2nd and 3rd Six Weeks

We had a lot of growth in the 2nd and 3rd Six Weeks. The group that was having the least success with DI has grown. I have seen a little bit of a drop in the other groups. I will need to follow up with them and make sure they are still working with DI.

5352 Week 4 Part 3

In order to evaluate technology integration on our campus, we will need to have a Technology Action Committee. This group will take part in action research project for our campus. The group will be led by the campus technology liaison and will have representatives from each department. The technology liaison will train the committee members for one week. The training will consist of proper action research, technology applications, delivering professional development, and proper data analysis. Once the initial training is complete, the committee will develop two goals for the campus and the department representatives will develop one goal for their department. The campus goals will be set by looking at the campus STaR Chart and by looking at the District Technology Plan. The department teams will be decided by looking at the Campus Improvement Plan and by input from the members of the department. All of the goals will be SMART goals so the committee can measure growth over the school year. The committee will design a technology survey that will be given to the staff members and these will be used to generate the measures for the SMART goals. All professional development offered in the area of technology improvement will have a pre and post assessment for participants. Staff members will be able to rate themselves on their skill before the professional growth and after. There will also be a follow up assessment sent out electronically to the participants so they can monitor how they are improving on their technology skills. The technology committee will collect and evaluate if the professional growth is helping the staff grow in this area. The technology committee members will from time to time in department meetings ask their groups to talk about the professional growth opportunities they are taking part in at school. The technology committee will ask the principal to add a technology component to the walk through forms that the administration has to do for PDAS. All surveys will be completed by using googledocs or some other online survey. This will help in collecting data and one would hope that using technology in a way to collect data would inspire staff members to use them with their students. Once all of the data is collected throughout the year, the technology committee will gather in the summer and look at their SMART goals that they made for the school and their departments. They will create a report that they will deliver to the principal and the site based decision making team. The committee will create new goals and then create another presentation that will be shared with the staff at the beginning of the next school year so the whole process can be completed again.

5352 Week 4 Part 2

Need: Strengthen data driven decision making Activity: Technology Professional Learning Community (PLC) will receive training on making and updating spreadsheets. The PLC members will then train their content teams on how to use and maintain spreadsheets. The spreadsheets will then hold information on students like Lexile level so students can be given appropriate reading materials in their classes. They will also include test data and formative assessment results so students can be monitored the entire year. Need: Communication with stakeholders Activity: Campus technology liaison will conduct professional growth that shows proper email communication with parents and other interested stakeholders. Teachers will also be shown how to set up and maintain a webpage for students and parents. Need: Students need to engage in using higher order thinking skills Activity: Content coordinators will create technology lessons that integrate higher order thinking skills. Coordinators will then have professional development for teachers who will learn the new lessons and then come and use them with their students. Need: Students who failed TAKS should receive remediation Activity: Teachers will receive training from district technology personnel on computer software that will provide remediation to students who need help with TAKS objectives. One of the biggest needs on our campus is building staff confidence in working with spreadsheets. Our Math department works with spreadsheets in their curriculum, but the others do not. Spreadsheets are the way we will analyze our test results and we need to help our staff outside of the math department grow in using these tools. Most of the teachers admitted that they have a spreadsheet person on their team and that person leads the data analysis for the team. All of our teachers need to have the ability to run data analysis for their classes. The development of the technology PLC that will learn and then train their teammates will help in this area. The technology PLC will put all the data for students into one place. Teachers are always going to many different sources to get the whole picture of the child. A teacher usually has to go to the counselor to look up the cumulative file to retrieve old grades and test scores from the previous years. Another step would be to go the Reading Teacher to go and get the Lexile score. This would be followed by a trip to the assistant principals’ office to see if the child has a discipline folder. Finally, the teacher might visit with their previous teacher to see what kind of student they were the year before. This can be exhausting. Having all the data in one spreadsheet will allow the teacher time to sit down and really evaluate their students and make proper data based decisions for the students’ learning path.

Web Conference 1/29/12

Web Conferences can be very valuable. We use them in my district. Our district is big and we have seventeen middle schools. Our content coordinator has meetings over Adobe Connect. I will admit at first I was not really ready for this type of learning. I found it hard to concentrate and wanted to “play” with the new technology. I learned quickly that I really had to pay attention. Not everyone attends this meeting and it is up to me to get together with my team and share the information with them. They are counting on me to share the information accurately. I think it really helps with our group not having to leave their home campuses when we have meetings. It is respectful of our time and schedules. I think that is why it is perfect for our purposes in the Lamar Program. It allows us to get together with our fellow students and teachers and really help each other out. During the web conference that I attended there was a lot of students helping other students. It made you feel good to know that others had similar questions to the ones that you had. The biggest take away from the web conference is that I really understand my power as a teacher. We really do have power to get new technologies in the hands of our students. I remember a few years ago we could not access YouTube. Now we can. It took many teachers asking for it. Our district technology people allowed us access to it. It is wonderful. I teach history and many of the things that we talk about are all over the country and most of my students have not visited those places. Now I can describe the place and show them the place with YouTube. Teachers have to be vigilant in our work. The work that our students will do in the future have not been invented yet, so it is up to us to use new things like technology to prepare students with skills that will be marketable in the future.

