Can I tell you a secret? I have a love-hate relationship with the summer on a school campus.

As a school administrator, my days extend quite far into the summer. That’s okay – I knew what I was signing up for. Yet, it’s such a weird experience on a campus. On the one hand, it’s lighter and quiet. There is time to think, plan, and recuperate. On the other hand, it’s eerily quiet and lonely. It’s so strange to go from 100 mph to residential speeds in a few days. Mostly, I greatly miss our staff and students. That being said, I have greatly come to appreciate the time to slow down, think, and plan for the future.

As a part of the planning process for next year, our team is making some big pushes toward increasing the amount and quality of professional development on our campus. We will be making a huge push with amplifying our PLC’s and pushing writing across the curriculum. In addition to this, we will have a variety of staff meetings, optional PD’s, and district PD’s in which our staff can participate. To help organize all of this information, I developed a simple “Professional Development Calendar” with all of the trainings, dates, locations, and links to upcoming PD to keep our staff informed.

Here’s a quick example of what it looks like:

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As you can see, the calendar is broken into four sections:

• Staff Meetings – Monthly staff meeting with a specific sitewide focus. This year, it will be on “Amplifying our PLC’s”
• Academics – PD specifically aimed towards improving our academics. This year, we will be offering writing PD’s, continuing our learning walks, and a Rookie Rap for new teachers.
• Student Well-Being – Any PD for our SEL & PBIS goals to support teachers as they navigate the ever-changing behaviors of our students.
• District PD – Any PD being offered by the district office.

If for some reason one of my amazing teachers is reading this PD, I know that none of this is new information but please note these dates are all simply examples and may not be accurate. Your “legit” version is coming soon!

As with anything, I always want to make sure the “why” is understood when developing, creating, or implementing something new. While this PD calendar has a low impact on staff, the “why” is quite simple but still important. Clear, accurate, and timely communication is always appreciated by school staff. We have a lot of amazing opportunities happening on our campus. It’s important that our staff can easily access these trainings and plan for their year.

Finally, as a leader, the goals for the year must be communicated to your staff. As simple as this calendar might be, it is another way to remind our staff of our sitewide goals for the year. After all, how effective are your professional development and goals if it is unknown by your staff? Simply sharing this calendar is another way to increase the awareness of our goals for the year through visually seeing the professional development that is offered to support it.

How does your school share their important events and/or dates with staff? I would love to hear about it, so share in the comments below!

Hello friends! I know – it has been a while…but that’s life.

I am so excited to share a great tool with you today that will make your teaching easier and more enjoyable while increasing the rigor in your classroom. It’s called Brisk for Teaching, and it’s an AI-powered platform that helps you create and deliver amazing and effective learning experiences for your students.

Brisk for Teaching is a Google Chrome add-on web-based tool that helps you create lessons and quizzes, deliver personalized feedback, and detect authenticity using AI. With Brisk, you can:

• Generate and customize content that matches your curriculum, standards, and objectives
• Create multiple choice, short response, and long response quizzes and assessments
• Provide instant and personalized feedback and guidance to your students based on their performance and progress
• Analyze and visualize your students’ data and insights to track their learning outcomes and identify their strengths and weaknesses
• Create questions based on the different levels of DOK

Brisk for Teaching is super easy to use and works with any device and browser. You can also integrate it with your existing tools and platforms, such as Google Docs, Google Forms, and more.

To show you how you can use Brisk for Teaching in your classroom, I have made a video that walks you through the main features and functions of the tool. You can watch the video below or click on this link to view it on YouTube:

Thank you for reading and watching. Happy teaching!

Happy November! It is hard to believe that we are almost through the first semester of school! I hope you are doing well and surviving these crazy times – because it really is SO crazy right now.

In fun news, I am starting a new series of blog posts that will come out at the beginning of each month – the Rundown! This is a simple post with a TON of links to Google Workspace Updates, helpful videos, blog posts, and a variety of instructional and educational resources that I have discovered over the last month. It is a short post this month but I plan on growing it over the next few months to contain more categories, blog posts, videos, and resources.

I hope that you enjoy these easy, quick blog posts and find something useful to use in your classroom and/or school!

