Never work harder than your students, Cha. 4

Support your students

Jackson starts off this chapter by defining the "Curse of Knowledge," knowing something and being unable to imagine what it's like not knowing it. She suggests that it's one of the big reasons that teachers have a hard time teaching until the remediation stage. Then, she suggests that by having remediation plans without intervening during instruction is tantamount to planning on our students' failure. This, of course, leads to frustration all around.

The mitigation to this--the principle for this chapter--is to plan interventions in to the lesson. In the planning stages of a class or a unit, a teacher decides what students should know. (This is reflected in "standard and benchmarks" and whatnot.) He then breaks that up into smaller bits, steps and stages of learning goals to put together some kind of continuity plan so that he's not just randomly pulling activities out of his file drawer. Then, he builds in learning supports over the course of the unit, so that when students trip up, they have a system to help them keep their footing.

Jackson identifies the following elements of an effective intervention system:

1. The Plan is developed before students begin to fail.
2. The Plan has a red flag mechanism that triggers action--objective, based on learning objectives (not behavior).
3. A concrete procedure is in place such that when the conditions are met (less than 76%, missed standards, whatever), the procedure kicks right in. It's in the letter home, the syllabus, the class's website, on refrigerator magnets. Everybody understands the procedure, what it's for, when it happens. It's not punishment and it's not busywork.
4. Students have shared accountability in this Plan. They have a well-defined job and responsibility for their learning.
   

Jackson suggests a number of interlinking steps to help support students' learning:

• Anticipate confusion. Having once been learners of our subject ourselves, and having taught our subject every year more, we have a pretty good idea where our students will get tripped up. Prepare your students for those moments and have a variety of teaching strategies in your pocket.
• Pinpoint confusion and uncover misconceptions. Know where your students are getting tripped up. She points out that this is tricky, because you can get right answers using wrong strategy. This action step (or whatever it is she calls it) addresses the strategies that students are using, and making sure that they're using the correct strategies.
  
• Demystify the process. The process of education makes sense to educators. We live it, we dedicate ourselves to improving it, we've invested huge amounts of time to thinking abstractly about it. This is not so for student. Help them to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
  
• Gradually remove supports as students improve. Make it clear that some of your "crutch" methods may be necessary now, but they won't be available forever. She makes the point of saying that, rather than changing the learning activities, try keeping the learning activities the same and changing the students' relationship to it. I'm not exactly clear what she means by this, or what this would look like in an WL class, but I get the shape of what she's saying.
  
• Support the learning of students who have already mastered the learning goals. The teacher prep looks nearly the same for this step as the previous. Instead of taking the ambiguity out of a learning objective, leave some of the (learning-goal-relevant) ambiguity in. The students who already know a lot need to learn, too.
  

And in this way, Jackson comes back to content differentiation. These are all things that a teacher prepares for as often as possible. Jackson suggests doing this systemically, making sure that you have this process available all the time.

Our school has an "Interventions" class this year, a class we've been struggling with getting right all year long. We know that we need a mechanism to help students learn content they may have missed the first time, and this year it took the form of a 1-hour-a-day class. We've had trouble organizing the class logistically, re-teaching standards, getting students into and out of Interventions, and keeping occupied those students who don't need to make up standards. This chapter reads like Jackson has been through a number of projects like that. She's taken those experiments and tried to turn them into something.

Traits of great teachers

One of the "Try This" points of Chapter 3 of Jackson's book is (paraphrased): Make a list of the 10 most important attributes of great teachers. Cut that down until you've only got 2, the 2 most important traits of great teachers.

Here's what I came up with, in the order they occurred to me:

• A passion for the subject matter
• A passion for teaching
• Love for your students
• Communication
• Organization
• Planning and following plans
• Teamwork
• Intelligence
• Presence of mind in the classroom
• Sense of self-improvement

The second list looked like this:

• Passion for teaching
• Love for students
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Sense of self-improvement

The final list boiled down to:

• Passion for teaching
• Love for students

I did this list yesterday over coffee. These all seem a little generic; important, yes, but important in the way that "optimism" would be important. If I were to do this list this morning, I'm not sure it would look the same.

