The Transparency Files: Standardized Testing

This is our third year of publishing the “Grade Equivalent Scores” for the Iowa Test of Basic Skills or ITBS – the standardized test we take annually at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  We did not have comparison data the first year we published results.  I also blogged that year about our overall philosophy regarding the proper context for standardized testing.  Last year we able for the first time to graph out comparison data and provided an analysis of our findings.

There was, and continues to be, some confusion about the proper understanding of what a “grade equivalent score” is and, more importantly, is not.  I am happy to refer you to a thorough explanation, but if you want the quick summary:

Grade-equivalent scores attempt to show at what grade level and month your child is functioning.  However, grade-equivalent scores are not able to show this.  Let me use an example to illustrate this.  In reading comprehension, your son scored a 7.3 grade equivalent.  The seven represents the grade level while the 3 represents the month.  7.3 would represent the seventh grade, third month, which is December.  The reason it is the third month is because September is zero, October is one, etc.  It is not true though that your son is functioning at the seventh grade level since he was never tested on seventh grade material.  He was only tested on fifth grade material.  That’s why the grade-equivalent scores should not be used to decide at what grade level a students is functioning.

This year, I blogged about our firm belief that “reflection leads to achievement”.  In that post, I attempt to peg our pioneering work in 21st century learning to academic success. All the blogging, reflecting, technology, project-based learning, flipped classrooms, etc., we not only do because we believe it leads to the best outcomes…we do it because it does lead to the best outcomes.

We do not believe that standardized test scores represent the only, nor surely the best, evidence for academic success.  Our goal continues to be providing each student with a “floor, but no ceiling” representing each student’s maximum success.  Our best outcome is still producing students who become lifelong learners.

But I also don’t want to undersell the objective evidence that shows that the work we are doing here does in fact lead to tangible success!

Our graduates the last three years have successfully placed into the high school programs of their choice.  Each one had a different ceiling – they are all different – but working with them, their families and their teachers, we successfully transitioned them all to the schools and programs they qualified for.

And for three years running, despite all the qualifications and caveats, our ITBS scores continue to demonstrate excellence.  Excellence within the grades and between them. And let’s be clear, this academic excellence comes with an inclusive admissions process.

That’s the headline…let’s look more closely at the story.

First up is “Language”.

MJGDS ITBS 2013 - Language

 

Remember…in order to track a class you have to compare 2012 to 2013.  For example, in 2012, the Language Grade Equivalent of Average for Grade Two was 3.4.  In 2013, those kids are now in Grade Three and scored 4.9.  That class “grew” 1.5 from last year to this. (Also, the scale stops at 13…it is the highest score available.)

The positive, of course, is that each grade is functioning at an extremely high level!  There are dips up and down, but when both the averages and the diversity level is high, it hard to find much to point to.  One data point to explore is that although most classes grew at least one grade equivalency, Grades One and Two did not.  They still have high averages, but this is worth looking at further.  This is also the benefit of not teaching to the test…it can sometimes uncover gaps in curriculum or teaching.

Let’s move onto “Reading”.

MJGDS ITBS 2013 - Reading

 

Here the news is all positive!  Each class grew at least one grade equivalency (technically Grade One grew .9) and all are functioning at very high levels.  One possible influence that we will be looking to track is the growing impact of the Daily Five, which we began piloting in Grades 4 & 5, but also had influence on other grades.

Let’s take a look at “Math”.

MJGDS ITBS 2013 - Math

Again, the overwhelming news is positive.  This marks the second year we are using Singapore Math, the first year for a few of our teachers, and the first year of departmentalization in Grades Four & Five.  The only trend worth noting is the relatively flat growth in the youngest grades.  The grade averages, even in those grades, are appropriately high and the class averages still show growth.  It is the rate of growth we will need to explore.  It could be that our students are covering more than the curriculum in Kindergarten – where the curriculum is the most sparse – and it takes until Grades Two or Three before the curriculum jumps.  [NOTE: It takes a lot of courage for teachers to work under this level of transparency.]  We have noted in the past that the curriculum tends to start out slow and build…and if that is the case, we may need to think about how to supplement in Kindergarten and Grade One.

