Inter-District Collaboration

By The Collab Lab Team:

Yesterday a team from Bremen HS came to visit the Collab Lab after participating in our webinar on "Collaborating to Learn" hosted by the Illinois Principals Association and EdLeaders Network last month.  This team of administrators and teachers is looking to expand their peer observation, professional development, and teacher leader opportunities and were interested in asking questions about how Elk Grove's Collab Lab formed and evolved.

We are thankful for the Bremen team for coming to visit us, and we look forward to the opportunity to continue to work with, visit them, and learn from them across districts as well!
 

Aligning Purpose and Learning Goals: a Model from the Spanish PLC

by Dean Burrier Sanchis

The Elk Grove HS Spanish PLC team of Leslie Guimon, Pam Coté, Carmen Ruíz, Effie Kalkounos, Diana Cappelen, Ricky Castro, Dean Burrier Sanchis and Chris Cirrincione came together for a full-day department meeting in the CollabLab this past Monday. Our scope was very grand as we set out to establish our standards of expectations for our department, analyze our global approach to assessments, grading, gradebook setup, rubric usage, student engagement and overall department goals. Amazingly, we addressed and came away with some great tangibles for each and every one of those areas. Our fearless PLC leader Leslie Guimon took copious notes on the walls of the CollabLab, to the point of literally filling the entire wall, a testament to all that was accomplished.

The team began with brainstorming and note-taking

Certainly our greatest takeaway was the set of internally defined standards that we discussed, devised, wrote out and revised as a team. Our team was able to create a common vision for what we want our students to come out of our program possessing as students. Every team member had a hand in our penning of our Department’s 5 “Enduring Understandings”

The first major step was to define their purpose and learning targets

After creating this set of standards, we went through our assessment categories in our gradebooks and revamped our department wide setup to better reflect the new Enduring Understandings we had created. From there, we went through a backward alignment process from AP down to Spanish 1 to explicitly define the areas and ways we would be addressing the Enduring Understandings as well as our goals and curricular connections to the Understandings at each of our Spanish levels.

Final version of purpose-filled curriculum in a Google doc shared with all team members

Leslie’s notes document just how much we were able to accomplish. Chris Cirrincione took notes electronically and created a great visual representation of our results for today. Pam Coté treated our team to lunch where we continued our ongoing dialogues and renewed our energy. We found the environment of the CollabLab to be very well designed to fit our needs and handle our team’s drive and inspiration. Additionally, Linda Ashida and Kirsten Fletcher helped by adding their support and perspective to our conversations adding their vast experience and pedagogical knowledge, much to our benefit, as well offering suggestions for the uses of technology.

The Evolution of the Bio Curriculum

Written by Quinn Loch

The bio team, like most teams at EG, has been reworking its curriculum since I joined it three years ago. The largest changes have been with our learning targets and our grading practices. We are always trying to figure out both what we want students to master and what that mastery looks like.

We recently worked together during a pull-out day and examined our curriculum on a more global scale. Our collaboration led to great questions and conversations. For example, why do we have a "scientific method" unit? Doesn't this unit include the skills that should be developed throughout the year and not just in small doses? Isn't our course supposed to be a year long investigation into the process of science that is just driven by principles in biology? How often should we be assessing skills related to experimental design and analysis? What are these skills? How often do we have labs where we practice these skills and how are we providing feedback on them? Should large themes like change over time (evolution) be taught independently or weaved throughout the year as an important overarching reality of the world around us?

It was great to have this open dialogue and it really helps reset our priorities in a science classroom. We spent the beginning of the day agreeing to eliminate our independently taught scientific method unit. Instead, we would use our standards based rubric that we developed as a way to constantly assess on science skills throughout the year.

By using this rubric, students can track their progress throughout the year on important lab skills like procedure writing, graph making, and conclusion writing. This rubric format was modeled off of what Kim Miklusak and the English team use for writing.

On top of re-evaluating skills in the classroom, we re-worked our content for the year as well. This included re-writing learning targets so that they are more student friendly and re-structuring so that large themes like evolution, energy/matter flow, and interdependence are interwoven throughout the year.

What part of our brainstorm looked like in the Collab Lab.

The biggest challenge still, in my opinion, is how to connect progress and student mastery in the grade book. This is what I consider to be one of the biggest "growing pains" of our transition to standards based grading in biology. As a team, we are on the same page as to our targets and what mastery should look like, but are our students? How are we weighting formative and summative assessments in the grade book? How can we make a student's progress throughout the year clear and understandable? What's the best way to communicate this?

Finding solutions to these challenges is the next step and will help make reassessment more efficient and hopefully increase student ownership.