Google Workspace Updates:

• Replacing a Background in Google Meet
• Slideshow Button in Google Slides
• Making Google Classroom Video Meetings Easier and More Secure
• Google Classroom Unenrollment Features
• Create Meeting Notes in Google Calendar
• Easily Add to Google Docs with the @ Menu
• Page Break Before Paragraphs in Google Docs
• New Google Meet Host Features for Audio and Video

Instructional & Educational Technology:

• PearDeck: Reflect & Review
• 11 Things Coaches Should Look For in Classroom Observations
• Slides Mania Cardtegories!
• Top 5 Game-Based Learning Platforms

Inspirational:

• Don’t Let the Tough Things Keep You from the GREAT Things! (Video)

Going forward, I hope to add many more links and sections to this blog posts. Particularly, I would like to share some leadership blog posts and videos to help support education leaders and, selfishly, help me to grow, too!

Stay tuned for the next rundown!

As our school site continues on our journey of evaluating our grading practices (see my previous blog post for more details), I am excited to share more interactive resources that can be used for professional development at your site! In the previous blog post, I shared an activity that challenged teachers to evaluate their grading practices through a self-assessment. Now that teachers have gone through this process, it is important to begin the hard work of trying to brainstorm and establish common goals. To start this process, our school site leadership team met and determined three areas of importance when establishing common grading practices:

• Grading Scale
  • Example: 0-100, A-F, 4 Point Scale, Etc.
• Late Work
  • Example: Is late work allowed? What’s your policy?
• Categories & Weights
  • Example: What is more important – the task or learning? Do you weight your grades?

As a school site, our goal is to try to create common goals for grading practices across our PLC’s and, in some areas, on a schoolwide level. We are trying to start small by focusing on these three areas and PLC’s and, hopefully, growing them over time. As an example, starting with PLC’s or departments is already a huge task. Trying to establish all of these goals on a sitewide level could be a much larger task that may take some time. Overall, our goal is to allow our leadership team to help guide the focus of these conversations and where they hope that we should go as we deep dive into our grading practices.

To help us understand our common goals across PLC’s, we developed two activities that I will share below. As mentioned above, we are starting in PLC’s and that is how I will reference our process. However, you could certainly replace PLC’s with department, grade level, or even schoolwide. It is totally up to you and your site to decide what is best!

1.) Brainstorming Common Goals

In this activity, PLC’s will meet together to simply start brainstorming and thinking about these three categories and where they hope to go in the future. Think of it like a brain dump. There is no need to have all your questions answered or decisions made. Simply take the time to have a discussion with your PLC and record your thoughts. After the PLC’s record their thoughts and ideas, challenge them to view the other slides (based on subject area) to view other ideas and/or add comments and questions.

We have already completed this activity with our PLC’s and I absolutely loved the conversations that we observed and the ideas that were recorded. I was so impressed with the time and deep-dive our teachers took into evaluating their grading practices and attempting to start the process of establishing common goals.

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2.) Establishing Common Goals

After PLC’s have had the opportunity to brainstorm, challenge them to begin the hard work of narrowing their focus and establishing common goals. This is the real meat and potatoes of creating cohesive grading process across PLC’s (or departments, grade level, etc).

In this activity, you will once again see our three focus areas. Each slide represents one focus area and asks several questions to help PLC’s narrow down their common goals for their grading practices. By the end of this activity, the goal is for PLC’s to have a strong idea of what their PLC-wide focus will be for grading.

If you choose to make a copy of this activity and want to include all of your PLC’s, simply make a copy of the three slides multiple times and assign certain slides to certain PLC’s.

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I am going to be 100% transparent that this is a huge undertaking for our school site and the end goals are still being determined as we go through this process. Hopefully, if you find yourself in similar conversations at your school site, these activities can help frame and guide your conversations.

As always, drop any comments and/or questions below!

Our site has recently begun the journey of evaluating our grading practices through a deep dive into the book, “Grading for Equity“, by Joe Feldman. It’s a hard conversation to have for any teacher because it is personal and our brains have been so ingrained in the current grading practices that are in place. However, it is an incredibly important conversation to have to understand if our grading practices are truly equitable across all students.