 

To sum up, despite our focus on individual growth, our average growth continues to significantly outpace national percentiles and grade equivalency scores.  Does “reflection lead to achievement” at MJGDS?  Does being a 21st century learning pioneer translate into high academic success?

Three years in a row may not be conclusive, but it carries weight.

As with last year, all receiving teachers will have prior years’ data and be charged with making the next year even better.  They have been up to the task these last three years and we look forward to more learning, more growth and more excellence in the year to come.

 

 

 

 

The Transparency Files: Annual Parent Survey

After making transparent the results of my own evaluation by both myself and my faculty, it is time to turn to our other annual survey: the Annual Parent Survey.  [For comparison sake, you are welcome to explore last year’s reflection.]

I will try to highlight any trends I see over the years as well as indicate anything of import in this year’s survey.

The first trend is that each year far fewer parents (22 vs. 39 vs. 64) filled out surveys!

Possible explanations?

Families could be thrilled with what’s going on.  Families could be resigned that the results are not taken seriously enough to invest the time in.  There could be a certain amount of apathy.  Or perhaps we are not marketing the surveys enough.

Regardless, the lower the rate, the possibility of strong validity is reduced.  But in the spirit of hoping to learn from whatever there is to learn…let’s move on to the results.

 

Parent Survey Graph #1

 

This is more even than last year, but still skewed a bit towards the younger grades, as expected in school surveys.  Let’s look at the BIG PICTURE:

ChartExport

 

The score is still promising.  On a  scale of 1-10, our average score wound up being an 8.0 Last year we scored an 8.3.  The year prior we scored 7.7.  It is a fairly stable score – especially considering the sample – but still leaves us some room to grow.  Let’s dig deeper.

ChartExport

 

When it comes to communication, we continue to have high marks.  Each one has gone up (except the first, which is virtually the same)!  The biggest jumps come in providing opportunities for parents to be involved in student learning (which was the lowest one the prior year).  Hopefully this indicates growth on our part from what we learned. Another big jump was in parent-teacher conferences, which I would like to attribute to our piloting Student-Led Conferences.  I am pleased that the biggest jump came in front office attitude, and I have shared that pleasure with those people.  The place to keep working appears to be ongoing communication about children’s academic status, which could be a concern about our current system in the Middle School or lack of a system in the Lower School.

ChartExport

 

I know it is a little crowded, so let me break down some of the highlights.

Let me unpack the non-subject specific areas first:

  • Most important increase!  The education offered at our school is high quality: 8.4 vs. 8.28 (last year) vs. 7.72 (the year before last year)
  • EVERY category in this section is up – most importantly questions that deal with “teaching in different styles”, “teaching to different levels” and “satisfied…(with) individual attention”.  All these categories blend with “21st century learning”.

General Studies:

  • The big picture is great!  The OVERALL rating has gone to 8.3 from last year’s 7.97 from the prior year’s 7.19. That is a trend in the right direction.
  • Based on that it makes sense that all General Studies scores are up from last year, with one exception.  The impact of Singapore Math continues to positively impact as does, we hope, the influence of the Daily Five on Language Arts.
  • But there is still room to grow.  Science took a drop – and that is despite dedicating time and an instructor in the Lower School for the first time.  It is impossible to know because of how the survey is done whether or not to attribute the drop to dissatisfaction in Grades K-2 (where there is time, but no teacher), Grades 3-5 (where there is time and a new position), or Middle School (which is the same).  Regardless, this is something very important for us to explore.  There is no “21st century learning” without high-quality Science instruction.