Getting an Outsider's Perspective

Written by Quinn Loch

At the last EGLLT meeting one of our focuses was on setting clear targets for our students. We saw lots of examples of how teachers communicate their learning targets to their students and it's always great to see how other teachers in the school do things in their classrooms. Sometimes I feel trapped in a bubble and it is inspiring to see things from another angle.

It got me wondering if my students could understand the learning targets that I provided them. This understanding is crucial for the student. If students don't know what they're aiming for, how can they succeed and meet the goals that you set for them? It can be difficult to step back and get an objective look at your own learning targets, so I turned to my colleagues from other content areas for feedback. If my colleagues couldn't follow or understand the learning targets, how could my students?

Inspired by Mark Heintz, I printed the learning targets for one of the freshman biology units along with some of the assessments, skills practice, and readings for the unit and taped them up to the whiteboard wall in the Collab Lab.

Over the next couple of days, some of the DTC's made comments and asked some questions. It was apparent that not everything was clear. There are areas where I am lacking specificity and some of the language isn't very student-friendly, especially for a freshman student. Of course I want my students to know words and descriptors like "differentiate", but I can communicate things in a more straightforward and unambiguous manner that would lead to less confusion.

Some of the changes are easy fixes, but should go a long way in leading my students' to success. The feedback that I received gave me a fresh perspective and would encourage my colleagues to do the same. 

Peer Observation: Round 2 (Post 4/4)

Period 7
We had two visitors join us this period: Cliff Darnall and Courtney Lavand.  Though unplanned, the theme of our Period 7 observations was activating background knowledge.  In both Lindsey Bucciarelli's Human Geography class and Señora Carmen Ruiz-Bergman's AP Spanish class, we observed numerous methods of brainstorming to initiate discussions.

In Human Geography, we saw students developing lists in Notability of why people migrate.  There are the "Pushes" and "Pulls" of why people leave home or come to a desired land/country.  Students also took a matching quiz on Schoology to ensure student understanding of these various push/pull factors.  Then, students watched a 5 minute video clip summarizing the situation in Syria.  After the video, students were going to work on a Jigsaw in pairs to explore the different elements of migration.

        

In AP Spanish, we observed students exploring the facts of Halloween vs. Día de los muertos.  Students were watching a video describing some of the rituals of both celebrations and then were going to write a persuasive essay where they had to choose one day to celebrate.  

Following the observations, we discussed the different methods both teachers used to activate students' background knowledge on the subject manners.  We also talked about the use of Schoology and Notability to record (both written and verbal) student learning.

Period 8
Matt Bohnenkamp joined our group for observing Sr. Burrier-Sanchis and Lindsey Bucciarelli.  

In Sr. Burrier-Sanchis's AP Spanish Literature class, they were discussing the novel Into the Beautiful North.  Students were discussing various adjectives that they could use to describe the novel.  Following the quick discussion in pairs, Sr. Burrier-Sanchis showed students the website wordreference.com to use as a thesaurus for multiple languages.  

Observations in both classes sparked great brainstorming sessions about scaffolding and other connections on the CollabLab's dry erase wall!  Stop on down to check it out and add more ideas!

Five Things I Learned In The Colablab

By Joe Bush

During the first eight days of school, I intentionally went to the collablab each day to connect with one of the DTC’s.  Below is a summary of all of the things I have learned from my meetings:

1.    Does it increase student learning?

I asked Mark Heintz to help me “jazz” up a worksheet that I was making.  We talked about formatting, layout and font color.  Then after a few minutes, Mark asked if the new images would increase student learning.  I answered by saying “probably not.”  Mark then asked, why I was worried about spending so much more time designing something that won’t increase student learning. What I took away from that is a lesson I had learned years ago.  The lesson was this: Don’t spend too much time working outside your strength zone.  My strengths are far from anything artistic, and because I can make a halfway decent looking worksheet that will get the job done, spending time trying to do something to make it look too much better is not time well spent.

2.    Students will internalize information more when they share it with each other.

Kirsten Fletcher and I got on the subject of my son’s dual language school.  She pointed out that if he were really going to understand Spanish, it would require him to use it with his friends.  Friends create a special motivation that teachers and parents can’t necessarily replicate.   I took that same idea into my leadership class.  If students are going to practice being leaders, there needs to be a social incentive.  Rather than just hearing the lessons from me, students need to practice their leadership skills with one another. 

3.    Linking Schoology accounts

Quinn Loch showed me how to link Schoology accounts so when I add an assignment to one class, it automatically adds it to another class. This saved me so much time. 

