Top Ten Signs You Are Raising an Avid Reader

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1. There is no such thing as a bad place to read.

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2. You always have a balance at your public library due to late fees.

3. You often return your own books to the public library.

4. Instead of getting rid of some of your kids’ books, you buy more book shelves.

5. Special books will fall apart before your child loses interest in them.

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6. Going to Barnes and Noble is considered a vacation.

7. Using books as a reward for good behavior is effective.

8. Amazon remembers you when you visit their website.

9. The kids (sometimes) pick reading over watching television or playing video games.

10. Going to bed without stories is unacceptable.

No More Silos

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Here is the master schedule I shared with my staff before everyone left for break:

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This is driven mostly by Response to Intervention. Starting December of this year, all schools have to ensure that interventions that may lead to a special education referral for reading or math take place outside of that respective subject area. Where you see “I/E” stands for Intervention and Enrichment. Kids that are either below the line or above the line should receive additional support in their specific area of need. This is based on a template by Dr. Michael Rettig.

I had a number of teachers come down and speak with me after I sent this out. “So, reading and content should be taught separately?” was one of the more common questions. I explained that, no, this is just a schedule that your grade level should do their best to adhere to over the course of the year. Integrating the subject areas is highly encouraged. We only want to ensure that students’ needs are being met through Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. Scheduling in an intervention block is the best way we know how to make sure this happens. There has been good discourse about this, and we will continue to talk.

Yet I bring this up here because I have concerns. Not about Response to Intervention (RtI). Besides soon becoming law, John Hattie, researcher and author of Visible Learning, has found that RtI has one of the largest effect sizes on student learning. I take comfort knowing that “grey area” kids, those that don’t qualify for special education services because their cognitive abilities are too low, may now get the necessary support. In addition, RtI has been called “the last, best hope” for literacy education by Richard Allington.

No, I am more concerned that all of these initiatives coming at us – Common Core, Smarter Balanced Assessment, and new teacher evaluations based on students’ test scores (on top of RtI, but without the research base) – will further fracture our already chopped up days at the elementary level. Many secondary schools already suffer from this. “They are everybody’s kids”, and therefore nobody’s kids. Leaders thinking in black-and-white terms might start to believe that continuing to departmentalize the core areas will lead to better gains in student achievement. Specific interventions can be used to zero in on targeted literacy and numeracy skills. Words such as “hard” and “rigorous” are often used to describe these interventions.

But this is not what kids, or most adults, comes to school for. They want to be engaged. They want to see the connections between their lives and what they are learning. Making connections throughout the day will only enhance instruction. The thinking required for this type of work comes before the instruction actually happens, as well during the teaching-learning process using ongoing assessments. It doesn’t happen when we are inputting progress monitoring results into a spreadsheet. It doesn’t happen when we are solely aligning our instruction with standards instead of with our students’ needs. It doesn’t happen when we are forced to think about our own livelihoods instead of our students’ futures.

Giving students the best opportunity for success starts with engaging and evidence-based classroom instruction. Separating subjects and skill areas into silos is not natural. The further we pull away for learning as an authentic experience, the more we risk disengaging our students because it doesn’t represent what is real and what is meaningful.

Show. Don’t Tell.

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In which I do a book talk on Wonder for my 5th grade commencement speech.

I was handed a copy of a Movin’ On Up speech delivered by Mr. Kellogg a couple of years ago. The title was “Make it a Good Day”. He spoke about the importance of making good choices instead of just saying so. It is a good script. I plan to expand upon it.

At Howe, we adhere to values such as compassion and teamwork, acceptance, imagination and attitude, responsibility and respect, and attendance. These powerful concepts were present in a book I read aloud to some 5th graders this year, Wonder by R.J. Palacio. I found a good summary of this book at the Children’s Craniofacial Association:

“August (Auggie) Pullman was born with a facial difference that prevented him from going to a mainstream school—until now. He’s about to enter 5th grade at Beecher Prep, and if you’ve ever been the new kid, then you know how hard that can be. The thing is Auggie’s just an ordinary kid, with an extraordinary face. But can he convince his new classmates that he’s just like them, despite appearances?”

I thought this book exemplified many of the Howe values.

Compassion and Teamwork

When Auggie enters school, no one initially sits by him at lunch. Summer, a classmate, realizes this and chooses to eat with Auggie every day. They form a strong bond. In order to show compassion toward others, we need to have the courage to take that first step.

Acceptance

Auggie’s older sister Via is one of his biggest supporters. She sticks up for him when others treat him differently. However, she struggles to balance her loyalty to her brother with her need for her own life at her new high school. Via also doesn’t how to deal with the fact that Auggie is becoming more independent and doesn’t need her as much as he used to.

Imagination and Attitude

Before school started, Auggie and his family had a difficult time preparing for the first day. He was creative in his approach to try and fit in with his peers, such as doing more listening than talking to learn about life at Beecher Prep. It also helped that the school provided an orientation for Auggie and made it clear about what is expected of all students.