How about it? What do you think are the most important qualities of a great teacher?

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 3

Expect to get your students there

The bottom line of this chapter is to have high expectations for your students. Jackson moves very quickly to make a couple of things clear, though: giving students a harder test is not raising expectations. Praising students for mediocre performance is not raising expectations. In fact, she maintains, faking higher expectations until making higher expectations is one of the more damaging practices out there. She differentiates between "standards" and "expectations." Standards are what students need to learn. Expectations are a teacher's belief about how far s/he can take her / his students towards the standards.

[Michigan is working on publishing "content expectations," which is the list of things a student has to know. These lists used to be known as "standards." In neither list is there a measure of how far on this list the state believes a student can get. With this chapter, the terminologies become completely muddled, and are now more or less meaningless (for a given value of "meaningless." Whatever that means.)]

In fact, over half of this chapter is spent defining "expectations." Jackson suggests that expectations are what we think we can help students to learn, combined with how much we value the learning objectives. And the big takeaway line is, "Expectations say more about your own sense of efficacy than they do about your students' abilities" (84). It's not about taking responsibility for learning away from students and putting it on teachers, but it IS about teachers knowing their power (Nancy Pelosi is playing on the Daily Show, plugging her book, and it was too tidy a phrase not to use) to improve their students' learning. She (Jackson, not Pelosi) goes on to explore what it means to have lowered expectations, and where it comes from, and she decides that lowered expectations are a defense mechanism: they "reduce the gap between our own understanding about what good teaching should be and our perceptions about our ability to teach effectively given our current teaching situation" (85). That makes sense--it explains why it's such a common phenomenon, and why it's so hard to get over. Fortunately, she does offer some concrete steps to help.

As the basis for these steps, she quotes Jim Collins's book Good to Great (one of my principal's current favorites) quoting Admiral Jim Stockdale: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end--which you can never afford to lose--with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be (Collins, 2001, p. 85)" (Jackson, 2009, p. 89). She breaks this into two parts-- "Adopt an unwavering faith in yourself and the importance of your work" (91) and "Confront the brutal facts of your reality" (95).

Part of the "unwavering faith" involves teaching philosophy; why did you become a teacher? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Part of it is more pragmatic: walk the walk in your classroom. We can all sit on our blogs and bang out, "I believe all students can learn, that teamwork is more effective than individual work, that homework needs to be utilized carefully, that extrinsic awards are counterproductive," or whatever was in the most recent professional development article we've read. But it's totally different to say those things than to actually utilize group work, to give meaningful homework assignments, to never give out candy for performance.

Confronting the "brutal facts" involves more self-knowledge: what are you good at? What teaching strategies are you currently using? Then some knowledge of situation: What is the teaching task at hand? What's challenging about teaching this time in this place? (Jackson tells a story about trying to teach Shakespeare to a group of, erm, students she didn't naturally connect with.) Then some judgement: are your current strategies up to the task? If not, what can you do about it?

Jackson ends the chapter with the admonition that you have to attend to both of these parts. Faith in yourself is a necessary condition for improving your teaching, but not a sufficient condition. Knowing your situation without tending to your philosophy is a recipe for burnout. And, ultimately, once again, know that your expectations for your students are really your expectations for yourself.

People doing pt. 2

Dina Strasser's take on Chapter 2 of Marzano's Art and Science, over at ASCD Inservice. I'll be eagerly watching to see if Marzano continues to speak.

Dina Strasser's other blog. I haven't had time to look through it yet, but I've liked her on ASCD. Looking forward to less "assignment-driven" blogging.

To find her first chapter, you can click on the "Teaching" tag on the left of ASCD's website. You can also click here for this humble blog's link to the first chapter, and Marzano's oracular response.