Jewish Studies, Resources and Extracurricular Activities:

  • The marks in these areas are, again, all slightly down from last year.  Not dramatically so, but still noticeable.  With renewed emphasis on language immersion, we really do believe our program is stronger, but for whatever reason it has not translated to parent satisfaction (at least from the sample).  It is possible that we have set a higher bar and the distance from it is now more noticeable.  We have pledged to post more video of our students engaged in authentic Hebrew speech and this will hopefully contribute to higher marks in the years to come.
  • Our weakest area has consistently been “After School Activities”.  It is hard to know if this is a referendum on the quality of what we do offer or on the quantity of what we do not offer.  We have added more club sports and a Chess Club on top of an Enhanced Kindergarten Program and partnership with the JCA.  We might wish to do some parent surveys to unpack this one more fully.

So there you have it for 2012-2013!

Thanks to all the parents who took the time and care to fill out surveys.  In addition to the multiple choice questions, there were opportunities for open-ended responses.  They added an additional layer of depth; one which is difficult to summarize for a post like this.  But please know that all comments will be shared with those they concern as we use this data to make enhancements and improvements headed into next year.  By the by, we are very pleased with how well satisfied our parents are with how the school is going…but be assured, just like with everything else, we expect to see growth and progress in a school where there is “a floor, but no ceiling”.

Is Hosting edJEWcon Good for MJGDS?

There is no criteria I can think of that would not conclude that this week’s edJEWcon 5773.1 was anything other than an unqualified success.  And I do not want to duplicate the amazing curatorial efforts of my colleagues and present my summary of what took place, when they are continuing to do such an amazing job of it themselves.  I’ll simply cut-and-paste from their terrific contributions to the website and move on to a question I need to answer as head of the school who hosts…

Here is the story of edJEWcon through its keynotes:

 

Here is the story of edJEWcon through Storify (thanks to Silvia Tolisano for creating!):

http://storify.com/langwitches/edjewcon-5773-1-day-1

 

http://storify.com/langwitches/edjewcon-5773-1-day-2

 

http://storify.com/langwitches/edjewcon-5773

 

And here is what was undoubtedly the highlight for many attendees: Speed Geeking!

 

However, before moving into the meat of my reflection, special mention must be made of Andrea Hernandez, who is the most responsible for the conference.  Others make meaningful contributions, but Andrea makes it happen.  No Andrea?  No edJEWcon.  So please be sure to share your admiration and appreciation to her directly.

Considering how much time and energy it takes to put on an experience like edJEWcon, it is reasonable to ask whether or not hosting edJEWcon is good for the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School?  Remember, after all, that our primary responsibility is to the students, parents, teachers, donors, and stakeholders of MJGDS – if edJEWcon doesn’t serve their needs we have to consider the question.

Upon reflection, I can think of three categories in which to consider this question.

Financial Impact

If our school made money off of edJEWcon that could be reinvested in the school, that could be one reason why edJEWcon is good for MJGDS!  The EduCon we borrowed the original idea from does, in fact, turn a surplus which is invested back into the host school, Science Leadership Academy.

In our case, we have been generously funded by the AVI CHAI Foundation in order to put on edJEWcon the first two years and have charged fees to cover expenses.  We have not looked to monetize edJEWcon – either through fees, sponsorships, vendors, etc.  Our plan was to transition from being subsidized to a sustainable business model that allowed us to break even.  We have not focused on edJEWcon as a possible source of revenue for MJGDS.  Considering how much fundraising goes into the school’s budget, it is at least reasonable to ask whether or not hosting edJEWcon should be viewed as a business opportunity.  Would it change the mission of the conference?  Would it change the program?  Would it impact how people felt about the conference?

All worthwhile questions worthy of consideration.

Recruitment/Retention

Does hosting edJEWcon and the accumulated prestige associated with it have enough of a local impact to positively impact retention and recruitment of students into the school? Retention is a harder one to measure because there are so many co-variables.  In the abstract, it makes sense that the more our local community has access (through the public keynote, publicity, social media, etc.) to the significance of hosting a conference such as this, that it ought to lend prestige to the school, bolster its reputation and hopefully encourage families to want to send (and keep) their children in a school like this.  I think we have some anecdotal evidence, at least with retention, that this is the case, but I think the recruitment question is not yet clear.

