This year, Kim Kingery (8-12 Science) wanted to help her students be more aware of their own learning and create opportunities for students to reflect on what they were learning and tie it to an underlying idea/phenomena. Tying learning to Essential Questions and applying science content is a big part of the NGSS and the shift toward three-dimensional learning (integration of student performance expectations, crosscutting concepts, and science & engineering practices). In an effort to continue the shift toward full implementation of the NGSS, she created several unit maps and looked for relevant phenomena and/or essential question(s) to guide the content taught throughout her courses.
Using the unit maps in her 8th Grade Science class helped students review what was learned in a previous lesson and also tie what they were doing to an expectation. The maps also helped students organize big ideas, make connections, and share with others about what they were learning and where to categorize the new material. (On the back of each unit map were the major ideas of the unit and students placed activity summaries and identified when performance expectations were met.) In the Physics class, the use of an essential question helped students create a pathway of learning for themselves. In an effort to answer the Essential Question, students brainstormed ideas that would tie to the question, questions they needed to answer before they could answer the Essential Question, information they already knew (and thought they knew), and potential experiments/tests to perform. See the handout used for the Force & Motion Unit in Physics. In the High School Chemistry Class, the unit map was a hybrid of what was used in the 8th grade and Physics classes. This map gave students a place to summarize learning and apply it to answer the Essential Question of the unit. See the unit map used for a introductory unit on Chemical Reactions. As with any new strategy, changes and improvements to both the documents as well as implementation within the classroom, will need to be made. Future maps will include a way for students to identify and explain how various crosscutting concepts and science & engineering practices were used throughout the learning process. Tying the learning content to essential questions helped improve student engagement and after a few times filling out the Unit Map as a class, students knew exactly how to do it and were working together discussing how the learning activities and content helped meet performance expectations and where to organize the information. Click on any image above to check out the elements used in this work!
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Do you "hear" about growth mindset, but wonder about tangible ways to engage students in it in the classroom? In a month-by-month guide, teachers are given specific strategies to use with students, with example lessons that can be implemented the next day! MHS teachers from a variety of disciplines read "The Growth Mindset" this year and have RAVE reviews! Crystal Ecton (7-12 Social Studies), Rosemary McGuire (9-12 Math), Rita Osborn (9-12 SPED), and Jeanna Scheve (K-12 IP) read, discussed, and implemented these ideas in various ways throughout the year. These teachers shared that it made them consciously change how they spoke to students in order to elicit a growth mindset and to focus more intently on feedback in assessment practices to allow for student growth to be the focus.
10-12 grade ELA teacher, Martie Helm, read the books: "True Stories: Guides for Writing from Your Life" and "Disrupting Thinking" to gain insight on various ways to personalize on-demand writing for her classes. This type of writing is incorporated daily in class. Prompts throughout the year included: responses to poems or surveys, current events, and personal narratives. Each student got to personalize their own composition notebooks with pictures and self-learning activities. This is where each writing assignment went and Mrs. Helm would not necessarily write in the book, wanting instead for that space to be free for thinking and drafting as they prepare for writing a more final copy elsewhere. Mrs. Helm shared that students enjoyed their "comp. books each day" and the on-demand writing tasks took on more meaning for them this year!
7-12 grade science teacher, Justin Redeker, continues work with developing an Environmental Learning Center on the grounds of USD 386. This project has included community member resources such as Charlie Gowen, Luke Westerman, and various greenhouses over the past two years. Interactions with community members spark interest with students and the opportunities that are available to them. Using speakers from the community enhances students learning and gets them more involved and interested in the fields of study that they are learning about. Students have designed a water garden, determining which plants would be appropriate and their costs, materials needed for a pump, and the various ways to run the pump. Their research included the depth of the water garden, liners needed, the angles for the solar panel to run a pump in the garden. They utilized plant sales to raise money for the work that was needed. Their work was presented to HS principal, Ryan Bradbury, in a meeting organized and run by the students. Title I Reading Specialist, Cheryl Baysinger, researched strategies that were most effective in investigating ways to teach fluency. A great resource that came out of this was from Dr. Timothy Rasinski's website. Rasinki is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University. The website below is a gold mine of information!
Emily Hamm learned about Hyperdocs and created a Eulogy project for the novel "The Outsiders" to used with JH students this year. The files shared here were created by Mrs. Hamm for use with her students.
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