Metablog: Tried the Trackback link instead of the other link, the wossname, the Permalink. We'll see if I show up.

Update: It didn't like the TrackBack link. Updated to fix.

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 1

Start where your students are

This chapter takes a look at some of the disconnect between a teacher's values and students' values. Let's face it--sometimes it feels like you're speaking an entire different language from your teacher. (Well, in my case, I am. But that's not the point.) Jackson uses the metaphor of "currency" to describe this difference. "Suppose," she says, "youadvertise that your house is for sale and I come take a look. [...] I dig into my pocket, pull out a few shiny beads, some seachells, and a couple of wood carvings, place them on the table, and ask for the keys" (31-2). She suggests that this is like the frustrated teacher and the unmotivated student. The teacher doesn't know why the student doesn't value the "currency" of the classroom. The student feels like she's trying her best, but the teacher just doesn't appreciate her effort. Jackon's metaphor for this is that the two parties aren't trading in the same currency.

She recommends that teachers understand what they value (what currencies they're accepting), what their students value (what currencies they're spending), and the disconnect between the two. Find ways to show students how to use their values in school (use their currencies to acquire school currency) and to code switch based on situation (acquire and spend multiple currencies). As a final point, she suggests creating community as a valuable way to help students see the value in school.

It seems like a good metaphor for the eternal disconnect between teachers and students. I value learning inerently; it's a huge part of why I became a teacher. I think that people should know as much as possible, and that they should be able to think as well as possible. So it always comes as something of a shock to me when students say, "Why should I know this?" My response is usually, "Why wouldn't you want to?" Of course, that argument doesn't work with students. It's not enough, nor should it be. In Jackson's language, we're not spending the same currency. I've spent a great deal of time in the last year striving to create community in the school, at the expense of creating it in my classroom. My frustration level has grown in the last couple of weeks, as I can only assume the frustration of my students has. Now might be an excellent time to re-examine my currencies and those of my students, and to work on creating meaningful community in my classroom to help ease these frustrations.

In a meta-analysis of the book, I like the way Jackson has her chapters structured. She outlines the scenario and describes what less-expert teachers might do. She then presents her principle, breaks it down into do-able steps and how to implement them. She occasionally adds in a "Yes, but..." box, to address probable concerns from experienced-but-not-yet-expert teachers. It's a good way of getting a huge amount of information out in an organized fashion. Also, she illustrates this with a lot of personal stories from her extensive experience. So, good on her! I'm enjoying it so far; wish I had more time to study it than once a week.

Never work harder than your students, Preface and Intro

The preface has some inspiring words and what certainly seem like keen insights into the development of teachers. Jackson defines what she calls the "master teacher mindset," a way of thinking about and looking the craft of teaching which exemplifies really effective teachers. The defining point seems to be that instead of looking for hard-and-fast answers to questions that arise while teaching, a master teacher understands that asking the right question is the more important act (2). She suggests that all teachers can be master teachers with practice, a sentiment with which I certainly agree.

The introduction reminds me of nothing so much as a quiz in Cosmo. (Erm...or so I'm told.) You answer the questions, you give yourself a score based on your answers, and then the test tells you who your true love is, or what your ideal profession is, or whatever those tests are supposed to tell you. Or, in this case, what level your teaching practice rests at. I rank in as a practitioner, the third stage of four in this hierarchy of professional development, by exactly 1 point. As you can probably tell by my tone, I'm always a little skeptical of such things; it's like a horoscope. They're vaguely enough worded that they could apply to anybody. Some parts of the "practitioner" description are very accurate, but others are not. (I flatter myself that I have a pretty high awareness of both my skills and areas of needed improvement).