If it were the case that hosting edJEWcon lead to higher rates of retention and increased enrollment, it would be well worth the time and energy it takes to put it on.

Quality of Education

Does the fact that we host edJEWcon positively impact our teachers’ professional growth and, ultimately, their performance?  Or, more simply, does the fact that we host edJEWcon make our teachers better?

This is a difficult one to measure as well, because there is no control group of MJGDS teachers in a non-edJEWcon MJGDS to compare them to.  But it is my opinion that the knowledge that people are coming to our school to see a “21st century school in progress” does exert positive pressure.  I also believe the opportunities our teachers have to present at edJEWcon contribute positively to their professional growth.  They also, of course, benefit from the professional development opportunities of participating in edJEWcon.

If hosting edJEWcon makes our teachers better and, thus, improves the quality of education at MJGDS, it may be well worth doing.

[I could also mention the incredible opportunities our students have to present at edJEWcon and what impact it has on their growth.]

 

edJEWcon is an enormous task for a school our size to take on.  It comes at a significant price – the time, energy, and care of the conference organizer, the conference planning team, and one way or another the entire faculty and staff of the school.  We all have pretty important day jobs to concern ourselves with – ensuring that the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School is everything it can be.  As we reflect on edJEWcon 5773.1, it is my responsibility to ensure that if there is going to be an edJEWcon 5774.2 that it serve the greatest good for the greatest amount.

And in the spirit of transparency, it is important that I make that explicit.

In the meanwhile, we will continue here at MJGDS, on the edJEWcon website, and through social media to keep the edJEWcon-versations alive for all who care about the marriage of 21st century learning and Jewish day school education.

But first a good weekend’s sleep!

Getting Ready for edJEWcon 5773.1

Who was the smart guy who didn’t build a travel day into this year’s Passover Break?

This guy!

It has been quite a short week recovering from Passover and preparing for a tremendous amount of important events and programs to bring us from now through the end of another terrific year at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  We are engaged in annual parent and faculty surveys.  We are finalizing financial aid decisions.  We have many important and exciting Jewish holidays to celebrate and experience.  Our Middle School is off next week to Washington, D.C.  We will have standardized testing to analyze and disseminate.  We will have a graduation.  We have our annual L’Dor V’Dor spring event (save the date coming soon!).  We have a faculty to hire and new students to enroll.  We have a gaming project to embark upon and we are just opening up our K-2 digital portfolios to sit alongside our existing 3-8 blogfolios.

Needless to say, there is plenty to do!

And smack dab in the middle of it all comes edJEWcon 5773.1!

Thanks again to the generosity of the AVI CHAI Foundation and the support of the Schechter Day School Network we will again welcome over 100 participants representing schools, agencies, foundations and universities from all over North American and Israel who are coming to Jacksonville, Florida to learn, reflect, share and co-create the future of Jewish day school education.  Want to get excited?  Check this out.

Want to get excited if you are not a Jewish educator, but care about education?

Even with the difficulty in scheduling between Jewish holidays, we are thrilled to not only have great turnout, but we have changed the conference from last year to this in a few important ways:

  • Requests for presentation were offered and we received back more than enough high-quality proposals to allow edJEWcon to be a conference by the field for the field.
  • We have built in reflection and collaboration to ensure the conference is simply the beginning of an ongoing conversation about teaching and learning.
  • We closed school on the Monday so that our faculty can more fully participate and benefit from the conference.
  • We have expanded our outreach to ensure that Chris Lehmann’s Keynote: “Building School 2.0 Creating the Schools We Need” is well attended by our local school community as well our larger Jewish and educational community here in Jacksonville.
  • Working with DSLTI, we will have a post-edJEWcon experience focused on leading cultural change in a 21st century learning organization facilitated by Jonathan Cannon.