Responsibility and Respect

One of Auggie’s best friends at Beecher, Jack Will, makes a poor decision in the middle of the story. He gets involved in a hurtful conversation about Auggie with classmates. He happened to hear it, and the two of them stopped hanging out. It is true that a friendship takes a lifetime to build, but only a minute to damage or even destroy.

Attendance

Auggie not only deals with his physical disability, but also with a bullying situation. His adversary, Julian, persuades others to help him make Auggie’s life miserable through words and actions. Auggie handles this with maturity and composure. Classmates see how Auggie responds and start to come around to his side. Would this have been the case had he lashed out at Julian? I don’t think so. The story ends with Auggie being recognized in front of his peers for his courage, his willingness to forgive, and his determination to be successful despite large obstacles.

As you move up to the middle school, consider some of these reflective questions and the lessons from Wonder:

  • How will you show Summer’s compassion for those that struggle?
  • How will you show acceptance like Via, and appropriately stick up for others?
  • How will you act as Auggie did when you feel out of place? Will you stay focused on what’s important and steer clear of less desirable situations?
  • How will you avoid Jack Will’s poor decision and not talk about others behind their backs, whether they are your friends or not, whether online or face-to-face?
  • How will you show determination in your attendance at school every day, and deal with the “Julians” in your life with both assertiveness and understanding?

You will notice that I am asking you, not the group. Each one of us is accountable to ourselves. There will be challenges in your future, but I am confident that what you will have to face will be minor compared to what kids such as Auggie deal with every day.

These questions I pose to you also do not demand a verbal response. We expect that your actions will be the answer to these questions. Show. Don’t tell. As they say, actions speak louder than words.

Our Mission and Vision

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I wrote this for my school’s last newsletter of the year. It is a culmination of the hard work my leadership team put in to developing our school’s new mission. These eighteen words work well with each other. You might not realize that it was a two month process to create this mission. The resource Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year by Bill Ferriter (@plugusin) and Parry Graham has been instrumental in helping my staff move forward in collaborating at high levels of learning and engagement.

This year at Howe, one of the goals was to revisit our school vision. It is good practice for any organization to reflect on their purpose. The result: In addition to our vision statements, we also developed a mission. A mission is different than a vision. It describes where we want to go. It is a destination of where we want to be in the future, sort of like a horizon. We are constantly moving forward, even if perfection is unattainable. Vision statements describe the pathway in which to achieve our mission. What a mission provides is a concise, memorable message about our purpose. A mission and vision go hand in hand. Please read and think about about the proposed mission you see below:

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Our Mission: To foster a community of engaged learners, focused on academic and social growth, preparing for our changing future.

These words were chosen very carefully. Let’s break this down into smaller parts to understand the mission’s meaning more deeply:

To foster a community of engaged learners,

We as educators are responsible for creating a climate that will encourage deep thinking and reflection with our students. Engagement is the state of being emotionally involved or committed to something that is important to that person. In the schoolhouse, engagement means staff connecting with our students personally as well as cognitively. Engagement means giving students some choice in what they want to learn, as well as opportunities to share their learning with peers. Engagement means providing an authentic audience and a shared purpose when students are representing their thinking. When classrooms work together to learn with and from each other, our engagement helps create a community of learners.

focused on academic and social growth,

In order to be successful, we believe the skills and knowledge students should attain should be both knowing how to learn as well as knowing how to act. The staff at Howe Elementary School strive to be explicit in our teachings. We model it, have students try it as a whole group, then give guidance and eventually independence. Our goal is to create learners who are self-directed and self-motivated. Instilling this responsibility is a daily focus.

preparing for our changing future.

The world you and I grew up in is a lot different than the one our kids now inhabit. Instead of searching for specific information about a topic, learners today have to sort through all the information they have access to and determine which is most accurate and relevant. How we teach students must also change. We are guides instead of just providers of what students should know and be able to do. We are all learners in today’s world. As new knowledge continues to be created, this skill of knowing how to learn is a critical one.

Voucher Expansion Would Be an Enormous Mistake

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May 28, 2013

Dear Senator Lassa and Representative Krug:

I am writing regarding the Governor’s 2013-15 Budget proposals relating to K-12 education. Specifically, I strongly encourage you to:
• Support removing all private school voucher expansion proposals from the budget.
• Support removing all charter school proposals from the budget.
• Support the Ellis/Olsen plan to increase the revenue cap by at least $200 in each year of the biennium.

Voucher Expansion
Voucher expansion would be an enormous mistake because:
• Vouchers do not improve student achievement. These are the findings of numerous studies over the years, including the most recent five-year longitudinal study conducted by the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau.

• Vouchers eliminate public accountability. And this stands in stark contrast to the strong controls placed on public schools in many areas, including teacher certification, instruction/assessment requirements, graduation requirements, student admissions and due process protections, and financial oversight. (Click here for Disability Rights Wisconsin’s informational flyer that explains this further.)

• Vouchers take resources away from public school students and increase local property taxes. Two school districts that currently have voucher programs, Milwaukee and Racine, have experienced state aid reductions and property tax increases. Private school voucher expansion means property tax increases and reductions in student services at the local level. (Click here for the Green Bay Area Public School District’s informational flyer that explains this further.)