Having said all that, Jackon's primary objective in giving the quiz seems to be to initiate self-reflection and increase self-awareness. This reflection seems like it's going to be a key to Jackson's book, and I don't think it's something that can be over-practiced. So despite the teen-magazine feel of the beginning of the book, Jackson's purpose in the book seem to fit pretty tightly to my motivation for reading it.

Various points

*Credit where credit's due. He probably isn't the first or the only current user of the phrase, but the incomparable Glenn Greenwald uses that title when he wants to get out a number of things on his mind. I can only aspire to emulate his dedication to his task, and I will never be able to emulate his knowledge and skill at his job. For the moment, I'll settle for emulating his Web 2.0 mannerisms. Each of the points below is worthy of its own posts, and each of them has a post in the works. But they're itching and urgent. And, honestly, I don't know where to begin with them.

*The limitations of reflection. Sometimes, after really hard days, I look at the disaster I wrought upon my students and hope that I didn't do them any lasting harm. And I think to myself, "I love my job. I love my students. I love my subject matter, and where I work, and my coworkers. I believe unwaveringly in T. Roosevelt's notion that 'Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.' I think about this stuff all the time. It has occurred to me that, many years from now, thinking about teaching might not be a bad job. All the time I plan and I consider and I research and I write. And this is the best I can do?" And I despair. Then I go home and I think about how I could have done it better.

*Systemic thinking, or, the teacher as low-level bureaucrat. I'm not very good at thinking about systems. I don't do well at making arbitrary decisions and then making other people do them. I can weigh pros and cons and make a decision based on the results just fine, but if I have to pick between 5 equally good choices, and then make 140 people a day go with it, I get sort of stuck. This is a tremendous downfall as a teacher. Turning in student work, passing back student work, transitions between classes and useful but less-than-exciting paperwork are all really important systems. However, they're pretty much arbitrary--I decide what I want to happen, and then I ask my students to do it. My memory tends to take a back seat to my knee-jerk decision-making process (which, incidentally, is why I write down my lesson plans and try to follow it like a playbook). So these (and other) systems, which could really make my life and that of my students much easier, if I really designed them well, tend to be ad hoc hand-me-your-papers-no-wait-don't kinds of things. It probably frustrates my students, and it certainly limits my efficacy. So I'll try to stick to one system for the rest of the year, and redesign the whole thing during the summer. I'm getting better at it, and I can prove it, but nothing works as well as it should yet.

*Iterative standards. A lot of standards in World Languages are iterative--you have to perform the same communicative tasks in a number of contexts in order to get credit for the standard. By my way of thinking (and there's a lot of thinking still to be done on this), a student can get credit for these standards in one of two ways--either through summative assessments, administered shortly after instruction / formative assessment / reteaching / etc.; or through an as-yet undesigned, week-long final exam that really tests a student's ability to perform all six major communicative tasks in a variety of contexts (16 after two years of high school Spanish, according to the state's Standards and Benchmarks document). This seems like an impossible contrast to me, and I don't know why. I have a hard time envisioning permitting a student to pick and choose which sections of the final exam they want to take; in contrast, the final exam would have to be really long in order to test all communicative skills in all required contexts (or even a reasonable facsimile of them). I guess I'm just having a hard time picturing the logistics of this. (See "Systems thinking," above.)

*Teacher dispositions, positive behavior support and ACTFL. My quadrennial issue of The Language Educator, a publication by the ACTFL whose core objective normally appears to be to provide universities with MEd programs an outlet for their extra ad revenue, has a couple of genuinely interesting and, dare I say, useful articles. One of them is called "Another piece of the language learning puzzle: Why teacher dispositions are a crucial aspect of student success," by Maura Kate Hallam. It ties high expectations into student achievement, mentions a few ways people are studying it and teaching it, and encourages teachers to be more aware. (It also cites the National Board definition of teacher disposition; sounds like a good basis for student review of classes. Elsewhere in the issue they publish the full list of NB standards for WLOE.) A lot of things about the article are interesting, but one in particular caught my eye: They quote a Latin teacher as saying, "[...] TESA [Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement] addressed the affective side of teaching, which is often easy for young teachers to forget about as they worry about content. Experienced teachers always need reminders about what makes a positive climate." It's true that we can forget about staying positive, and that there's more to teaching than the list of standards. Teacher disposition, like behavior reinforcement, seems to take a back seat to measurable content advancement in the contemporary classroom. But, like behavior reinforcement, if you don't have it, the content is meaningless.

