A Year in Learning at Elk Grove: Introduction to Strength and Condition-Students

By Daisy Crus and Jaina Pfister

This is part of a blog series intended to document and define learning at Elk Grove High School throughout the 2018-2019 school year in order to increase student learning, give professionals autonomy, increase trust in our learning community, and foster a sense of personal-intellectual collegiality within the building across departments.  You can read all of the previous posts here.

In this post, two freshmen students reflect on what they learned in the first few weeks in Introduction to Strength and Condition.  You can read the teacher's reflection here.  The students are in control of their learning in this class. Here is a quick video the students talking about what they want in the course and how best to hold each other to those expectations.

Daisy Cruz

What did you learn in this lesson?

Something I learned in this lesson is that if you put your mind to what you are doing and you stay focused, you will always work through it till it’s complete. I also learned that when you are working out you always want to work on three things.  Those are strength, auxiliary and core.  Working with those three things will complete your daily workout. One thing I learned in this lesson is that you have to work on both parts of your body to not have one small leg and the other a lot muscular.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

Something I would like to learn in the next lesson is how to make the exercise more challenging if we feel it’s not pushing us to work harder. The teachers make us work hard and they are great but some people have already been in sports or activities and done harder workouts. They should have a specific workout and have it in two different ways, the normal way and the experienced way.

Jaina Pfister 

What did you learn in this lesson?

Today we learned about box jumps and step-ups with the boxes. It was mostly a learning day but days like those are a crucial step when it comes to working out. Learning the correct form will ensure we won’t get hurt and teaches us to become better athletes.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

For next time I hope we can incorporate the boxes in our workout so we can use the knowledge we learned. An important part of learning to me is being able to practice our learnings and continue to grow from there.

A Year in Learning at Elk Grove: Introduction to Strength and Condition-Teachers

By Anthony Furman and Mark Heintz

This is part of a blog series intended to document and define learning at Elk Grove High School throughout the 2018-2019 school year in order to increase student learning, give professionals autonomy, increase trust in our learning community, and foster a sense of personal-intellectual collegiality within the building across departments.  You can read all of the previous posts here. 

Going into a physical education class conjures up a lot of memories.  I personally always had great experiences but from movies, tv, and friends it seems that p.e. was great for everyone.  The class has been under fire across our country and most recently our state.  But going into Anthony Furman's 844 class highlights what p.e. should be.  Students owned the class.  They created the expectations and they did the work.  I'm in awe of what he was able to do in the first few weeks of school.

What did learning look like in the lesson? 

Furman: In this lesson, the “learning” focus was two-fold.  First, we completed our class culture expectations to work by.  This taught the students to genuinely think about what kind of environment they want to create and work within on a daily basis.  It is the beginning of understanding how to create a “culture” that will aim at improving the internal and external vision of what we expect from ourselves, our class and then throughout our school.  Students were given the opportunity to share expectations that were felt as important to have in class.  The list of I WILL, WE WILL and WE WILL NOT statements all came from the four sections of 844 students.

The exercises learned on this day were box jumps and variations of step-ups.  We have a template of exercises that we want our students to learn during their freshman year that will not only prepare themselves for future P.E. classes but also building a basic foundation of exercises for students to understand and build upon.  They learned the basic technique and purpose of each exercise and then were given time to practice each within small groups.  These exercises will be combined with other learned strength, core, and auxiliary exercises as we continue to learn our intro to a strength program.

What do you hope to do for the next time? 

Furman: I will be looking to see that we are practicing our “Building a Culture to be Proud Of” statements. That will come from teacher to student as well as student to student.  Exercises learned will be practiced and then given was to be made more challenging.  Ideally, we begin to build an atmosphere where class expectations are maintained by all students and we continue to build on the program focuses set each week.