EDLD 5352 Week 2 Assignment, Part 3: Blog Posts

I am looking at the area of Teaching and Learning in the STaR Chart or School Technology and Readiness assessment. Teaching and Learning is the most important piece of this puzzle to me because that is where the real work is done. Yes, teaching and learning must be fully supported by the other areas, but without effective teaching and learning the students will not meet the goals of the state. Teachers must be prepared either in their educator certification program or through professional development. The teachers and students must have the support of their administration to correctly implement any change. The structure must be there to support the technology. Teaching and Learning, just like the other areas it has four different levels. The first level is early tech. In early tech teaching and learning has the teacher at its source and there is little technology integration. If technology is used at all it is for drilling of facts. The second level is developing tech. This level instruction still comes from the teacher, but technology is used for locating information and making projects to be shown in the class. The third level is advanced tech. At this level the teacher guides instruction and technology is used to analyze data. The fourth level is target tech. Target tech has the role of the teacher as a learner along with the students. Students have access to all technology whenever they want allowing them to dictate when and where they work on school assignments. In looking at the area of teaching in learning we have had made progress over the years. When I look at my campus this is an area that we have grown in. In my campus we have grown from developing tech to advanced tech. When I reflect upon my own education, I really see a difference in this area. For the most part, when I was a student teachers taught and students sat and listened. This was the way it was. Today our classrooms do not look this way. I do not think that we are to the point where we have total acceptance in this area, but we are making strives there. Teachers are really seeing themselves as lifelong learners and one of the ways we can show this is by working with the students as co-learners and not seeing ourselves as the sole catalyst of learning. In looking statewide, we need to move to the advanced tech and target tech more. In looking at trends in teaching and learning, we see that our state is growing more into the advanced tech from the developing tech. This is a step in the right direction. The problem that I have is the target tech has stayed exactly the same over the period from 2007-2010. One would expect some growth, but with so much shifting from early tech to the higher indicators it would make since that the next step would be more growth into target tech. I would recommend that we encourage more schools to reach the target tech before the deadline of 2020. One way to do this would be to offer financial incentives to schools and districts that reach target tech before the deadline. The state could partner with organizations that want to support education to help fund these incentives. The state could also offer a stipend to teachers and administrators that get a technology certification attached to their teaching credentials. I also think schools should reach out to higher education to offer dual credit for students in the area of technology. They could offer a degree to the students’ teacher this would show the public school students that their teacher truly is a lifelong learner. Personal Documentation Texas STaR Chart Retrieved from http://starchart.epsilen.com

Welcome to the dean s ta r chart meeting

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Action Research Project Progress Report

Is Differentiation Done?

     Is differentiation done correctly?    I sat down with the principal of my school and we looked at our Campus Improvement Plan and TAKS data from the AEIS report for our school.  In completing the needs assessment, the following groups were the one we saw in need.  In the area of Reading, our White students scored in the exemplary level and all our other groups African American, Hispanic, and Economically Disadvantaged were in the recognized range.  In the area of Math, our White students performed in the recognized range and the other groups African American, Hispanic, and Economically Disadvantaged scored in the acceptable range.  In the area of Science, our White students scored in the exemplary level and all our other groups African American, Hispanic, and Economically Disadvantaged were in the acceptable range.  In all these indicators we see failure the close the achievement gap.  At our school, we want all the students to hit the exemplary range or at the very least we want to begin the process of closing the achievement gap.  

     We will implement the Differentiated Instruction philosophy at our school to help close the achievement gap between the white student group and the other groups including African Americans, Hispanic, and Economically Disadvantaged.  The vision of our school is that all children will learn, and we will find the best way to educate all children no matter what they bring to the table.  I will be looking at the impact of Differentiated Instruction Lessons on student achievement on district benchmarks.  By January 2012, we will see the closure of the achievement gap between white students and the other groups.  Currently the white students are performing at eighty-eight percent passing and our African American students are performing at eighty-two percent passing, the Economically Disadvantaged group is performing at eighty-four percent passing, and the Hispanic group is performing at eighty four percent passing.  I expect the teachers to use Differentiated Instruction to close the achievement gap on district benchmarks. 