When we discuss these grading practices, it is more than simply evaluating the current 0-100 scale that tends to dominate education. It goes much deeper than this. It also includes conversations such as late work policies, hard vs soft skills, assessment practices, and more. All of these pieces of our grading practices can influence students and their grades. Do our current grading practices represent the type of education we are giving our students today? Or do they more closely model a world of the past? Honestly, I am still exploring my own beliefs for the most equitable grading practices. There is a lot of hard work, conversations, and reflections that will be coming over the next several months. During this time, I hope to create some interactive and engaging professional development activities that you could also share with your teachers, departments or sites.

In this first activity, I created a simple, short, and interactive PearDeck presentation that challenges teachers to evaluate their grading practices to determine if it is truly equitable. I can take little to no credit for the content in this, since the majority of it came from Joe Feldman’s Quiz on his Grading for Equity website. However, I took this quiz and put it into a presentation that would allow school sites to have interactive conversations as they go through it. Here are a couple ideas on how to use this activity with your staff or team:

• Individually Paced – Set up the PearDeck for teachers to complete on their own and at their own pace during a staff meeting. Review the answers at the end, then break into groups to discuss these answers.
• Whole Group Paced – Set up the PearDeck for teachers to complete as a group. Display the responses to the whole group to see if the site is aligned or not. Review the answers, one by one, discuss during the presentation. If time allows, break into groups at the end for further discussion.

Personally, my favorite is the whole group option, although that was rarely my teaching style in the classroom. However, it is truly powerful to go through these questions as a whole site and compare where everyone is at and to see whether or not the school was aligned. You may find that, on certain questions, nearly all your teachers completely agree with one another. On the other hand, there may be questions where they are more split – which is where the true work begins!

If you are interested in using this activity with your site, all you need to do is:

1. Make your own copy.
2. Install the PearDeck add-on.
3. Present with PearDeck!

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Important Note: To view the answers choices to the quiz, you must present through PearDeck.  You can also view them in the speaker notes at the bottom.

Has your school taken a deep dive into its grading practices? If so, share in the comments below!

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) has been a huge focus for our site over the last couple of years – especially during the last year during the pandemic and distance learning. SEL is “the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.” (CASEL) If you are unfamiliar with SEL, I highly encourage you to check out CASEL’s website as a good diving point, then conduct your own research to learn more about how it can support your students!

One way that we are promoting SEL this year is on our “SEL Wednesdays” which has been our asynchronous days at our school site. Teachers have been encouraged to assign a short assignment that promotes SEL for their students to complete. Recently, I found several great activities on Scholastic and converted one into an editable Google Slide Deck for students!

In this activity, students are challenged to complete an “Optimist or Pessimist” survey and score their responses to determine which quality they have. After this, students are challenged to analyze their score and talk about next steps to either maintain or change their outlook. Below, you will find a quick look at the activity, as well as the full view and copy version:

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Do you have any SEL activities you are willing to share? Drop them in the comments below!

Hello EDU Friends! I hope you are surviving this crazy world that we are living in right now. Whether you are in distance learning, hybrid, or fully back in the classroom, I hope you and yours are safe, healthy, and happy.

Today, I will be sharing a simple, easy, and interactive presentation that can be given during professional development. The district in which I work is huge with the 4 C’s which, eventually, morphed into a personal passion through my Google Innovator project. I truly believe the 4 C’s in an excellent way to evaluate the depth of teacher lessons and improve these lessons for the future.

Recently, I delivered some PD to our new teachers breaking down the 4 C’s into a simple, short presentation. The 4 C’s can be a really deep and complex concept, so I tried to break it down to its simplest form, while also providing more depth for the future. In this presentation, you will find that it is broken into three parts:

1. What are the 4 C’s?
   • In this section, teachers are introduced to the lowest level and highest level of the 4 C’s, as well as provided rubrics for breaking down each C.
2. How Can I Assess the 4 C’s in my Lessons?
   • In this section, teachers are challenged to evaluate the current depth of 4 C’s in their own lessons and find next steps for improving their lessons.
3. Resources for Lesson Design
   • In the last section, teachers are provided links to lesson design ideas, websites, and resources.

