.).

Everybody is a Genius

What's Old is New--Headphones and Reading

So, the title says "Headphones", but the image above is of a CD player.  How did we get here?

We are revamping our reading program school wide this year.  Our primary students have been assessed and assigned into differentiated reading groups based on reading ability and not on grade.  Three times per week, we are working in these reading groups led by our classroom teachers, our Learning Assistance teacher, our Teacher Librarian, some Literacy-Support teachers that we have added to our staff and myself.  The groups vary in size depending on the strength of the readers--the stronger groups are larger--and we have purposely placed the lowest (and smallest) groups with the classroom teachers.  It's a good plan for the entire school, because we feel that:

• we will improve the overall reading levels of the the primary students more efficiently
• we have the structures in place to best support the classroom teachers
• by supporting the classroom teacher we are supporting the learners in the best way possible
• a systematic approach to reading is better than trying to work on things in isolation
• by aggressively focusing our energy on reducing primary students assessed as "at-risk" in reading, our goal is to reduce the number of at-risk students in the intermediate grades.

Now, this is all good.  We are going to reduce reading problems at the primary grades to benefit the intermediate grades.  But, what about the intermediate classes now?  What about the students in those classes that need extra support? To that end, we have brought back a reading program that has been successful for us in the class.  It requires some trained staff and CD players with headphones.  So, I went down to a local electronics shop and purchased some inexpensive CD players for student use.  We got everything back up to the school and the room set up, only to find that none of these CD players had an audio out (i.e. none of them had a headphone plug in).  Of course, I didn't believe the reports and went into the room to show everyone how smart I was.  Guess what?  No headphone jack.  So, I returned the devices to the store and tried to exchange them for ones with headphone jacks.

Guess what? There weren't any!

How have we gotten to a place where headphone jacks aren't a standard component to a CD player?  I did eventually find some, for more than twice the price, but I had to go to 5 stores to finally find them.

This got me to thinking about the philosophy and the history of what we are trying.  We have used data (new) to identify a need (old).  The data has been collected (old) and analyzed and aggregated (new) so that we are using creating very specific intervention as a response to very specific data (new).  Differentiated reading groups is certainly not a new idea;  it's done all over the place.  The difference, here, is that it is new to us.  If I go back to my CD player fiasco, the CDs themselves (old) represents a traditional, tried and tested model of support.  I could have bought tonnes of MP3 players (new), all complete with fancy ear bud headphones (new), but then the CDs (old) couldn't be played.  I guess we could have transferred the analog program (old) into a digital format (new) to work with an MP3 player (new), but that would have been a tonne of work, and would have really only gotten us back to the same place that we started at.  Whew!

The best part about of new model of support isn't really any of the supports that we are offering our teachers and students, but rather the way in which we are offering those supports.  Our collaborative model of support is designed to pull staff together, during the regular work day, so that they can use the data we collect to create targeted responses to the challenges that we identify.  It's structured, it's systematic and it's school-wide.

The Happy Secret to Better Work

 

I found this Tedx video of Shawn Achor, and it struck a very real and genuine chord for me.  Shawn is a positive Psychology expert who spent over a decade working at Harvard University.  Shawn’s basic premise is about trying to train people to be positive in the present, not some distant “happiness” over the horizon, and to use that happiness to boost performance by at least 30%.

My notes and nuggets (in itallics) from his TEDx talk:

• We need to escape the cult of the average 
•  We spend all of our time gathering data to find the “average” and then building programs and supports suitable to that average.  
•  He challenges us to move the entire average up.  This was pretty intriguing to me, because I have always struggled with averages because of the outliers that averages create.  The idea to set a standard, and then work to raise that standard for everyone is great.  I will definitely put some more thought into ways to implement this in my practice. 
•  He questions our sensory inputs for news and events, and asks “what is the accurate ratio of negative to positive?”  Does the news accurately portray the world or sensationalize the negative events happening?  Like Shawn, I go through phases of watching the news and ignoring it.  I watch to keep informed, but then disengage when it seems to be negative.  And, I disengage a lot.  It is interesting that Shawn looks at the ratio of negative input to positive input—especially if our brain shapes it’s own reality by what it sees (see point below). 
• Changing the lens
•  Does reality shape us, or does the lens that our brain views the world shape the reality [that we see]?  See my notes above...
•  If we change the lens, we can change the outlook.  This reminds me of a condition that a brain scientist referred to once during a keynote presentation.  Rectaloctyosis:  A crappy outlook on life.  But I digress.  I knew a man who got a phone call from the hospital to pick up his daughter.  “Oh my gosh!, he said, “was she in an accident?”  “No sir, she had a baby.”  The man didn’t know that she was pregnant.  Now you can take what you want from this guy, but I can tell you—oblivious or not—he only saw the happy things in his life and they were the things that he wanted to see.  As a result, he was always (always) happy.  I think that sometimes, many of us look at life with a far too critical eye, and have had many moments wondering if this guy was onto (not just on) something.  He certainly spent a lot of energy crafting what his brain was given...
•  Does reality shape us, or does the lens that our brain views the world shape the reality [that we see]?  See my notes above...
• Shawn gave us an example of his acceptance into Harvard being a very positive one for him but not for every other entrant
•  2 weeks after acceptance, the original success many first year students experience by getting in was replaced by feelings of competition, workload, hassles, stresses and complaints.  Wow, does this ring true and I will share a sports analogy that I use with kids all the time.  How come, when someone scores a goal in youth soccer—say on a penalty kick—they are “supposed” to run back to centre and “get ready” for the kick off?  Why are we called show offs for celebrating our own success?  The flip side, of course, is that if they miss the penalty kick, feel bad, kick the ground a few times, shrug off the “that’s okay” from their team mates, and then they relive it in their memory over and over and over.  This often affects their play and we try to coach them to “put it behind” them.  This has always been backwards to me.  If we are supposed to visualize our successes before they happen, why are we not then allowed to celebrate them, heck, revel in them?  We should live in the past, and never forget our great accomplishments, and then be able to simply forget our mistakes and “move on”.
•  There is an assumption that the external world is predictive of our happiness levels.  He says that this assumption is backwards.
•  90% of happiness is determined by how your brain processes the world.  So, what if we can train our brain to process things differently?
•  If we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we then affect reality.  
•  75% of job successes are predicted by optimism levels, social support and your ability to see stresses as a challenge instead of as a threat.  So, then it seems to me that the bulk of our energy at work should be devoted to improving optimism levels and social supports (peer networks), and in stress management training.
•  Example of a wellness week at a boarding school
•  Monday – Adolescent depression
•  Tuesday – School violence and bullying
•  Wednesday – Eating disorders
•  Thursday – Illicit drug use
•   Friday – Risky sex vs. happiness (undecided)
•  My ideas on this are that this list reminds me of some many wellness workshops that I have attended, where we focus on the potential bad in work situations.  I call these the Chicken Little sessions because the focus seems to be more about identifying all of the things going wrong instead of ways to keep the path ahead a positive one.   
•  ***The absence of disease is not health.  This is a very powerful statement:  the absence of disease is not health.  I can be inserviced until the end of time, however, making me aware of everything that could go wrong doesn’t mean that it won’t.  It also won’t ensure that I have balance or wellness in my life.
• We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success:
•  Working harder ≠ more success
• More success ≠ more happiness
• Every time the brain achieves success, we change the goal posts for what success looks like
•  Good grades lead to a need for even better grades
•  Going to a good school leads to the need for going to an even better school
•  Getting a good job is a stepping stone to getting a better job
•  If we hit our quarterly sales target, we change the sales target 
•  If happiness is on the other side of success, your brain never gets there.  If we never stop to celebrate our achievements, never smell the roses, we will never give our brain a chance to feel success.  I think that this is what I feel during the “more stuff piled on” phases of my work year;  I always feel so run-down and over-worked when I seem to be just out of grasp of some sort of success.
•  If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what he calls a “happiness advantage”
•  Your brain, positive, performs 31% better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed
•  Intelligence rises, creativity rises, energy levels rise, every business outcome improves
• Dopamine
•  Makes you happier
• Turns on all of the learning centres in your brain
•  We need to bring more dopamine into the workplace!
• You can train your brain to be positive in the present by doing 5 things every day for 21 days:
•  3 Gratitudes (to take a moment to celebrate 3 small successes each day—to train your brain to scan for positive in your day)   
• Journaling (to reflect on things and relive them)
• Exercise (to teach our brain that your behaviour matters)
• Mediation (to combat our culture of ADHD and too many things to stay on top of—to train your brain to focus on the task at hand)
•  Random acts of kindness  (spreading the wealth)