*Never work harder than your students. It's the title of a book by Robyn R. Jackson. It's another "how-to-be-a-better teacher" book from ASCD. I have a copy on loan from my principal. As I work through it, I'll keep the post posted.

*Celebrate good times. Each of my students has made huge progress this year, and our school community is starting to feel like an actual community. People (not just faculty and staff) are coming together to create positive social events. Just as could be expected from a group of people with a common goal and a common geography, we're all starting to row in the same direction, even if we're not always stroking on the same beat. My high school Spanish classes are getting better and better all the time, not just at Spanish, but at school. They're taking some lessons which (let's be honest) start out a little superficially, and often really turn them into something worthwhile.

Edited to fix typos and subject/verb agreements.

Positive Behavior Support

This particular post is directed towards my colleagues.

As you know, we've been working on a system for Positive Behavior Support. We're at the stage where I simply cannot do everything that needs to be done, and make it work well. So I'm asking for your help. Below are some of the things that I could REALLY use your help with. Please let me know in the comments if you have any ideas you can share with us, or if you want to get back to us on something.

1.) The whole idea behind School-wide Positive Behavior Support is that we let students know when they're doing well, not just when they're behaving incorrectly. Praise and high-fives and the like are an important part of this. But the research suggests that some sort of tangible reward is an important component. To that end, I'd like help coming up with an awards system. I think it should have the following components: a.) Something to GIVE the students, in the moment we catch them behaving. It seems like a good idea (and common practice) to tie it into the mascot of our school--"Bobcat Bucks" or "Paw Prints" or something. b.) Some way of turning this token reward into a tangible reward. I thought it could be like what Mrs. Conklin does with her MP3 giveaway for attendance, and exactly what Mrs. Everitt does for her Positive Behavior Support--a periodic drawing for a prize of some kind. How often? What kind of prizes (inexpensive ones, obviously)? c.) This drawing or giveaway or whatever it is should come tied to a school-wide recognition--a ceremony or celebration, like 10 seconds of classroom applause or a PA presentation.

Bear in mind that I broke this into pieces because it would be too much to do all at once. If you have any thoughts or suggestions about ANY of these elements, please let us know in the comments.

2.) Would somebody be willing to design or produce signage? I think it should have the following elements: a.) A tie-in with Bobcats, our school mascot. b.) The words GOOD CHOICES: Be safe! Be respectful! Be responsible!

This design (and we had some really good ideas for it in our initial meeting last year) will go on posters to help remind students of what we expect from them in school. It might go on the tokens or tickets mentioned above.

If you can help with any of these things, or have some suggestions, please leave me a message in the comments. At the bottom of this post it says, "1 comments." Click that. It will take you to another screen with a place for typing. Underneath that, it will say, "Choose an Identity." Click the circle next to "Anonymous," and you'll be able to post your comment. Please put your name in the comment, though, so I know who I'm talking to!

Thanks a million for your help and your dedication to our students.

--John Cosby

Edited, or possibly re-posted, to reflect actual time posted, instead of when first draft was saved

The Art and Science of Teaching, Pt. 1

I'm working my way through The Art and Science of Teaching by Marzano, and want to review some of the most useful bits of the first half. The book is highly usable. It's maybe a bit dense to wade through the first time, like everything with a healthy dose of research and statistical analysis, but it's set up such that a reader looking for something can find it very easily, and I haven't even looked at the index yet. As my exposure to books on education practice increases, I'm finding that that's important: if you're going to tell me to do something, tell me what it is you want me to do. Don't hide it in the middle of a bunch of soft squishy feelings about how you love being a teacher. I love being a teacher, too, and if I didn't, reading your book probably wouldn't make me love it. But this book is set up, as the subtitle of the book says, as "a comprehensive framework for effective instruction." Each chapter title is a question about an element of instruction, and is set up to provide a definition of the issue, an example of that element in a classroom, research to explain why the element is important, and specific steps that a teacher can take to implement that element into his classroom.

