Meet the Artists: Ansonia Senior Center

The AHS Culinary and Art students did a great job putting on a fabulous event for our senior citizens on Thursday, March 24th.  Lots of great food and fantastic art on display.

Where in Ansonia....

Can you identify where this photo was taken?

Unity of Purpose in Our Practices

Here in the Department of Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with our system-wide committees, we have been putting a lot of thought into making our curriculum, assessment, and data team practices more unified.  Our goal is to provide teachers and students with a sense of purpose and rhythm as they progress through the year's curriculum.  To this end, we have begun to restructure how our curriculum documents and assessment documents function and the schedule on which they will be implemented.  The objective is to make our CFAs, benchmarks, and curriculum documents all synchronize with the data team process.  Below you'll find a few documents that explain what we're working on.

Because our data team schedule is roughly based on calendar months, we'll be reorganizing our curriculum pacing guides to align with this.  In order to do this, we studied how many "instructional days" are in each month for the coming school year.  We defined an instructional day as a day in which teaching time was available.  In other words, an early-release school day equals approximately 0.5 of an instructional day.  This was enlightening to see how different the months can be in this respect:  Analysis document at this LINK.

We want to ensure that teachers, students, and parents can easily understand they ways in which CFAs help to guide and assess learning.  We also want to have a clear and simple connection between CFAs and benchmark assessments - showing that CFAs are the discrete building blocks upon which the benchmarks are built.  To this work, we've added a new and exciting grade-level capstone assessment.  Our district improvement plan states that we should be doing regular performance assessments, but it has been unclear how to implement this without taking away large amounts of instructional time.  We will begin to develop interdisciplinary performance assessments for each grade/content area.  Students will be asked to integrate the learning from a year's study to demonstrate that they have internalized the curriculum.  A conceptual model of how all of this will work together is available HERE.

Another exciting development is our continued growth in the implementation of instructional data teams.  We believe that, in a gradual-release model, Ansonia teachers are ready to move to the "we do" stage of implementing data teams.  By this we mean that we have the talent and are ready to take on more responsibility for facilitating our own meetings.  Our colleagues from ACES have been instrumental in our growth in this area.  Now it's time for us to take on the reins with continued support from ACES.  THIS document explains our plan for 2011-2012.

The Worth of Homework

Education.com recently published another article by Mike W., our Math & Science Coordinator:

http://www.education.com/reference/article/homework-why-do-it/?nocache

Khan Academy. WOW! Tons of Math, Physics, and History Resources.

Thanks to our ACES colleague, Emily F., for passing this along.  This could really be an incredible resource for high school teachers and students.
Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) is a gigantic library of YouTube lectures and practice activities on an incredibly broad range of mathematical, scientific, and some historical topics.


In this TED video, he talks about an idea that I like a lot:  (http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html).  Ask students to view the lecture for homework (at home or in the school library).  This allows class time to be more focused on guided and independent practice for the students while the teacher is there to help.


Even better, it seems that all of the videos are available for download, so if you're afraid that you won't be able to access YouTube in your classroom, download the video to a flash drive and bring it with you.

Tons and tons of examples of practical applications of Effective Teaching Strategies.

Thanks to Mike W. for passing on the following resources.  Lots to explore and lots to offer.


http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=297

http://www.middleweb.com/MWLresources/marzchat1.html


www.uhseport.net/published/k/sh/kshaw/​collection/1/25/


http://www.iobservation.com/Marzano-Suite/

http://station05.qc.ca/css/cybersite/reach-out/strategies/TEACHING.htm

http://instructionaltech.org/online-resources/technology-support-for-high-yield-strategies/

http://www.schools.manatee.k12.fl.us/3160MARZANO/3160marzano/

http://www.smyser.org/ourpages/professional_development/2008-9%20Professional%20Development/The%20Art%20and%20Science%20of%20Teaching%20Professional%20Development%20PowerPoint.pdf

http://www.netc.org/focus/strategies/prov.php

http://www.sbac.edu/~include/documents/ACPSstrategies7-24draft.pdf

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/33118785/Marzanos-High-Leverage-Strategies

http://t4.jordan.k12.ut.us/professional_development/strategies/

http://www.ellingtonpublicschools.org/emslibrary/21stCenturyTechnologyandMarzano.htm

http://franklincountyschools.k12tn.net/Show%20Me%20the%20Strategies.htm

http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/assessment/el200402_strong.html

http://www.meade.k12.sd.us/PASS/Pass%20Adobe%20Files/March%202007/SummarizingStrategies.pdf

Where in Ansonia...

More free Math Resources

From Mike W.: Here are a couple links for some good math practice activities - most appropriate for K-4.

www.mathnook.com

www.edupup.com

Quick Great Ideas from Fran A.

Making predictions and inferences before or during reading:

Provide students with key words (new vocab or not) from a text/topic and have students categorize the words under (setting, character, conflict),  (cause and effect) etc.  Thereafter have students use the words they have categorized to write 1-2 quick sentences about their predictions/inference about the text or topic. One of the sentences has to answer "why" the student feels his/her prediction/inference may be valid.  Provide no more than 6-8 words. This strategy can be applied in small groups or individually. Can this be done with selected sentences from a text? hhhmmmm

Please share your comments with us all and don't hesitate to send me your Quick Great Ideas!