Charter School Oversight Board
The Governor’s budget proposes to create a state-level Charter School Oversight Board (CSOB) to approve contracts with persons to operate independent charter schools.

Stripping the power to open and fund schools from locally elected school boards and putting it in the hands of political appointees in Madison violates principles of effective governance and public accountability. Furthermore, independent charter schools are funded from a first draw on the general aid appropriation. Therefore, the independent charter schools authorized by the CSOB would siphon state aid dollars from all local districts regardless of where the independent charter schools are located, causing many school boards to raise local property taxes to make up the difference.

I encourage you to remove all private voucher expansion and charter school proposals from the budget. Major changes in education policy do not belong in the budget bill but rather as separate legislation that is debated in the light of day and stand, or fall, on their own merits.

School Funding
A strong public school system has been a civic and economic priority in Wisconsin since we ratified our Constitution in 1848. The Governor’s budget proposal would freeze school district revenue limits while increasing state spending by $1.7 billion. If enacted, this proposal would literally and symbolically end the Badger State’s emphasis on quality education. Specifically, class sizes at Howe Elementary School would most likely rise, while student services would probably decrease. My school is not experiencing declining enrollment. Even so, the support needed to help all kids reach their potential may be reduced.

I encourage you to support Senators Ellis and Olsen’s plan to increase the revenue limit by at least $200 in each year of the biennium.

Thank you for your service in the Legislature and for considering my thoughts on these issues of critical importance to our State.

Sincerely,

Matt Renwick
Principal
Howe Elementary School
Wisconsin Rapids, WI

Note: Thank you to the Association of Wisconsin School Administrators (AWSA) for providing the framework and much of the language in this letter. I couldn’t have written it better or agreed with it more.

Responsive Language for Positively Affecting Students’ Learning

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I just got back from a weekend vacation. We stayed with my wife’s family in a cabin along the Mississippi River, located in the Northeast part of Iowa (for my niece’s graduation). No wireless in the cabin, but I didn’t miss it. It was good to be disconnected for a couple days. I visited with family, thought, and read. The only time I really used my smart phone was to check the weather.

However, always a learner, I did take time to briefly reflect on my school’s progress in being more socially proactive with our students. We are in the midst of implementing the Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) framework. It is an initiative that helps an entire building develop consistent expectations, as well as focus on the positive actions of our students whenever possible. Despite the sometimes bumpy ride when you implement any kind of initiative, I have been pleased with the progress we have made.

One area of focus is the words we use with students when things are going well or need correction. The more all staff use the same language when addressing issues in school, the more students will consistently meet our behavioral expectations. Once home, with my mind freed up from the constant stream of information (i.e. social media), I was able to transfer the work by Peter Johnston, in his book Choice Words, into a language matrix. As you can see below, example phrases are provided that would be applicable to several situations in each setting.

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This is on a Google Doc, for good reason. I am sure there will be suggestions for improvement, once the PBIS Team reviews this and the staff start to use these phrases. Many already do. However, it is nice to have a summary written down of what’s important from an essential resource like Choice Words, and applied to a specific setting. If you have additional suggestions for one of the responses, please share in the comments.

Best Read Aloud You’ve Never Heard of: The Smartest Man in Ireland

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I wrote this post to summarize a book I had read aloud to 3rd graders. The students and teacher saw how I embedded a Glog into a post on our school blog (which you see here).

Recently, I shared the book The Smartest Man in Ireland by Mollie Hunter with Mrs. Hafermann’s 3rd graders. They really enjoyed this novel for a variety of reasons.

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Character Development

Patrick Kentigern Keenan learned a very important lesson throughout the book. He had a tendency to brag about how intelligent he was, hence the title. People didn’t believe him, though, because the fairies and leprechauns tricked him. For example, when Patrick painted two coins gold to pay for shoes made by leprechauns, they kidnapped his son Kieron until he paid them back with work. Patrick got to keep the shoes, but he learned not to steal what is not his.

Interesting Details

Patrick found a lot of fabled items in his adventures to prove he was as smart as he thought he was. For instance, he managed to take a silver bridle from a fairy’s horse. Although he almost paid with his life for this, he discovered that he could tame horses with the bridle that had not been broken in yet (meaning wild). At this point in the story, Patrick had learned to keep his mouth shut regarding how he came about it. He started to show his smartness through his actions, instead of his words.

Suspenseful Plot

The plot of the story is the journey that Patrick takes to learn what is more important in life. When the fairies entrance his son Kieron and hold him hostage in their lair, Patrick realizes that it is courage in addition to his intelligence that will ultimately save his son. An ancient story about an iron knife turned out to be important in their escape. However, had Patrick not had the courage to go in after Kieron, this knowledge would be useless.

In Summary

We ended our read aloud by summarizing our learning in a Glog. (Click here to go to this Glog. It is only pictured above. WordPress does not allow Glogs to be embedded into blog posts). A glog is a visual blog. It can highlight audio, video, images and text all in one digital poster. It shows what we know from the story, as well as highlight some of the images that we visualized while listening to it.