A Year in Learning at Elk Grove: Dual Credit College Composition-Students

By Madison Reed, Jake Mizialko, Alexandra Glinski and Mark Heintz

Emily Mikuzis reflected on learning in a previous post, but what do the students think? A group of teachers and students explore what learning is. From the students perspective, for deep learning to occur, they've got to be interested in it.  They have to find meaning to them.  Here are just a few highlights before you read:

• This story’s argument really made me think about how much meaning I give things in my life and my perspective. 

• I love the freedom of ideas and creativity it allows us as students to have most times.

• I hope that students will be able to branch off of those three things and be able to incorporate it into their own writing.

• I would hope to find a style of writing/narrative the best suits me.

Madison

What did you learn in this lesson?

In this lesson, I learned about narratives and arguments from a deeper perspective. We read a passage called ‘This is Water’ by David Foster Wallace. The story touched pretty heavily on the ideas of “you control the meanings on everything in the world” and “you control your own perspective and decide how much meaning everything gets”. The whole class was split into groups. After listening to this piece and annotating things we found important in the text, everyone in each group shared a sentence, phrase and word from the reading that we thought was important and at the end, the whole class discussed thoughts on the reading as a whole. This story’s argument really made me think about how much meaning I give things in my life and my perspective. I enjoyed this narrative a lot and I loved the message/argument it brought with it.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

I hope to learn more about the other types of writings that are out there. Writing is one of my favorite things to do in school. I love the freedom of ideas and creativity it allows us as students to have most times. Also, I hope to learn how to better my writing abilities. So far in my senior year here at EGHS, College Composition has been one of my favorite classes and generally my favorite English class I've taken.

Jake
What did you learn in this lesson?

During this lesson, we, as a class, learned how to fully understand a story by highlighting significant words, phrases, and sentences. These three things helped us figure out what the narrative, argument, and effect were on the reader. This way of annotating shows that students are able to concisely get to the point while still annotating and understanding the story completely. This was a unique lesson because once the student finished reading on their own they were able to talk to their group members to hear what they took out of the story and how they perceived it.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

For the next lesson, I hope to learn how you can you words, phrases, and sentences to help you learn more about the message that the author was trying to get across to his readers. I hope that students will be able to branch off of those three things and be able to incorporate it into their own writing. By practicing this task, this will allow students to strengthen their writing abilities and easily identify key parts of a story.

Alexandra
What did you learn in this lesson?

In this lesson, I learned how different narratives can be used to make an argument. We listened and read through a couple of texts which all had addressed an argument, but all using different narratives. Individually, we would complete a reading guide where we, the students, had to annotate for a sentence, a phrase, and one keyword from the text that we believed was important. By identifying these different things, we are able to identify what the argument of the text was and how effective the narrative was. While repeating this process a few times, I learned how narrative is a key figure to an essay and how a good narrative will help your argument, which together can create a successful piece of writing.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

In the next lesson, I would hope to find a style of writing/narrative the best suits me. Trying and testing different essay structures will be a big part of finding out what I like. I want to be able to write an effective essay that not only has a good narrative but also gets my argument across. Hopefully, in our next few writing assignments, my best style of writing will become more clear to me.

A Year in Learning at Elk Grove: Dual Credit College Composition-Teachers

By Emily Mikuzis and Mark Heintz

In the continued effort of defining learning at Elk Grove, Emily Mikuzis graciously invited me into her class and reflected on the learning in her dual credit College Composition class.

From my point of view, students were finding their voice.  Not an easy thing to do.  But in this case, students had agency: they wanted to know how to express their opinions in their voice. Why shouldn't they?  They were finding their voice. In her reflection, Emily told me that last year, almost all of her students' first paper sounded the same. It didn't matter the student's experience, the voice was the same.  She thought back on why this happened. She was guiding them too much, created an environment that favored writing was easy and offered little opportunity to truly express themselves.  This year, her goal is to change that. She wants to empower her students and at the beginning of the year, to find their voice in writing.

I'm very jealous of her students as they get to explore who they are and how best to express themselves.  We would all be lucky to have that opportunity.  Right now, learning looks like a personal journey and struggle towards what is meaningful to each student and how best to express it.

