Only two more chapters in our study of DuFour's Whatever It Takes. As I have said many times before, your work during professional development this year has been exceptional in terms of how you have approached the material and given it some deep thought and consideration.Chapter nine addresses the challenges and barriers of adopting the kinds of programs, practices, and ideas outlined in the previous chapter in the book. A lot of your work during Wednesday's in-service focused on these very ideas, so this will be a nice addendum to it. I look forward to your insight!
1. This chapter explores several challenges that might be raised against the proposal to build a system of interventions for students when they are not learning. What other philosophical challenges might be presented?
2. Most of the challenges to the system of interventions will focus on implementation problems rather than on philosophical concerns. Objections are likely to take the form of “we don’t have enough ‘fill in the blank’ (time, money, resources, space, consensus, kids who will comply).” What are some strategies for addressing these concerns?
3. The authors believe that “the benefits of PLC concepts will speak for themselves if educators demonstrate good faith toward one another as they honestly assess both best practices for helping all students achieve at high levels and the current reality of their own schools.” If they are correct, one of the challenges leaders will face is how to help staff build shared knowledge regarding best practices and current reality. How would you propose to meet this challenge?
Terah, Rana, Brian, Kim:
ReplyDelete1. Making sure expectations are high. How do we define success, failure isn't an option, improvements towards the goal could be considered successful.
When helping our students, how far is it appropriate to "get into" their lives. Where is the line, and when are we "crossing" it?
We have to agree on the management of these groups and interventions.
Being open minded, let's make the change that is best for the children, and not "stuck" in a rut; not always thinking about what is best / easy for us. It is human nature to be defensive. It is important to not put the barriers up and to be open to learning from each others.
We understand that we also face social and emotional challenges. How do we, handle these and deal with them effectively?
2. If you want to do it bad enough, the rest will fall in place. Support from community and administrators, community, and collaboration time with other teachers. A well set plan, and the decision to follow it would help address these concerns and maybe eliminate some to the struggles that we face.
3. We share data and ideas, modeling and best practices could always be done more. Whose standard do we go by? We need to have dialogue as a group, and stay open to new ideas. We need to feel comfortable enough to say what we are doing within our own classrooms. We all need to be on the same page. Staff needs to be open and understand the standards. Follow the research, it is constantly changing and continually re-evaluate the research; stay flexible, and remember that it is a life long process.
PLC Group 1: Caleb, Don, Noel, Paula
ReplyDelete1. This chapter explores several challenges that might be raised against the proposal to build a system of interventions for students when they are not learning. What other philosophical challenges might be presented?
-One possible philosophical challenge would be that parents ultimately need to be motivating their own children, and the children themselves need to have a desire to learn and improve as well.
2. Most of the challenges to the system of interventions will focus on implementation problems rather than on philosophical concerns. Objections are likely to take the form of “we don’t have enough ‘fill in the blank’ (time, money, resources, space, consensus, kids who will comply).” What are some strategies for addressing these concerns?
-Ultimately there are a few that there is very little we can do to address. We're never going to change if we are constantly worrying about time, money, etc. We develop a plan, and then tweak it with the resources we have at our disposal. "If you build it, they will come." -Noel Connor
3. The authors believe that “the benefits of PLC concepts will speak for themselves if educators demonstrate good faith toward one another as they honestly assess both best practices for helping all students achieve at high levels and the current reality of their own schools.” If they are correct, one of the challenges leaders will face is how to help staff build shared knowledge regarding best practices and current reality. How would you propose to meet this challenge?
-It would be beneficial for us to see these practices that are already implemented at small schools in our area, if they exist. Likely, they are few and far between in our area. It would likely need to be a transition we would have to ease ourselves into and continuously evaluate where we stand. This could potentially be done with a small group at a time to test. Like an incoming class of 7th graders to first implement our plan on. This could also be done suddenly, but would likely have much resistance.
