EDAD 715: Administrator and Instructional Supervision

Melody Schopp, PhD

Four Goals of Education: 
1. Career Development - help kids be focused on careers and life
2. Effective Teachers & Leaders
3. Quality Standards & Resources
4. Healthy Kids

• Physical and Emotional
• throwing in physical activity throughout the day

Charlotte Danielson Framework are the set of standards the State of South Dakota has adopted.

• Looks at the teaching not the teachers
• Courses and Book Studies over the next few years offered to the state

FFT - Framework for Teaching

What Does "a Framework for Teaching" Mean?

• A description of the teacher responsibilities that promote student learning.
• A definition of what teachers should know and be able to do in the exercise of their profession, based on research and best practice
• A common language that allow opportunities for educators to discuss good teaching.
• A structure designed to address the complexities of teaching applicable to all practitioner levels from novice through accomplished.

The "Wow" Factor
If you were to observe an excellent teacher, either in the classroom or another professional setting, what might you see or hear that would caouse you to think that you were in the presence of an expert?
What would make you think, "wow, this is good! If I had a child this age, This is the class I would want to choose."

Write one idea per sticky note.

A Framework for Teaching" The Domains
1. Planning and Preparation
2. The Classroom Environment
3. Instruction
4. Professional Responsibilities.

Seven Common Themes throughout all of the Domains

• Equity
• Cultural Sensitivity
• Hight Expectations
• Developmentatl appropriateness
• Accommodating individual needs
• Appropriate use of technology

Evidence: A Reporting of the Facts

• Evidence may include statements, actions or behaviors
• Evidence may also include artifacts prepared by the teacher, students, or others
• Evidence is not personal opinion or bias. It is selected though the observance and or teachers use of professional judgment.

Teaching is so hard that it is never perfect. - Charlotte Danielson

Features of the Framework

• comprehensive
• grounded in research
• public
• generic
• coherent in structure
• independent...

Summary of Framework

• A research-based definition of good teaching
• A road-map to, and for navigating through, the complex territory of teaching
• A framework for novice-level practitioners, through accomplished teaching

Uses of Framework

• Teacher preparation
• Supervising student teachers
• Teacher recruitment and hiring
• Mentoring beginning teachers
• Structuring professional development
• Evaluating teacher performance

Tests Show 1 In 4 U.S. Students Set For College; Wide Gap For Minorities

by Bill Chappell

Only 1 in 4 U.S. high school graduates who took the 2011 ACT college entrance exam scored high enough to be deemed ready for college-level courses in all four of the test's subject areas, according to the company that designs the tests. Story continues here...

Out of the 29 states in which at least 40 percent of graduates took the ACT, only Minnesota had more than half of its students meet at least three college-readiness benchmarks.

Atlanta's Schools Work Through Cheating Scandal

by Kathy Lohr
August 10, 2011
About 48,000 students headed back to school this week in the Atlanta Public Schools and there's a lot of work ahead — not just for the students, but for the whole district. It's recovering from a scandal that involved widespread cheating on student tests. Nearly 200 teachers and staff have been implicated at about half of the district's schools.
The district downplayed reports that showed a huge number of incorrect answers on student achievement tests were changed, so state investigators got involved. Just last month, Governor Nathan Deal released a 400-page report that detailed unethical behavior, and a climate of fear and intimidation.
"The report's findings are troubling, but I am encouraged that this investigation will bring closure to the problems that existed in the Atlanta Public Schools and restore the focus on students and the classroom," Gov. Deal said at a press conference. Story continued here...

Teachers Feeling 'Beat Down' As School Year Starts

by Claudio Sanchez
As students prepare to begin another school year, their teachers are hopping mad. They're facing layoffs and deep budget cuts and many say they're tired of being blamed unfairly for just about everything that's wrong in public education. They're so mad that many are bypassing their unions and mounting a campaign of their own to restore the public's faith in their profession.
Betsy Leis, a middle school teacher in Florida, is one of these angry teachers.
"I give my heart and my soul to every single student in my classroom and all I see on the news is that we aren't doing our job. We're constantly beat down. That's why I'm angry," Leis says. "I don't make any money and part of me is OK with that because I don't do it for the money."
And it's not enough that people don't appreciate teachers, they've become punching bags, says Claudia Rueda-Alvarez, a high school counselor in Chicago.
She says if people believe this country is going down the tubes, why don't they single out the people on Wall Street who are still getting million dollar bonuses? Story continued here...