     The first book that I am including in my literature review is The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners by Carol Ann Tomlinson.  This is a good starting point when looking at Differentiated Instruction.  It discusses what a differentiated classroom looks like, and it looks at the ways one can differentiate instruction.  One can differentiate the content, process, or product for the students and they can differentiate by the level of the students’ readiness, interest, or learning style.  The book goes on to talk about the instructional strategies that lend itself to differentiation.  A second book that helped me in this process was Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom: Strategies and Tools for Responsive Teaching by Carol Ann Tomlinson.  This work talks about how students needs must be met for them to be successful at school and one of the best ways to do that is to differentiate.  Part of differentiation is giving students some choice.  If the teachers give the students some sort of control, they are more likely to actively participate.  This book also shares some different ways for teachers to differentiate assignments.  It is a good way to show teachers that they can be successful with the process, and they probably already do some part of differentiation.  This will get teachers interested and hopefully they will eventually move from strategies to embracing it as a philosophy.  A third book is Green Light Classrooms: Teaching Techniques That Accelerate Learning by Rich Allen.  This book talks about the difference in traditional type classrooms where there is stand and deliver type of instruction where the students are sitting and learning from the teachers.  The author urges to include the students in the classroom and learning.  They are to be equal partners in the learning process.  This is at the heart of differentiation. Students help design their learning.  The students should have a choice in the way that they learn.  The teacher and student should work together to combine the learning style of the student with the lesson.  In the differentiated classroom there should be multiple ways that the learning can take place.  The final book that I will discuss is Teaching with Poverty in Mind: What Being Poor Does to Kids’ Brains and What Schools Can Do About It by Eric Jensen.  This book talks about understanding the background of your students and then using purposeful teaching to overcome the economic status of your kids.  This book really talks about pre-assessment and that is one way that you can understand your students so you can properly differentiate for their individual needs.  Jensen also discusses the issue of respect.  Differentiation embodies respect because it gives the students a part in the learning process by sometimes giving the student a choice in their work.  It is valuable to let the student know that the teacher values and respects the students because they did not tell them which assignment to complete they gave a couple of choices and they let the students select the one that will help them be the most successful.  In a perfect world the teacher might even let the students’ decide on an option for an assignment.  My principal and I sat down and decided on a topic for my action research project.  This is an area that our building and district have provided a lot of financial support.  We have had training with a small group over two years and we have had multiple full staff professional development days on the topic of differentiated instruction.  We see differentiate instruction as a way to improve the achievement of our students.  We want a staff that views their students as learning partners because that should be the goal of a twenty-first century learner.  The school house of old where the teacher tells the students what to do needs to come to an end.  The avenue that we have decided to help our campus reach that goal is differentiated instruction.    

     Selling your product is essential.  My research project has to have the cooperation of my department.  I am the instructional support for my department, so I get many opportunities to help get them on board with differentiated instruction.  I was part of the original group that got the training with the consultant from outside our district.  This put me in the position of being the go to guy for my department with regards to differentiation. I also am in the position to dictate what kinds of professional development we take part in.  I have offered classes where we focused on differentiated instruction.  I also collect differentiated lessons from my teachers and share them with the other members of our department.  I also have them lead the professional growth sessions so my department members see their coworkers being successful using differentiated instruction.  Additionally, we get buy in from students by letting them have a choice in their education.  I teach at middle school level, and the students’ biggest complaint is not having any control over their lives.  They feel that teachers and parents are united in telling them what to do from the time the sun comes up to the time the sun goes down.  Differentiation gives the students some control of their learning and they are willing to go the extra mile in our classes. 

     I will admit that I felt we did have some troubles in implementing the project.  I had teachers implementing differentiated instruction at different levels.  This year we have full and proper implementation in my department.  I had to convince my department that teachers needed to seriously look at the types of lessons that they were teaching to make sure that they included differentiated lessons in their curriculum.   This is an expectation from our building leadership and our district leadership.  So I was really helping and supporting them by helping them meet the districts’ goals for them.  I insured that the individual students’ data is being protected because we are not looking at individual data we are looking at their scores as a whole on district benchmark exams. 

     I led the department through the process I am using to analyze data by using the same data that we go through as a campus.  We look at AEIS reports and benchmark data all the time.  I wanted to use this project as another data point for them.  I know, as a teacher, I am always looking for more data points to use to help my students.  There has been a little resistance to using differentiated instruction.  I used the strategy of making the use of differentiated instruction something that was required of us by the district and building leadership.  They were going to have to do it whether they liked it or not.  I urged them to get on board by showing them the successes of other campuses where differentiated instruction has proven successful.  I also showed them that I will be there for them at every step, and I led them by example.  I created some differentiated lessons for them at first and had them try them with me modeling in the room with them and later on their own.  The next step was to have them generate and use differentiated instruction lessons on their own with their students. 

     We have a big economically disadvantaged population.  We have really had to work hard with these and all of our students.  Our district and community is always asking us what are we doing to help and reach these students.  One of the ways is to push the differentiated instruction model.  Whenever we have a parent meeting, we are always talking about the philosophy and the potential impact that it has on our students.  We have a wall in our staff lounge that shows all the different types of differentiated lessons and which content teams have taught a lesson using that particular type of strategy.  When you explain that you base the lessons off the strengths and weaknesses of the students to drive instruction as opposed to regular lessons that are given to everyone in the class no matter what their level, it lets the community know that we are helping and reaching out to all of our students. 

References

Allen, R. (2008). Green light classrooms:teaching techniques that accelerate learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin ASAGE Company.

Jensen, E. (2009). Teaching with poverty in mind:what being poor does to kids'brains and what schools can do about it. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Tomlinson, C. A. (1999). The differentiated classroom, responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria, VA: ASCD

Tomlinson, C. A. (2003). Fulfilling the promise of the differentiated classroom:strategies and tools for responsive teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.