So much gratitude and thanks goes to our 21st Century Learning Team who does the bulk of the conference preparation.  Thanks to all the students, teachers, parents and stakeholders at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School whose hard work allows us to host an edJEWcon.  Extra thanks to those MJGDS teachers who are presenting this year!  Much thanks to Karin Hallett and Silvia Tolisano for innumerable hours of work.  Extra special thanks to Andrea Hernandez who steers the ship and who will very deservingly be giving the opening keynote.

We have a lot of work to do over the next three weeks to ensure edJEWcon’s success.  But it is inspiring to know that the future of Jewish education is happening now…and it is happening here.

Stay tuned!

Take My Wordle For It

A deep breath on a lovely day-of-Erev Tu B’Shevat here in Jacksonville, Florida.  Students throughout the school are engaged in different planting projects, seders, and celebrations of this “New Year for the Trees”.  And, for whatever reason, this week of the year has become my annual “New Year for the Blog”.  It is time, indeed, for my annual Wordle reflection of my blog!  [What’s a “wordle”?  From their website: “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.  The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.]

(For last year’s, you are welcome to click here.)

One year ago this blog’s Wordle looked like this:

And almost exactly one year later, it looks like this:

Having spent about thirty minutes or so comparing the two Wordle’s side-by-side, and factoring in the occasional random word or favorite idiom, there are indeed a few things that strike me as noteworthy:

  • The word that takes on the most prominence in this year’s Wordle is “conversation”.  I LOVE that!  To the degree that this blog represents my practice, I am very pleased to see “conversation” rise to the top.  I do believe that a significant facet to being an effective leader is engaging people in conversations, facilitating collaborations and fostering connectedness.  I hope that I am not simply blogging about it, but actually doing it.  I’m definitely trying.
  • So what might all these “conversations” be about?  Well, based on this year’s Wordle it would be “teaching” and “learning”!  Those sound like good things for a school to be conversing about, no?  But digging deeper, to me it actually reflects the possibility that we have successfully made the philosophical (and semantic) shift from “21st Century Learning” [which has almost disappeared from the Wordle from the prior year] to simply “teaching and learning”.  This has, indeed, been a major priority of ours – the complete identification of this thing called “21st century learning” as the core of “teaching and learning” in our school.
  • What is not there that surprises and disappoints me?  No appearance of “Community of Kindness”!  (I have definitely blogged about here, here, here, here, here and here.)  Maybe the word “kindness” is filtered out of Wordle’s logarithm, but I do want to honor the possibility that this important initiative has not received the attention it requires to impact our culture to the desired degree.  This demands deeper reflection and will receive it.
  • New initiatives or ideas that definitely reflect the facts on the ground include “iPads”, “EdCamp” and “target”.
  • Specific to this blog, this annual exercise asks me to consider and reconsider a foundational question: Who is my audience?

When I began blogging, I thought my audience would be almost exclusively parents of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  Little did I know that through the power of amplification, social networking, the amazing work our teachers and students are doing, and the happenstance of being in the right place at the right time – I am chronically surprised by who reads this blog.  I barely have time to cross-post; I do not have time to operate two different blogs.  So I try my best to write about topics (and in a style) that would be of primary interest to an ever-growing concentric circle of stakeholders, beginning with my parents and ending at the edge of the educational universe.

Am I succeeding?

I am not entirely sure.

I am sure that this weekly reflective exercise called blogging has made me a better Head of School.  I am all in on “reflection leads to achievement“.  So on my personal, annual “New Year of the Blog” I am thankful for the opportunity to be transparent.  It takes supportive and brave lay leadership and I got it in spades.

Next year’s blogging?  I certainly welcome and encourage feedback from readers of this blog.  If I am not meeting y’all’s needs, this blogger definitely wants to know!

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The Transparency Files: MJGDS Learning Target

I blogged last week, here, about tomorrow’s exciting MJGDS EdCamp!  We are very excited for our day of learning and I will hopefully write a bonus blog next week reflecting and sharing the experience.  Since I will be unable to write tomorrow, I did want to take some here to preview (in a major exclusive!) the debut of our new MJGDS Learning Target and what it will mean for our teachers and students moving forward.