4.    Storify

If you are looking to take all of your twitter hash tags and move them into one succinct location, use Storify.  This will help tell the story of a class, or a topic or any other idea.  It is quick, easy and effective.  

5.    We work with great people

As the year quickly settles in, don’t forget that we work with some amazing people.  I have found that I can learn so much from my colleagues by just asking questions.  Open up a dialog and see what happens. I did not intend to learn any of the previous four points, but they naturally evolved by stopping by the CollabLab.  Check it out, and see what you can learn.

Reasons to Collaborate

By Mark Heintz

As the holiday season winds down, I find myself thinking about the conversations I had over the past few months.  The holiday season is when I have time to catch up with family and old friends. Often, there are new people I meet, and once they find out I am a teacher, they share their own experiences with education.  Many are positive, and they share memories of great teachers and coaches that impacted them.  But, often they talk about the state of education and how it is worsening. They share stories of ineffective teachers and how they wished they would have gotten more out of their time at school.

My response is to compare schools to television.  I tell them to look at the typical T.V. series and how many people are involved in the development process. They have writers, directors, producers, costume designers, actors, actresses, acting coaches, set designers, special effects specialists, advertisers and the list goes on.  Each person works together to create a single series.  The typical series is comprised of about twenty-four episodes and targets a specific audience. Despite all of the people involved, over 50% of new T.V. series fail.  All of the collaboration with trained professionals with typically a budget of millions of dollars, and they still fail.  Now, I understand they fail for a variety of reasons that are often not at the fault of the people involved in the making, but the point remains that they fail.

I then compare the television industry to teaching. It is not a direct comparison, but I watch a lot of T.V. and am a teacher, so I talk, and now write, about what I know.  I tell them a teacher typically plays all the roles in the developmental process of a television series.  As teachers, we are writers, directors, producers, costume designers, actors/actresses, coaches, set designers, special effects specialists,  advertisers and the list goes on. We deliver around 180 "shows" a year to an audience that is compelled by law to attend.  The audience at the high school level is hormonal, developing their identity, self-centered, sleep deprived, and not always wanting to be there. They cannot simply pause the show or set their DVR to come back to it when they are ready. The audience can criticize or praise you to your face as the lesson progresses.  Even if a student is hungry, going through a crisis, ....they are there to learn.

I make the comparison not to wallow in self-pity or showcase how great I am or all teachers are.  I make it to show people's memories or understanding of their educational experiences might not be the clearest. They might have been going through something at the time they were learning and just because they cannot remember every detail from history or whatever subject, does not mean they did not grow in the skill development or as a human being.  I also point out that education is in the pursuit of educating everyone.  I feel every year we, as educators, get better at that pursuit.

As I reflect on the conversations, I see the need for teachers to collaborate with one another.  Also, we need to collaborate to develop new teachers.  We need to foster their spirit and skills so they can continue in the educational pursuit of every one.  We need to collaborate to share current research and best practices.  We need to work together to ensure we do not feel isolated with our daily problems.  Bottom line, we need to collaborate with one another.  It helps us grow as an institution and to help the public understand what we do in the classroom and the school.  Working together helps all students feel welcome and can foster their individual needs in a classroom of many.  It helps lessen the load of teachers, so they can spend time giving feedback, support and better instruction to students.   It helps the community as a whole become better.

Lesson Sharing & School Culture

By Kim Miklusak

One of the things I like most about the school culture at EG is our willingness to share lesson ideas and instructional techniques with each other.  I've done two lessons this week that were introduced to me by my peers.

The first was a QR code pre-reading activity that was originally done at our Freshman First Days event at the start of the school year.  I then observed Bonnie Kale use it with her freshmen as a preview to reading Shakepeare; it was so well received by her students that other members of her freshmen team started using it as well!  Many members of our American Literature team are now using that idea this week to preview the concept of race and conflicts surrounding race in the US today as we begin preparing to read Huck Finn.  What was great about this activity was that it was self-paced but still skills-centered and incorporated current events and conflicts via articles and videos.

The second idea is the gamification of grammar practice, an idea long championed by Rita Sayre.  Today I did brackets to make a head-to-head competition.  Students worked by themselves or with a peer.  Each English grammar passage was a round.  The students put the number of correct answers plus an answer explanation as a tie breaker.  Even if they were kicked out in the first round they kept playing because the team with the next highest total came back in for the final round!  The students really got into it--even students who normally wouldn't be as interested in grammar.  Another great way to do this would be through Kahoot!

Collab Lab Housewarming Party

Many thanks to all of the administrators, teachers, staff, guests, and students who stopped by today! We look forward to working with you in our new space!