By: Jen Pribil, Sara Franey, Dianne Reynolds, Mollie Scrivner, Amanda Pelzer
ReplyDelete1. For teachers planning time is greatly increased due to trying to meet the needs of ALL students. Having so many levels to teach at, it may be hard to always meet their needs. (might leave kids out, or not get to some that definitely need help or need enrichment)
2. Take PD time to plan intervention groups based on academic/specific needs at ALL grade levels for ALL kids. Use associates as needed; include them in on planning before class time. A schedule condusive for common planning and meeting elementary students' academic needs.
3. Training through PD, collaborate with many teachers of all grade levels/subject areas.
1. A challenge would be that some parents may not support the school having their child miss recess or lunch time to receive extra support. Having parents understand the importance of helping their child be responsible is a challenge as well. As teachers, we know that some student’s home life is chaotic, and that it is not necessarily appropriate to make a child stay in for recess or lunch because of that. Also, we need to make sure that we are considering extra support for social/emotional development, social studies, and other areas besides just math and literacy.
ReplyDelete2. One strategy is to have a common planning time, which is something that doesn’t require additional funding. A time we could do this without having to adjust our schedule would be to meet in the morning, or we could schedule collaboration time after school. Also, using associates in a different way. We know that associates need to work with kids, but there seems like a way to have associates help in other areas, like morning bus duty, or afternoon bus duty. This would allow teachers that time to collaborate as needed. It would also be nice if we could make our end of the day more efficient so that we don’t have kids in our room until 3:25. We could be using that time much more than we are. A different idea to give teachers more time is to have high school students help students/teachers, as service helpers, in which they could get some high school credit for it.
Also, having consistent rules, like not having the bus let kids in the door before 8, or not having kids hanging around after school until they get picked up late will help. It would be nice to have set guidelines and follow through with them.
3. One way is to provide professional development, classes offered at MstM during the summer, and acknowledging that the elementary will need a different focus sometimes than the high school. It would also help to sometimes have a more structured early out afternoon schedule, so that teachers have a guideline that helps give direction of what to accomplish. It would be also nice to have a speaker that is viewed as an expert in their area, i.e. a speaker regarding Daily 5, to help all teachers have a shared knowledge regarding best practices. Letting teachers have more a voice regarding what WE would like to have our professional development on. Giving teachers a interest survey identifying what our needs are would also help when picking a professional development subject.
1. Another philosophical problem ,is how these interventions would or could conflict with our current paradigm of extra-curricular/sports vs academics. Could these interventions coincide with our communities focus on athlete over student?
ReplyDelete2. Shorten the school day as far as blocks go and leave 40 minutes or so at the end of the day for that intervention time or enrichment time. This way, we wouldnt have to hold them late or before school to do these interventions. We can just fit it in while they are here. Teachers could either volunteer to help with those needing intervention or the others who would just be in a study hall type setting.
3. We propose that as a staff and administration we are able to sit together and have our leaders initiate dialogue to get to the bottom of everyone's perspective, assumptions, and thought processes and figure out and actually get an action plan together to address these issues and how we can make this work at MSTM.
A philisophical challenge that may be presented is parent involvement. Parents need to be involved in the decision making of interventions. Parents need to be on board with picking up kids from school, helping with extra work, and be supportive of school interventions.
ReplyDeleteAnother challenge is cultural and peer pressure for kids to reach their full potential. Kids receive pressure from peers and family not to do their best. A system to reward good behavior and to create interventions or extra remediation for students who need it.
2. A school needs to utilize their resources that they already have in place (procedures, interventions, grading programs) and use those resources and procedures in a more concise way to achieve our goals. Using policies and procedures that are already at our disposal and can be easily implemented using less time and resources.
We also need common way of addressing problems that we would have with students. All students and faculty would know what procedures were for a failing student, lacking motivation, parental support, etc. A combined effort of teachers, administrators and parents. A plan in place for those problems would be helpful for parents to be on board to help with those problems.
3. Administrators, teachers and parents need to have shared dialogue on how to silve the problems that are occuring in their district or school. Sharing and hammering out ideas on what the best practices are will help in getting everyone on board on the solutions.