Soft Schools Website

Soft School

Math Investigations Thursday

Math Investigations Thursday - Dana Brown

Estimating Sums

Giving students problems:

• give a purpose for learning
• problem to work on
• wait time
• partner share
• share out

Landmark or Friendly Numbers

How students solve Sticker Problems (addition and subtraction):

• 100s chart
• open number line

Math Investigations Wednesday

Math Investigations - Dana Brown

How do we use data - 

• Developmental data for children ex. 75 percentile
• sports
• testing
• weather
• running
• voting/election results
• tracking crime statistics

How many years have you been teaching?
It is important to define the question...so you gather the correct data.
Redefined...How long have you been employed by a school district?
Keep students focused on the data...on the purpose of the data...There's 5 X's on 10. No there are 5 people who have taught for 10 years.

Using fractions is a good way to present the data to students:
1/3 of our group has taught 5 years or less
about 1/2 of the group has taught between 10 and 20 years
about 1/2 of the group has taught 12 years or less

median: middle value of the data when the data is put in order
Visual way to show the median: line 11 people up and point out the center. The median can be in the center of two points
1/2 the teachers have taught 16yrs or less and 1/2 the teachers have taught 16 years or more
 Range: the difference between the highest value and the lowest value in a set of data.
Mode: the value that occurs most often in a set of data
Outlier: a piece of value that has an unusual value, much lower or much higher
Median: the middle value of the data when all the data are put in order



What occupation would you choose if you weren't a teacher?

You need to make mistakes to get ahead

By Alina Tugend, Special to CNN

August 2, 2011 8:45 a.m. EDT

Editor's note: Alina Tugend, author of Better By Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, has been a journalist for nearly 30 years. She lives outside New York City with her husband and their two sons.
(CNN) -- We live in a culture that sends out very mixed messages about mistakes: We're told we learn by making them, but we work mightily to avoid them; that no one's perfect, but goofing-up is bad. So the result is most of us know that we -- as parents, spouses, employers and employees -- are going to make mistakes, but deep down, we feel we shouldn't.
But since, as the old saw goes, "to err is human," how do we work toward accepting mistakes and learn from them, rather than avoiding and denying them? Well, the good news is that there are upsides to making mistakes:
One of the definitions of "to err" is "to wander or stray." Often we make mistakes because we try new things -- we stray from accepted paths. Teflon, penicillin -- these are examples of great discoveries made by mistake. Take a page from Albert Einstein, who said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." Continued at CNN...

Building Leadership Teams - Aug. 2

Reconnecting with your Building Leadership Teammates!
Doris Ray & Sue Card

Victoria L. Bernhart - Data Analysis for Continuous School Improvement
http://eff.suchico.edu


1. What types and levels of data can BLTs look at to make school-level improvement decisions?

Systematic -> A logical, structured process of collecting, analyzing to increase understanding of your school's system.

Systemic -> Considers all the processes and procedures that contribute to student learning.

Continuous Improvement -> Done on an ongoing basis - Proactive

From Random Acts of School Improvement to Focused School Improvement

Think-Pair-Share

1. As a BLT, what is your purpose for collecting data at your school?

attendance, to see strengths and weaknesses of students,

2. What TYPES of data do you already collect?

No Child Left Behind, make AYP, AIMSweb, D-Step, DACS, looking at individual

Types of Data

Demographics - Enrollment, Attendance, Drop Out Rate, Ethnicity, Gender, Grade Level - Over time, indicates changes in the context of the school

Perceptions - perceptions of learning environment, values, beliefs, and attitudes, observations - Over time, can tell us about environmental improvements

• What people think and feel when the enter your school
• Family walk through
• Student interviews
• culture surveys
• staff surveys
• grapevine data
• feedback forms

Student learning - State, district, school and teacher developed assessment, teacher observations - over time, gives us information about student performance on different measures

School Processes - Descriptions of school programs and processes - over time, tells us how classrooms change

• what went well
• what didn't go well
• where it work
• where it didn't work
• what you need to do to improve
• discipline, how? who? where do the most infractions occur
• Marzano strategies - who? where?

