Ways to accelerate learning that work!

Leading the Rebound, is a book by Fisher and Frey that has practical ways to help students accelerate learning. The following is a list of recommendations found in the Visible Learning research:

1. Student mental mindset: Explain the value and importance of the learning, increase students' ownership of their learning, and explore the habits of minds and mindsets.

2. Metacognition and self-regulation: Create reflection assignments, teach students about planning, monitoring, and adjusting their learning, and use practice tests.

3. Student fear and mistrust: Focus on teacher credibility, restructure feedback, and create a safe climate for learning and making mistakes.

4. Insufficient background knowledge: Use initial assessments, provide lessons background knowledge and key vocabulary in advance, and use interactive videos....in Blackboard, my add:-)

5. Misconceptions: Use advance organizers, recognize common misconceptions for students, and invite students to justify their responses to their thinking.

6. Ineffective learning strategies: Teach study skills, model effective strategies with think-alouds, and use spaced practice.

7. Transfer of learning: Plan appropriate tasks, model application in different contexts, and tailor feedback to include processing of the task.

8. Constraints of selective attention: Increase teacher clarity, use breaks and reorientation strategies, teach students to avoid multitasking, especially with media.

9. Constraints of mental effort and working memory: Organize information and chunk it, use both visual and auditory cues, and use retrieval practice.

If we all can address these cognitive challenges, imagine how much more our students will be able to do!

EMLSS Project Team Updates

What is EMLSS? Equitable Multi-Level Systems of Supports! Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

This week, our district team met for our monthly meeting as we are committed to ensuring a system where highly-trained educators utilize evidence-based resources, materials and supports to help each and every student reach academic excellence.

With our Instructional Coaching group, we are already starting to see an impact in our coaching training plan, our coaching profile and our coaching structures! The work of the Coaching Project Team has helped springboard a basic and consistent level of training guarantees through our partnership with AWSA. We are starting to use DPI's coaching practice profile that clearly outlines expectations for all coaches in our system. Lastly, our PCL coaching structure has a tight framework for time allocations spent by our coaches to ensure impact. As we all know, busyness does not equate to impact.

November 8th is our next meeting where we will continue to deepen our learning around Wisconsin's DPI framework and how we are strengthening they key system features in Waukesha. December 8th will lead us to our second data delve of the year as we dig into our MAP literacy data, paying attention to our Theory of Action "So That, Thereby"statement:

SO THAT...growth is accelerated for students scoring beneath the 25th percentile on MAP in reading, THEREBY...increasing the number of students projected to be proficient on the Forward as measured by the MAP assessment.

Thank you to all of our EMLSS members for their impactful work!

Proactive Planning Commitments

Summer Institute 2021 was the start of this unusual school year.  One constant we can count on is that ‘There is No Average’, and the variability in learning that students bring to school is more evident than ever.  The Proactive Planning work we did in August was a snapshot of work on the theme of meeting student needs - each and every student.

We have been teaching for six weeks now - as you build relationships with each and every learner, you have gained some insight into the assets of your students and some barriers they might be experiencing in accessing learning in your class.  Relationships take time to build.  As collaboration is underway in your building, perhaps there are colleagues or teams of teachers you work with to serve this student who share an investment in this work.  Parent-teacher conferences will provide valuable insight about a student’s strengths and needs from their family’s perspective.  October presents a great opportunity to continue building collaborative teams and to capitalize on the strengths of the teams who work together to serve learners.

Proactive Planning involves reflection on a regular basis to check if you know what you need to know to give your students the best strategies for success.  

This week, take time to reflect on the commitment you made as the Proactive Planning sessions concluded during Summer Institute. 

In your reflection, ask yourself: 

How satisfied are you with the progress you have made in honoring your commitment?  

Is your Summer Institute commitment still your intention? Has it changed?

What can you celebrate, where do you want to focus next?

~Written by Patty Hovel

Elementary Social Studies Update

 The Elementary Social Studies Curriculum Development Team 

has started monthly curriculum development!

Teams spent time digging into the Social Studies Standards for the skills students need to acquire and the purpose for which they are learning the skills.  From these skills and purposes, the team has finalized the 2022 Social Studies Learning Targets.  The Targets represent the value that is placed upon student's ability to engage in the Arc of Inquiry that is the foundation of Social Studies Learning.  The 2022 targets are listed below.

As this team engaged in studying the Arc of Inquiry and the Standards, they compared and contrasted them with the instructional framework of elementary Social Studies: Engage: Investigate: Report: Take Action.  The IMPACT Resource we have adopted will guide you to facilitate instruction through a framework that prepares students for inquiry, argument and action within an integrated content approach. The targets are as follows:

The Targets (known as dimensions) and their alignment to the instructional framework are represented below:

If you have read this far, FANTASTIC! Also know that we have begun the process of determine the scope and sequence so that we can start developing our unit plans.  Our goal is to determine three Social Studies Units per grade level that will support teachers to teach 6 week units opposite Science in grades K-5, one unit per Trimester (El programa dual utiliza los estudios sociales para el desarrollo del lenguaje inglés y será dirigido para enseñar a diario)

Unit Planners are under development with the goal to have Unit 1 complete this fall!

Please see your building social studies representative for more information on their experience.  We will meet again on October 28th!