As I wrote last week, the final part of the day will be spent unveiling our new learning “target”.  Inspired by Jim Knight’s book “Unmistakable Impact“,  a committee of teachers and administrators have been working to put in writing a one-page “target” which describes how we believe teaching and learning ought to look at our school. That committee has been meeting for a few months and will be presenting the target to the full faculty as the culminating activity for our Professional Day.

For those looking to hear Jim Knight describe and define school learning targets, I invite you to click this link (I don’t have permission to embed this video in my post), here, go to 33:26 of the video and watch for about 8 minutes.

To read another school’s journey towards developing a learning target, I encourage you to check out this blog post, here.

The goal of tomorrow’s “target conversation” is for those faculty who worked on the committee to present their work to their colleagues.  We want out teachers to have a fuller understanding of what exactly the target consists of and what comes next.  In order to do that, we are going to have a very structured conversation, which in our school means the use of a formal protocol.  The reason why I prefer to use a formal protocol is that it ensures full and equal participation.  It also ensures that the conversation is structured and stays on track.

The last two “whip-around questions” of the protocol will begin the conversation about next steps.  Because the presentation of the target is the beginning of a conversation, not an end.  Everything we do must now be revisited in light of the target.  Workgroups, task forces, committees – call it whatever you like, should organically bubble up asking questions about everything from curriculum mapping to faculty evaluation to student assessment to “bring your own device” to professional development/instructional coaching to scheduling and everything else in between.

Obviously, I may have priorities of my own, which I will make transparent in due time, but for this conversation I will be satisfied if teachers walk away with a meaningful understanding of the target and that it necessarily requires next steps be taken.

So…wanna see the new MJGDS Learning Target?  With great thanks to Cathy Toglia, Judy Reppert, Shelly Zavon, Stephanie Teitelbaum, Karen Hallett, Andrea Hernandez and Silvia Tolisano, I am pleased to share it below:

We have a separate document providing detailing each cog in greater detail, which I will be happy to share upon request.  We are very excited to clarify what teaching and learning at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School ought to look like and to make it transparent to all our stakeholders.

Tomorrow we bring it to life!

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MJGDS EdCamp

Let me begin by giving full credit to this blog post to Andrea Hernandez, our Director of Teaching & Learning, not only for most of the ideas, but the links as well.  We are finishing up planning for next Friday’s scheduled “Professional Development” Day – an annual day of school without students, dedicated to professional development.  And thanks to Andrea, who has championed this day of faculty learning for the last couple of years, along with Silvia Tolisano, our 21st Century Learning Specialist, we have planned a very exciting three-part day which we think will not only inspire our teachers on their ongoing journeys of growth, but will impact what teaching and learning looks like at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.

The first part of the day will be an “EdCamp”.  What is “EdCamp”?

Edcamp is an “unconference” – an opportunity, without intense preparation or anxiety for teachers to “own” their professional learning.  Teachers will show up at edcamp and find a blank schedule – only time slots and locations.  They will then decide what topics they want to present on or which conversations they wish to facilitate and simply sign up until the schedule is complete.  And then the learning begins!

Sounds simple, which it is, but its power is in recognizing how much teachers already have to offer and how strong their desire is to learn from each other.  It is also an important acknowledgment that they are already experts in important topics and, thus, there is no need for intense preparation – simply share the work.

For those who are interested in diving deeper and being inspired, I invite you to watch this 16-minute TED talk by Kristen Swanson, a founder and planner for EdCamp Philly:

For a fuller written description of the EdCamp model, I invite you to read this article from Edutopia, here.  For a reflection on one school’s first experience with a faculty EdCamp, invite you to this blog post by Greg Miller, here.

We will have reflection built in to our EdCamp and I look forward to sharing mine once MJGDS EdCamp is complete.  But that’s just the first chunk of our exciting day!