As a BLT...
1. Start a list - an inventory - of the DATA TYPES you already collect.

• Demographics - attendance, enrollment, mobility of students, gender (number of boys and girls) in each class
• Perceptions - take students as is, parent walk throughs, district culture surveys, district staff surveys
• Student Learning - AIMS Web, D-Step, DACS, anecdotal notes, WIDA
• School Processes - not really

2. What do you notice?

• Need to work on perceptions and school processes

LEVELS of Data Analysis

1. Snapshots - ex. enrollment for 09-10 = 2083
2. Snapshots over time - ex. 2001 to 2010 (10 years) Average number of students enrolled = 2442
3. Two or more variables within the same type of data - ex. 9th graders 2005-06 school year - average days enrolled: 129/168 and average days absent 30/168
4. Two or more variables within same type of data over time - ex. 2001-2010 - TCSD: average days enrolled 132/163; average days absent 16/163
5. Intersection of two types of data - ex. Class of 2009; enrolled as seniors as of May 2009 - 77; Seniors had earned enough credits to graduate = 44
6. Intersection of two types of data over time - ex. 2001-2010; average number grade 9 = 259; average number of graduates = 65 students
7. Intersection of three types of data
8. Intersection of three types of data over time
9. Intersection of all four types of data
10. Intersection of all four types of data over time

Levels used at HEDOG

Level 1 - snapshots
Level 5 - intersection of two types of data - test scores and demographics

Data Driven Dialogue
Phase 1: Predict and Ground
Phase 2: Observe
Phase 3. Infer/Question

Transforming the School

Contemporary School Administration by Theodore Kowlaski  - Chapter 14  NOTES
 
Organizational Change

Administrators can usually induce temporary behavior changes (through the promise of rewards or threats of punishment), but unless the basic values and beliefs of teachers and other employees are reshaped, they revert to the routine behaviors once the pressure to change has subsided

• Defining Change
• Change is a process. 
• Change is a medium for adaptation.
• The only thing that is permanent is change. 
• Often, changes that occur in schools are not perceptible to the general public
• Many changes that occur in school generate little attention and produce little conflict. However, attempted transformations of values and practices are a different matter...

• Change in Educational Institutions
• Gene Hall and Shirley Hord (2001) offer and explanation as to why schools appear to be both intractable and adaptive. They observed that many education innovations have been "adopted, tired out, and subsequently rejected - only to cycle around and be readopted some years later in a 'new and improved' form"
• schools are caught in a web of enduring internal and external dilemmas that serve to derali change initiatives
• The more detrimental internal issues include the following: 
• Goals -
• Task structures
• Hierarchy
• Professionalism
• The more detrimental external issues include the following: 
• Persistence - tensions between protecting the status quo and making adaptations
• Boundaries - tensions between protecting the integrity of the organization and dealing with environmental uncertainty
• Compliance - tensions between technical compliance and institutional compliance

• Educational change has been studied in relation to three key variables: 
• Change source
• Change type
• Time orientation

• A major difference between external and internal change relates to administrative choices
• because schools were created and sustained as agencies of social stability, administrators have not been especially encouraged to initiate or support changes that could threaten this role.

Resistance to Change
Resistance to change has been described as "any attempt to maintain the status quo when there is pressure to change"

• General Resistance
• schools have developed an institutional character that generally treats change as disruptive and counterproductive
• Organizational character is perceptible in the following areas:
• Vision - common understanding of purpose and identity?
• Fairness - motivational faith in administrators because of trust?
• Ability - motivational faith in administrators because of knowledge and skills?
• Distinctive skills - customs? networks of experts? technology?

• when people inside the school have little or no understanding of the purposes or potentialities of change, they almost always develop high levels of anxiety and resistance

• Specific Barriers
• barriers to understanding - pertain to information deficiencies
• barriers to acceptance - pertain to philosophical or professional incongruity
• barriers to acting - pertain to human or material resource deficiencies

• Some of the most common obstacles found in schools:
• lack of involvement in setting the agenda
• lack of information about the agenda
• lack of conviction
• disenchantment and alienation
• discontinuity of leadership
• insufficient time and resources
• inadequate preparation to deal with the complexity of change
• ineffective or insufficient use of the professional knowledge base

Change Strategies
Common Strategies that have been used to pursue change:

1. Empirical-Rational strategies: Employees behave rationally and employees are motivated by self-interests.
• fails because people do not always act rationally
2. Normative-reeducative strategies: change requires employees to alter their normative orientations to behavior patters - by exposing employees to new knowledge and skills that will affect values and beliefs
• have been used extensively in education; however, that does not mean that they have been highly effective.
3. Power-coercive strategies: most members of the organization are unwilling or incapable of producing change.  Economic or political force must be used.
• fail because educators resent being forced to do things differently - and the condition of their work environment (e.g. control over the classroom) gives them the power to resist.
  