Chapters 1-5 deal with issues in instruction--respectively, using learning goals, acquiring new knowledge, practicing and deepening understanding of new knowledge, generating and testing hypotheses of new knowledge, and engaging students. The later chapters deal with issues of classroom management and community-building, and more about these when I've read them.

Having read some other of Marzano's work and derivatives of it, I'm a little surprised to see so little talk about building background knowledge and vocabulary. This is disappointing, because of all the in-class strategies I've read, the work with vocabulary was the most immediately applicable th the language classroom. I'll have to sit down and think a little more about language learning and how it's different from learning, for example, science.

Some of the suggestions I intend to implement follow.

Have students identify their own learning goals: Upon introducing a new chapter / unit / some other division of learning, students will write down what they hope to be able to understand (language-wise), recognize, and be able to communicate about by the time they finish. Throughout the unit, students will revisit that goal to see how well they're progressing, and whether the course and I are addressing their objective. Part of the final assessment will be a a self-assessment on their learning objective.

Identify critical-input experiences: The word "input" has a special meaning in language acquisition, but the two meanings run parallel. Of course, ALL classroom time is an input experience, especially in courses conducted entirely in Spanish like I strive to conduct. But some moments are more important than others, require greater coordination of forces, and really are (or should be) the anchors of a unit. I can do a better job of separating these experiences from the textbook, and then bringing the necessary resources to bear on them.

Homework: I don't give anywhere near enough homework. As someone who was never very good at getting it done myself, I've always questioned the wisdom of it. But it's important, and there's a right way of doing it. And when college happened right in my face, and I had no idea how to deal with the work load, I recognized what I'd missed. So, vocab practice, reading comprehension practice, drawing--more of it.

These are obviously not all of the things I should be doing or could be doing better, but it's a place to start. And, as I'm learning, a small number of effective goals you can work towards is better than a lot of goals that you'll work on once and then forget about.

Status report

An overview of the various projects I'm working on at the moment, and a brief analysis of where I stand and what happens next on each:

1.) Don Quijote in the 1st and 2nd-year classroom. As part of the a teachers' workshop I attended this summer, I've started working on a module to help people who have never read Don Quijote introduce this work into their early-Spanish classes. When it's finally polished, with luck in time to test-drive in the fall, it will include TPR vocab acquisition, comparisons of culture, authentic materials, and barf jokes. I'm also trying to get good enough at Google Earth to map out one of the various hypothetical routes that Don Quijote took on his various trips. That's probably the next step, because although it's the least important (being only one of many activities that need designing, and not the best), it lets me play with Google Earth.

2.) Analyzing Data Protocol. This is not so much a unique product, as it is synthesizing all the professional development I've been hit with in the past 2 years and fitting it into a note card that I can laminate and carry around in my pocket. It's also probably something that all successful professionals in all fields ever know already, and that makes me surprised that I'd never been formally presented to it before.

It boils down to this: Decide what you want to know. Find out about it. Based on that, decide you want to happen. Find ways of making it happen, and if none already exist, make them yourself. Do it. After a while, take a look and see if it's working.

This isn't rocket science, and on a small scale, we as people do it all the time. But it's a sound process for making decisions of all kind, and I've seen it in a few different contexts. The State School Improvement Framework lays out this protocol for all of its areas of concern. A woman from Minnesota is making an okay, if travel-intensive, living, showing people how to use this process to look at student work in the way it's supposed to be used. The positive-behavior program I'm working on (more about that in a mo) uses the same structure to analyze itself. In short, it's a way of taking self-improvement out of the realm of whim, and for someone as fundamentally whimsical as I am, that's important.