The lunch hour will be spent in our first-annual Faculty Hatzatah Contest!  What’s a hatzatah?

הצתה    (“Hatzatah”= Ignition) is our adaptation of a popular presentation format based on Pecha Kucha and Ignite.  Each presenter has 5 minutes to share their idea, broken down into 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds.

Here are a few examples from edJEWcon 5772.0.

Each MJGDS Faculty Meeting begins with a hatzatah.  We find it a fantastic way to get our faculty to fulfill the moral imperative of sharing in a 21st century modality.  To celebrate and inspire our faculty to make more and better use of iPads in the classroom, we decided to host a Hatzatah Contest on the theme of “How has the use of iPads impacted my professional practice?”  The presentations will take place during lunch on our Professional Day, will be judged by an outside panel of 21st century learning experts, and the winner will be awarded an iPad.  We have a number of teachers competing and it should make for an amazing hour of faculty learning.

For educators who wish to dig deeper, I invite you to download the above graphic as a PDF, here, that we created through edJEWcon (which will be hosting its own Hatzatah Contest this spring) describing the rubric we use to judge.

The final part of the day will be spent unveiling our new learning “target”.  Inspired by Jim Knight’s book “Unmistakable Impact“,  a committee of teachers and administrators have been working to put in writing a one-page “target” which describes how we believe teaching and learning ought to look at our school.  That committee has been meeting for a few months and will be presenting the target to the full faculty as the culminating activity for our Professional Day.  I fully intend to make that target transparent because it will be a guiding touchstone for all important decisions moving forward.  How we choose curriculum, how we decide on new use-of-technologies, how teachers ought to be evaluated, what student assessment ought to look like, etc., – all of those questions and more will be reexamined in light of whether they move us closer to or farther from the target.

Needless to say it should be an extraordinary day of learning that I am looking forward to with great anticipation.  And I look forward to sharing it with you soon.

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If You Are Thinking About Kindergarten

With the Thanksgiving holiday behind us and Winter Break looming, we are entering prime time for parents – particularly parents of pre-kindergarten aged children – to explore and make decisions about schooling.  With this age in particular, the conversations typically focus on two important ideas: “readiness” and “fit”.  With regard to “fit” the research is clear: the most important factor in determining a child’s future academic success isn’t the school, but the fit between the child and the school.

“Readiness,” however, is more slippery.

Young children’s development is irregular and episodic, and difficult to accurately assess, particularly using conventional tests at a single point in time.  Their performance is highly susceptible to immediate and transitory circumstances and can also be affected by physical health, nutrition, and living conditions.  Over time, these contextual factors may also affect their knowledge, skills, and behavior.  Children’s pre-kindergarten experiences are highly unequal, whether in the home and community or in preschool programs.  Thus, the “supply” of readiness skills children bring to kindergarten varies widely.  However, the impact of these variations depends on the demands that kindergarten and first grade place on children, and these also are variable.  There is a lack of agreement regarding the implicit and explicit demands of teachers, schools, state standards, and readiness tests. Children who are seen as ready in one classroom or community—whether the result of a cutoff date or specific assessment—may not be similarly viewed elsewhere.

Let’s bring “fit” and “readiness” together.  A definition of readiness must encompass what is “good enough” in each domain, while recognizing the unevenness of early development.  Every child need not meet the highest readiness standard in every domain, and a distribution of abilities is to be expected.  Despite our best efforts, some children will be less well-prepared than others.  By carefully defining readiness in terms of expectations for children and schools, it may be possible to improve the preparation of both, and create a much better match between children and schools so that more children succeed and maximize their learning during the kindergarten and first grade years.

That’s why it is so important for parents to really get the feel of the different schools they are considering for their child(ren).

Here at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, we are excited to think about all the wonderful new faces we are meeting and will be meeting as parents go about their due diligence to discover which is the right school for their child(ren).  We are always honored to be included in the search and we are confident that for many children, we will be that right choice – that best fit.  We are confident that no one will know your child better than us and no one will be better able to ensure that there truly will be a floor, but no ceiling for your child.