What did learning look like in the lesson? 

Emily: This semester, I am exploring ways to allow students to have greater confidence in their writing by increasing their investment and creating opportunities for student choice. 

In this lesson, students worked collaboratively to identify how narrative and argument, which are typically taught separately, can be used together to create an effective piece of writing. 

Students individually identified the story and argument present in a selection from Persepolis. I wanted students to begin to see that stories - even brief ones, can support a powerful argument. In this step, student learning looks like quiet reflection - low-risk exposure to a new topic. 

Next, students read and annotated a part of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College. While they annotated, they watched this corresponding video clip: "This Is Water." Students annotated for keywords, phrases, and sentences. In this step, student learning looked like gathering information to share with their group. Learning looked like reading to understand. 

Finally, students worked through a text rendering protocol with peers. Students shared a single word, phrase, and sentence without commentary in order to identify the big picture meaning of the text. In this step, learning looked like working together to piece together and refine understanding of a text. 

Student learning culminated in identifying the narrative elements and argument present in the piece. From there, they can compare the structure to two texts which incorporate the same elements but have different purposes and structures. David Sedaris’s essay “Jesus Shaves” and a story from The Moth, "Whatever Doesn't Kill Me."

What do you hope to do for the next time? 

Emily: Through the comparison of three engaging texts with very different structures and purposes, I hope to give students options for attacking their first writing assignment, Narrative as Argument. My hope is that students will begin to build confidence to make their own stylistic and structural choices in writing assignments. I hope to, throughout the semester, continue to create opportunities for students to work together to build understanding and hopefully begin to develop their own writer's voice through greater investment in our writing tasks.


You can read last week's post on learning here. 

A Year in Learning at Elk Grove: Intro to Engineering Part 1-Students

By Alexander Danan, Margi Patel, Ryan Libiano and Mark Heintz

Patrick McGing and I gave our insight into what learning looked like in Patrick's Intro to Engineering class. But what do the students think?  What do they want the class to be? If the focus of a school is meant to be on the learning, especially student learning, shouldn't we spend time getting their feedback?

A group of teachers met with me last May and agreed on a common mission and vision.  Part of that vision included partnering with students in an effort to document and define learning at Elk Grove.  Each week, as a teacher and I share our thoughts on learning, students who are in the teachers class I visit will do the same.  This week, three students in Patrick's class shared their thoughts on the first days of school. Here is what they had to say.

Ryan

What did you learn in this lesson?

Although we did not yet dive too deep into the engineering process or have started any projects, I found the class still to be engaging in the sense that we were able to reflect upon how we do now and how we will do in the future (as in our future work life etc). Certain topics such as skills and interests seemed to have no meaning in the basics of the design process or literally anything that relates to engineering, but I finally realized that these topics would soon help me become aware of what strengths I have and fields they were applicable in. Furthermore, the class will teach me how to write a resume and prepare myself for future endeavors throughout my adult life.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

Although we did not cover any engineering related topic in this lesson, I am still very excited to learn more about how to write a resume and cover letter and prepare myself for the future. Along with that, I am still very excited to dive deep into the engineering process and design my first object/thing (I don’t know what it is yet). Another huge hope is to finally use machinery such as the shopbot, CNC mill, Laser cutter, etc.

Margi

What did you learn in this lesson?

It's only been a few days so we haven't really started yet. I found some things interesting such as how to operate the machines and how to write the resume. We are going to start a project very soon so I'm really excited to find out how to do the designs and stuff. We also learned the things that we are going do it throughout the semester and I found most of the things very interesting.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

I hope to learn how to use the 3D printer and the new technology. By end of the semester, I would love to know what I should put it in my resume and cover letter. I'm a senior and I'm glad I took this class because I'm sure it's going to help figure what I want to do after high school in specifically engineering. I'm excited to learn more about the topics that we talked about. I'm also excited to see what interests me the most.

Alex

What did you learn in this lesson?