Below, you will find a preview of the presentation, the view access, and a link to make your own copy:

(View) (Make Your Own Copy!)

I hope you find this presentation beneficial and feel free to drop any comments, ideas, or suggestions below!

One of my favorite ways to get students talking in my classes was an AVID strategy called Philosophical Chairs. Philosophical Chairs is a student-centered format for classroom discussion that promotes analytical reading, respectful dialogue, and personal reflection. You could equate it to a debate, however, there is a much richer focus on text and mutual understanding. It’s an amazing strategy to get students talking to one another – whether you are teaching in person or online!

In the post below, I will share the steps for setting up and running a Philosophical Chair in your classroom, as well as a useful Google Slide Template! Let’s get started!

The first step of any successful Philosophical Chair is a relevant prompt for students to discuss. If it isn’t relevant to the students, then they won’t be interested in participating. In the past, I’ve had students discuss whether college athletes should be paid, if video games made people violent, and if social media should be limited to people over the age of 14. All of these topics immediately had my student’s interest because it was relevant to them.

Here is a list of possible Philosophical Chair topics I found online: Philosophical Chair Topics. The reason I said possible is that you should always reflect on the appropriateness of the topic based upon the age of your students.

Step #2: Find a Text to Read

Once you create your prompt, it is important to find a relevant text (or two!) for students to read to reflect on the prompt. Sometimes I would pick one article for them to read that was less biased, then allow students time to conduct their own research to find their additional texts. With my students, I always stressed the importance that their opinions were based on facts. They had to be able to prove why they chose the side they eventually sided on.

Step #3: Read & Annotate

After you select your text, I encourage you to teach your students to read, annotate, and reflect on the text that they have read. If you are unfamiliar with annotating the text, I encourage you to check out this student-centered template to use with your text:

Annotating the Text Student Template (View) (Copy)

As you can see in the template, this will guide your students through the pre-reading, reading, and post-reading of the text. By using these strategies, students were more likely to engage in deep levels of thinking with the text they were reading.

Step #4: Choose a Side!

After students spent time reflecting on the text they had read, the fun part begins – choosing a side! In the classroom, I would split the room in half to represent an “agree” and “disagree” side. I would ask students to stand on the side that reflected their opinion. If they were still unsure, they could stay in the middle. I’ve seen Philosophical Chairs done with more structure during this part, such as setting up chairs on each side and having students sit down. Personally, I would have my students push the furniture to opposite ends of the class so that they could move around during the discussion if their opinions started to change.

If you want a digital option with less movement, check out this template:

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Share this template with students and enable access to everyone. Each student takes a “tag” and replaces “Student” with their name. During the discussion, students can virtually move their name to the “agree” or “disagree” side – or even somewhere in the middle!

Step #5: Discuss

Once students have selected a side, the discussion beings! Here are a few rules I had during the discussion:

• Equal speaking time for each side.
• No interrupting each other – only talk when you are holding the “speaking object”.
• Refer to evidence in your text at least once while you are speaking.
• Reference what other students have said by saying, “I agree with John because…” or “I disagree with John because…”

Usually, we would spend the majority of the class discussing the topic because it’s just so fun!

Step #6: Repeat 4-5!

Throughout the discussion,  I would give students time to repeat the last two steps. They would have the opportunity to move sides after a few students talked and then the discussion would continue and repeat!

As you can see, this is a really fun (and super easy) instructional strategy that you can use in your classroom. I hope you give it a try out and, if you do, feel free to share how it went and/or how you modified it for your students!

]]> https://www.i-heart-edu.com/philosophical-chairs/feed/ 4 2558 https://www.i-heart-edu.com/quick-survey-distance-learning-hybrid-success-stories/ https://www.i-heart-edu.com/quick-survey-distance-learning-hybrid-success-stories/#respond Sat, 24 Oct 2020 16:19:09 +0000 https://www.i-heart-edu.com/?p=2553 Guys – this has been a crazy year in education. Actually, crazy is an understatement. One word probably can’t even describe how many of our educators feel right now. Crazy, tiring, overwhelming, exhausting, heartbreaking, and so many more words can describe this year. However, I know that there are some AMAZING success stories out there… Read More Quick Survey: Distance Learning/Hybrid Success Stories]]>

Guys – this has been a crazy year in education. Actually, crazy is an understatement. One word probably can’t even describe how many of our educators feel right now. Crazy, tiring, overwhelming, exhausting, heartbreaking, and so many more words can describe this year. However, I know that there are some AMAZING success stories out there – and I want to hear them!