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I am proud to be included amongst the authors contributing to the Autumn 2012 edition of “Contact” magazine.

The theme is “Technology & Jewish Education” and it includes a wonderful range of articles dealing with issues of 21st century learning, technology, and the future of Jewish education.

You can click here to read it.

Reflection Leads to Achievement

Our mission is to achieve the academic benchmarks and standards that define success. Our philosophy is to provide each student with “a floor, but no ceiling” representing each student’s maximum success.  Our pedagogy is this “thing” we’ve been calling “21st century learning” (but is really just excellence in “teaching & learning”).  Our product are students who are lifelong learners.

We can never confuse our product (academic success as defined by standards) with our process (“21st century learning”).  So with that context in mind, please consider the following:

Blogging is process, not product.

I was tempted to be extremely hyperbolic, as an attention grabber, and title this post, “Students who blog are more likely to get into Ivy League colleges, nab their dream jobs, and live happily ever after.”

Not to suggest there is any evidence (yet!) that this is true, but to try to shine a light on this fundamental truth operating at the core of our school; that we believe reflective learners achieve at a higher level than non-reflective learners.  It is both that simple and that complicated.

It is why reflection is embedded into all subject matter. It is why students have blogfolios.  It is why teachers have classroom blogs and responsibility for blogging on a faculty ning.

It is because we believe that the process of reflection leads to the product of achievement.

If I accomplish nothing else in this post, it will hopefully be to have you click on Silvia Tolisano’s blog post on our 21st Century Learning blog, here, in which she lays out in the most compelling and convincing way the why of blogging at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  It is as good a post as you’ll read this year.  With clear analysis and data, she explains how blogging catalyzes achievement.  Not just for students, but for their “text-people” – their teachers.

Or as I put it in a comment to a teacher’s blog post:

..if your students don’t see “blogging” as integral to their ability to learn math – if they don’t realize that blogging helps them learn math better – then why should they want to blog about math?

…and to draw the larger point…if we teachers don’t see blogging as integral to our ability to be effective teachers – if we don’t realize that engaging in collaborative reflection helps us become better teachers – then why should we want to blog about teaching?

 

Our teachers blog because the process of blogging makes them better teachers.  We teach our students to blog because blogging makes them better students.  Better students will achieve higher academic success than non-better students.  Our students want to be successful.  Our teachers want to be successful.

Reflection breeds success.

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Vlogging What You Preach

I was meeting on Friday with Andrea Hernandez, our Director of Teaching & Learning (formally “21st Century Learning” – we are trying to message that “21st Century Learning” is synonymous with “Teaching & Learning”), who chided me for not role modeling what was expected of all our faculty.  Namely, where was my evidence for my own summer learning!

I blogged, here, about our faculty’s commitment to summer learning.  I blogged, here, about my own.  Silvia Tolisano, our 21st Century Learning Consultant (yes, I recognize the conflict with the above parenthesis; it is an imperfect world we live in!) wrote an amazing blog post on the edJEWcon website presenting a mosaic of our entire faculty’s summer learning.  You can click on it, here, and I have insisted it move to the front of the website.  It is a great post.

There is great diversity in how teachers presented evidence of their student learning.  One methodology that inspired me, pushes me a bit outside my comfort zone…so it is probably a good one for me to experiment with – vlogging.  It sounds simple, instead of sitting at my desk, writing, writing, writing and writing, I can simply look into the camera and speak.  But when the light goes red…so do I!  Not so easy…and you’ll be able to tell when you watch it.  But I did try!  [Another problem…I’ve become so accustomed to hyperlinking, that each time I mentioned a name, I mentally paused to hyperlink!]

[NOTE: I apologize if watching me rock back and forth in my chair made anyone seasick!]

Thanks for suffering through my first (and possibly last!) vlog post.  As we enter the season of repentance, you will surely find it in your hearts to forgive me.  🙂

A Sweet & Happy New Year to All!

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