Culture Change
The reactionary nature of educators is attributable to several circumstances:
Past practice (shaping role expectations) and limited knowledge about organizational culture and its effects on behavior (creating apprehensions about recreating culture)


Complexity of Culture Change
f
Basic Values and Beliefs
Time Dimensions
Culture and Restructuring

How Shanghai schools beat them all

By Jiang Xueqin, The Diplomat

It appears that no one takes education quite as seriously as the Shanghainese.
Every three years, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) administers its worldwide Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to measure how well a nation’s education system has been preparing its students for the global knowledge economy. Nations such as South Korea, Finland, and Singapore have traditionally topped the rankings, but, apparently, even they are no match for Shanghai, which shoved the others into lower positions in its very first year of participation in the programme, in 2009.
When I was in Paris last week, I decided to drop in on Andreas Schleicher, the programme’s architect, to get his views on PISA and Shanghai’s education system. Dr. Schleicher, who was recently profiled in the Atlantic Monthly, had some very interesting things to say about both.
According to Schleicher, Shanghai’s education system is distinctive and superior — and not just globally, but also nationally.
Hong Kong, Beijing, and ten Chinese provinces participated in the 2009 PISA, but their results reflected education systems that were still the same-old knowledge acquisition models, whereas Shanghai had progressed to equipping students with the ability to interpret and extrapolate information from text and apply it to real world situations — what we would normally refer to as ‘creativity.’  Twenty-six percent of Shanghai 15 year-olds could demonstrate advanced problem-solving skills, whereas the OECD average is 3 percent.
So how did Shanghai create the world’s best education system? Continued at CNN...

How a Principal Creates a Culture of Consistency

Effective Teaching

by Harry & Rosemary Wong
Special to the Gazette
August 2011 

Karen Whitney arrived in Sisseton, South Dakota, three years ago and in her first year as a principal, there were not only 578 office referrals, but 87 inches of snow.  This past year office referrals dropped drastically, with only 193 referrals, and was accompanied with a rise in student achievement.  But, to everyone’s dismay, the snow kept falling! Karen is principal of Sisseton Middle School, a school placed inside the homeland of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe, a branch of the Sioux group of Native Americans, on the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation.  Native Americans make up slightly more than 50 percent of the student population. Continued at this link...

What do students already know?

By Mary Bigelow | Published: July 30, 2011

 
Last year, I started giving pretests at the beginning of each unit. The students were upset because they didn’t know many of the answers, even though I explained I didn’t expect them to know everything and the pretest wouldn’t count as a grade. Are there other ways to find out what students know about a topic?
–Cheri, Bangor, Maine
One of the most important factors influencing students’ learning is not the activities you plan or the materials you use but what students already know about a topic. In her recent Edutopia blog Are You Tapping into Prior Knowledge Often Enough in Your Classroom? Rebecca Alber describes the research on the value of accessing the knowledge, skills, and experiences students bring to a learning unit. Continued at link...

Balanced Literacy ~ August 1-2, 2011

Making the Most and Getting the Best Using A Balanced Literacy Approach

Black Hills State University Professors
Faye LaDuke-Pelster - - Faye.LaDuke@bhsu.edu
Sue McGrath - - Sue.McGrath@bhsu.edu