3.) Spanish Department 3-5 year development plan. There's a lot to do in the Spanish Department, and thinking that I'm going to get it done over the summer is foolishness. So I want to write out a plan for where I want the department to be in the next few years. It will, of course, follow the above protocol, but I know most of the information. That doesn't exactly lead to measurable results (important in any scientific or even pseudoscientific undertaking), but it's where I'm going to start.

4.) Positive Behavior system. This is not just the elephant in the middle of my living room, it's the monster drinking my espresso. There's so much work to do, I really have to start doing one thing at a time. The story so far: My school is one of many in the State that has decided that we're not doing all we could to promote behaviors that supplement learning--we could, for example, teach behaviors that supplement learning. As part of this process, our school took a year to decide what we'd most like to see our students to do in class, out of class, everywhere in and out of school and at all times at a school-related event. I had a meeting and a couple e-mail exchanges with a woman from the county school district who knows infinitely more about this than I do, and to whom I'm going to go with questions, just as soon as I'm smart enough to ask them. And now the ball--at least as far as the teacher side of things--is in my court. My principal for discipline is working on "intervention" techniques.

The next tasks I've identified are these: a.) Designing a positive behavior reinforcement system, so we have a school-wide way of telling kids they're doing a good job. I don't really know where to go with this; I'm going to see if I can get the other school teachers in my district to help me. I can do it, but I know a number of other teachers who already have this sort of thing, and if I don't have to reinvent the wheel, why would I? b.) Coming up with a way of teaching students these behaviors over the course of two days, so everybody's crystal clear on what they're being rewarded for (or intervened towards). I hope to design an outline, and farm out bits of this to a bunch of other professionals. However, ultimately it's my PD presentation. So, after all that's done, I'll need to figure out a way to teach that to the teachers and other involved parties. c.) Putting together a leadership team. The truth is that this should have happened much more formally months ago, and it very briefly did. I know who to ask to join--all the people who were at the first meeting in October who worked on the first draft of the behavior matrix--but that group hasn't gotten together as a group since then. It may be a little hairy. Some sort of protocol (see project 2 above) would be good to have in place as well. d.) Well...let's finish the first 3 before we get into long-term projections and assessment methodology, and all the other 67 things that need to get done.

5.) Spanish curriculum redesign and Standards and Benchmarks realignment. This is the first of the Spanish Department improvement projects I'm working on. It's the first, because I've been working on it since the day I started working at this school. The State has recently published some Standards for World Languages that look a lot like the National Standards, and have made them legally binding on the class of 2011, so the high school classes need to be brought up to snuff. In addition, the elementary and middle schools have been running on standards for years. The standards I'm currently working with in K-8, however, aren't tied as tightly to the State's standards as they need to be. I've been trying since day 1 to bring everything up to speed, not to use lesson plans unless they meet higher standards, that sort of thing. The results have been piecemeal and thoroughly unsatisfactory, so this summer I will be working on it. The current game-plan is this: Take a look at last year's Spanish I class (the first high school class to have standards attached), decide what went right and what went wrong, and change the plan for next year accordingly. That shouldn't be too work-intensive, and I should have success. That will help me put the Spanish II class into standards mode, which will be much more work-intensive. And then, starting at kindergarten, design a curriculum that uses the Standards as the baseline, instead of whatever system was used before.

6.) The Art and Science of Teaching. The 2007 book by Bob Marzano is my principal's new go-to book; past experience with similar literature suggests that we'll be hearing a lot about this in the next year. I'd like to have a leg up. Expect commentary as I go through it.

If anybody reads this, probably on accident on your way to somewhere more interesting, I'd appreciate thoughts on any of this.

And now, for the dishes.