I want to put together a blog post of amazing success stories that are occurring during distance learning and/or hybrid. In addition to this, I am selfishly hoping it will inspire me with more ideas to support the students, teachers, parents, and staff members at my own site. Perhaps you will find some great ideas in the next blog post, too!

So, please, (pretty please?) take this short survey – thank you, friends!

For those of you that have followed my blog for a while, you know that I am a huge fan of utilizing the flipped classroom strategy in classrooms. That being said, I worry that I haven’t talked enough about the tips and tricks to make a flipped classroom truly effective for students. Implementing a flipped classroom can be an amazing strategy – or it can be a complete trainwreck. If utilized properly, a flipped classroom can be an amazing way to open more time in your instructional day for deeper learning. However, if you don’t implement it properly, students are less likely to engage with and/or retain the material that was taught.

An effective flipped classroom is not simply sharing a video for students to watch. An effective flipped classroom is so much more than this. It is thoughtful, systematic, and continues to challenge and support students.

Ready to up your flipped classroom game? Check out these 5 tips! (Bonus: Check out the AWESOME infographic at the end and feel free to share out!)

Tip #1: Keep it Short

Gone are the days of 45+ minute lectures. Have you recently tried to sit through a long lecture or meeting? I swear my attention span is getting smaller as I am getting older. Imagine what is like for our students? As a middle school teacher, my flipped classroom lessons were never over 20 minutes. Usually, they were somewhere in the 10-15 minute range which was more than enough for my students. Remember, your students will have to account for writing time and checks for understanding. This means that they could be doing their flipped classroom for longer than the recorded time.

Pro-Tip: Use Screencastify to record your lessons. It keeps a timer of how long you have been recording to help you keep track of time.

Tip #2: Check for Understanding

Adding checks for understanding in your flipped lesson is one of the most important aspects of a flipped classroom lesson. It challenges students to stop, reflect, think, and apply the new knowledge they have learned. It doesn’t have to be a lot questions – just simple, quick checks. As a Math teacher, I usually added 3-5 problems per lesson to check for understanding that could be automatically graded within the system (EdPuzzle) I was using.

Pro-Tip: Utilize EdPuzzle to check for understanding. It can track how long the students have watched the video and grade questions that you embed into the lesson.

Tip #3: Allow Time to Reteach

Once you give your flipped lesson, please don’t move on until all of your students have a strong understanding of the material. After a flipped lesson, I would have students check their grade on EdPuzzle from the previous night’s lesson and have them break into groups based on their progress. For struggling students, I pulled them into small groups to reteach. For students that had done well, they could move onto the next assignment or an enrichment activity.

Pro-Tip: Utilize the grading feature in EdPuzzle to quickly grade and track student data to develop your groups.

Tip #4: Accessible to All Learners

This one is simple – check that the technology that you ask students to use is accessible across multiple platforms, even cell phones! More times than I could count, I have had students that lost internet access, or their Chromebook broke, or some other technology issue that prevented them from completing their assignment. However, EdPuzzle has an AMAZING mobile feature and I could always refer my students to that option.

Pro-Tip: Test out your flipped lesson on a mobile phone. If it works there, it will probably work anywhere.

Tip #5: Time to Apply Their Knowledge

Once students have completed their flipped lesson and you have followed up with them, challenge students to demonstrate their knowledge. Personally, I always assessed their skills and application of their knowledge. Simple, skills practice was completed in Google Forms where they could receive immediate feedback. The deeper application was done through projects, game-based learning, and other assignments. Make sure students have a chance to show what they know!

Pro-Tip: Need some new ideas? Check out this fun list from The Ed Advocate: 27 Ways to Have Students Demonstrate What They Have Learned.

    What are some of your best flipped classroom tips and tricks? Share in the comments below!