Comprehensive Literacy Framework (Balanced Literacy) - handout

• Starts with Assessment - DRA, Running Records, DACS, AIMSweb, anecdotal notes
• Read Aloud - teacher reads for enjoyment to students
• enjoyment
• modeling comprehension strategies
• think alouds
• expose them to different types of text
• Shared Reading - 
• ex. Social Studies and Science, highlighting text, big books, poetry, revisiting text with purposes
• Guided Reading - small group instruction
• ex. literature circles
• focusing on needs (moving students in and out depending on need)
• should be done once or twice a week, the other days should be conferencing with students one-on-one
• the first six weeks of school should be focused on learning about students (conference, observe students)
• establishing routines
• Independent Reading - children have to practice, uninterrupted chunks of time to read
• practice, practice, practice
• not happening at home
• have to teach students how to read independently
• gives us time to each when students are reading
• Independent Writing - student practices writing
• practice
• assessment
• conferring with students
• students should have choice over what they want to write (CHOICE)
• have students keep a list of ideas in their book that they could write about
• Guided Writing - small group instruction
• work on a specific skill, groups based on needs
• Interactive Writing - share the pen with students
• modeling
• Shared Writing - teacher is the scribe

The components of phonemic awareness, phonics, oral language, and literature circles/discussions are embedded in the above components.

Richard Peck - A Long Way from Chicago

Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) to Conquer Classroom Management - handout

Steps:

1. Demonstration (teacher)
2. Shared Demonstration (teacher)
3. Guided Practice (student)
4. Independent Practice (student)

Examples

• Transitioning 
• whistle
• clapping
• using music

• Practice! Practice!
• share practice
• guide practice

The Five Pillars of Effective Reading Instruction - National Reading Panel (2000)

• phonemic awareness
• phonics
• fluency
• vocabulary
• comprehension

Skimming and Scanning
Skimming and Scanning requires a reader to look quickly and find the most important features and information in a text.

Comprehension from the Ground Up -  Sharon Taberski
Ground Up link
Chapter 1: What Really Lies at the Heart of Comprehension

The Five Pillars of Effective Reading Instruction - National Reading Panel (2000)

• phonemic awareness
• phonics
• fluency
• vocabulary
• comprehension

New Thinking on the Pillars of Reading
 (Experiences and Skills that cultivate children's comprehension.)

COMPREHENSION (over all) Students are also inferring as they read all the time.

• Accurate Fluent Reading
• Background Knowledge
• Oral Language and Vocabulary
• Reading-Writing Connections
• Repertoire of strategies 

Time to Talk
Time to Write
Time to Read

Fundamental needs of Children:

• Children need us to be their advocates.
• "It is simply wrong to withhold the precious time students need to delight in reading books from their just-right bag that will help them consolidate the skills and strategies they're trying to acquire because we've used up all our time with lengthy whole-group instruction."
• Children need ample opportunities to read widely and across genres, to write texts for others to comprehend, and to engage in thoughtful conversation.
• If we want children to develop as readers, they must have abundant opportunities to write texts for others to comprehend.  
• Children need to read accurately and fluently with comprehension.
• We want students to read words accurately with appropriate speed, intonation, and emphasis so that they understand what they're reading.
• Children need to acquire background knowledge to bring to texts they read.
• Children need to extend their oral language and vocabulary, and capitalize on how they enhance reading comprehension.
• Children need to appreciate not only how to reading impacts writing, but how their experiences as writers enables them to adopt an insider's stance as they read.
• Children need to acquire a repertoire of meta-cognitive strategies to help them navigate difficult texts and reconstruct meaning when it breaks down. These strategies should be presented in a developmentally appropriate and systematic way throughout the elementary grades.

Comprehension from the Ground Up -  Sharon Taberski

What Is a Repertoire of Strategies?

• setting a purpose for reading
• accessing and using prior knowledge
• considering text structure
• asking questions
• visualizing
• summarizing to determine importance

Reader's Workshop 3 steps

• Community meeting
• booktalk
• mini-lesson
• Independent Reading
• small group instruction
• conferences
• literature circles
• Group Share (or share with a buddy)
• What did you learn about yourself as a reader today?
• Opportunity for holding students accountable for independent work
• how many pages did they read?
• types of genres 

It's All About Comprehension Video Notes: Sharon Taberski
Mini Lesson

• book basket with book of the topic you are studying
• folders with word lists (word banks) that are in the reading
• folders with pictures and information about topics
• don't answer questions of students but talk to them discovering their answers

Reading Conference

• ask questions of the student about their reading
• can talk to you about your reading
• help you with your reading
• folder with a note book
• work on a couple of nonfiction, and one fiction. Don't want students to get their fiction stories mixed up
• Help with strategies - main events sheet (title, author)
• Commit to one book, stick with it to the end