During the class I learned what our class is going to be and some of the things that we will be using in for the future. One of the things that stuck out to me was learning how to make a resume. Since I'm only 14 and don't know anything about resumes or jobs, this was a nice piece of information that will be able to help me throughout life since people need jobs to make money and live. Another thing was knowing that we will be able to use a lot of cool tech that I've never even touched before.

What do you hope to learn for the next time?

What I'm interested in is going through the design process to create some different but amazing things. I also want to learn more about how to use all the machines to make 2D into 3D.  One of the biggest things that I hope I learn next time or later in the year is all the small things that I'm able to do while designing program so I can make what I've already made and make it better to the best of my potential.

A Year in Learning at Elk Grove: Intro to Engineering Part 1-Teachers

By Patrick McGing and Mark Heintz

This is the first of hopefully, fingers crossed, a weekly series of teachers and students at Elk Grove reflecting on what meaningful learning looks like in practice.  A group of teachers all met with me in May of last year and we agreed on a common mission and vision for the 2018-2019 school year.

OUR MISSION

To document and define learning at Elk Grove High School throughout the 2018-2019 school year in order to increase student learning, give professionals autonomy, increase trust in our learning community, and foster a sense of personal-intellectual collegiality within the building across departments.

OUR VISION

• Connect teachers across all disciplines in the building in a quarterly meeting
• Weekly class visits and sharing video segments with the larger community of the learning taking place.  
• Involve the PTC by sharing the narrative of learning at Elk Grove and inviting them to possible future meetings with staff and students 
• Document and share a weekly blog post that involves student and teachers 

Throughout the year, we are guided by the following questions

• How do we define learning?
• What conditions maximize student learning? 
• How do we build trust with one another to increase professional autonomy and increase transparency? 
• How do we share our narrative of learning with the larger community and stakeholders?

In this first post, Patrick McGing graciously "volunteered" to be first.  Patrick is just awesome.  Ever since he stepped foot in the building, he's been asking the right questions and is focused on learning instead of teaching.  He's in the trenches with his students, figuring things out alongside them.  He's ever reflective and constantly making changes to his already amazing classes. 

The Career Technical Education department continues to be cutting edge.  Seriously, it's an amazing place to be and I'm grateful every time I'm down there. I think the school placed most of the CTE classes away from the rest of the "core" classes so we wouldn't be as jealous.  Everyone in that department is so progressive and I'm blown away when I go down there.  But as this post is focusing on Patrick, his focus continues to be on the learning. Every time I connect with him, I wish I could be as focused on learning as he is.  

What did learning look like in the lesson? 

McGing: For this lesson, students filled out a questionnaire asking about what their interests are, activities/sports they participate in, employment history, volunteering experiences, skills they have obtained from previous courses/extracurriculars, awards/achievements, words/phrases that describe them, and goals for the year. I wanted this to be an opportunity for me to get to know students better, but more importantly for students to reflect and document themselves. Little did students know, this was going to lead to the development of a cover letter and resume.

Therefore, learning looked like reflection and basic goal setting.

Learning looked liked seeing how small reflections and goal setting applies in the larger picture of District 214 goals and their own future goals.

Learning looked like how starting small and documenting where students begin will, in the end, help document personal growth.

What do you hope to do for the next time? 

McGing: At Elk Grove, the majority of teachers, including myself in Technology Education adopted Standards Based Grading as the majority of the learning in our classrooms revolves around learning and developing essential skills (“Standards”). These essential skills sometimes get lost in “day to day school.” Therefore, part of my reasoning for having students create a resume and document their skills is so they know where they are starting the year off. As we continue the school year and cover more essential skills I would like to have students add to their resume; along with anything else that applies from school, extracurriculars, or other.

Students can then begin to see growth, even if they started with a very bare resume, personal growth will be documented.

On top of this, as one of District 214’s goals is career ready and we fall in a Career and Technical Educational course, developing resume building skills will further help students as they begin looking for careers that require the same skills they have developed in their CTE courses and others.