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Welcome to the Ithaca High School's Wisdom site, an online publication spotlighting Instructional Best Practices as well as articles/notes about celebrations and successes throughout our community. Administrators and department chairs/leaders will continuously post articles and notices in this professional journal, thus providing timely and informative communications relative to the incredible teaching and learning occurring in classrooms, on field trips, in competitions, and throughout the hallways and other venues that define greatness in this academic institution. Check in often to read articles, view details about lessons, and learn more about the Wisdom that permeates the IHS community. ~ Dr. Claudette James
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- May 13, 2011 - How to Truly Engage Parents
- May 13, 2011 - Promoting Risk-Taking and Meaning in High School Math Classes
- May 13, 2011 - Robert Marzano on Lesson Objectives
- May 13, 2011 - Rethinking Math Education
- May 13, 2011 - Reducing Academic Pressure in High School
- May 13, 2011 - When Studying is Difficult, Learning Increases
- April 20, 2011 - Helpful Hints for Teachers and Administrators
- April 18, 2011 - NAEP Report: Rigor Works!
- March 18, 2011 - Critical Issues for the Team - Solution Tree
- March 18, 2011 - Path of Success Quotes - Village At Ithaca
- March 10, 2011 - The Four Pillars of PLC - Adapted by Dr. Claudette James, ICSD Administrator
- January 31, 2011 - RtI Tier I: Best Practices, Proactive Routines, Interventions
- January 10, 2011 - The Words Students Need - Dr. Claudette James
- December 21, 2010 - AVID Reading Strategies #2.- Andrea Kiely
- December 14, 2010 - AVID Reading Strategies - Andrea Kiely
- December 3, 2010 - IHS Math Prize for Girls - Todd Noyes
- December 1, 2010 - Mandarin Speakers Series in Chinese - Janet Abowb
- November 8, 2010 – Charting Nursing’s Future (Judy Hoffman)
- October 27, 2010 Reading in the Content Area by Gwen Freeman
- October 25, 2010 PLATO - by Jeremiah Salomon
- October 22, 2010 Inferential Thinking and Art - by Carol Spence
- October 15, 2010 English Department News - by Shirley Kennedy
- Oct 4, 2010 - Differentiated Instruction- Dr. Claudette James
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Articles/Notices:
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May 13, 2011 - How to Truly Engage Parents
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May 13, 2011 - Promoting Risk-Taking and Meaning in High School Math Classes
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May 13, 2011 - Rethinking Math Education
Copyright 2011 Marshall Memo LLC
a. Rethinking math education – In this 20-minute TED lecture, high-school math teacher Daniel Meyer says we need to make math more challenging and engaging by stripping away all the “helpful” scaffolding in textbook problems and bringing them into the real world: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html
“Dan Meyer: Math Class Needs a Makeover” May 2011
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| May 13, 2011 - Reducing Academic Pressure in High School |
| May 13, 2011 - When Studying is Difficult, Learning Increases |
| May 13, 2011 - Robert Marzano on Lesson Objectives |
| April 20, 2011 - Helpful Hints for Teachers and Administrators |
April 18, 2011 -
Key findings from the national report card
Among the key findings comparing 2009 with 1990, in the study released today by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP):
- Students received an average of about 420 more hours of instruction, primarily through summer school and online courses.
- 75 percent of high school graduates completed at least a standard curriculum (including four credits of English and at least 3 credits in social studies, math, and science). That’s up from 40 percent.
- 46 percent completed a mid-level curriculum (which adds the requirements of algebra II or geometry, one foreign language credit, and two courses out of biology, chemistry, and physics). That’s up from 26 percent.
- 13 percent completed a rigorous curriculum (which adds the requirement of a credit in pre-calculus or a higher course in math, all three of the above science courses, and two more credits in a foreign language). That’s up from 5 percent.
- Those completing a rigorous curriculum had the highest average NAEP achievement scores.
- Grade-point averages rose from 2.68 to 3.00, but have not changed significantly since 2005.
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January 31, 2011 - Tier 1: Best Practices, Proactive Routines, Interventions
Establishing Routines at the beginning of the year:
- Team-building/collaborative strategies to allow student to get to know one another
- Greet students at the door and make them feel welcome
- Posting homework and goals for the day on the board daily and wait for students to copy it down
- Using a Blackboard site to post homework, class work and other resources
- Starting class with a “Do Now” activity
- Starting class with a review of material from the day before
- Teaching bell to bell, no wasted time at the beginning and end of class
- Sign-in sheet and protocol for late students
- Established spot for handouts and back work along with routines of how students can access those materials. Be consistent.
- Daily class participation points
- Structure lessons to require active student involvement (multiple student opportunities to respond)
- CHAMPS clearly defined
- Respond to small infractions (at the beginning of the year) immediately and quickly with minor consequences
- Establish, communicate, and consistently enforce a make up policy for missed work and homework
- See Sprick text or Intervention Central website for more idea
Behavioral Interventions: (short term adjustments to change behavior or improve academic performance)
- Change seating
- Planned ignoring if the behavior is attention getting
- Redirect student attention
- Proximity – move toward student to redirect his/her behavior
- Establish, post and teach 3 to 5 positive behavioral expectations
- Purposefully direct positive comments to students that consistently need redirection. In other words, recognize when they are doing the right thing. (Research says there should be a 4 to 1 ratio for struggling student. Four positive comments for every 1 negative comment.)
- Call home to problem solve with parent/guardian
- Hands-free classroom. Use popsicle sticks or other mechanisms for calling on students randomly instead of shouting out
- Play a game (like a dice game) to give extra credit to students that are in class on time
- Use TESA strategies
- Discipline individual students quietly and privately
- Use disruptive students as “helper.” Keep him/her involved
- Use detention when appropriate
See: “Intervention Central,” a web-based resource for RtI.
Academic Interventions:
- Break large assignments into small chunks with check points along the way
- Scaffold or chunk classroom tasks to identify where students struggle
- Offer frequent opportunities for choice
- Celebrate small successes with students to build confidence
- Collect homework and grade it to see if students can perform independently. Provide feedback.
- Use graphic organizers
- Model and teach organizational strategies. Many teachers use a table of contents and grade binders.
- Use AVID strategies for Reading, Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration
- Tie lesson content or skills to students’ lives or skills needed in “the real world.” Make that connection explicit for students.
- Create lessons and assessments that allow for students to be successful using different learning styles
- Use exit tickets or brief exercises that check for understanding for ALL students before they leave the class. Don’t wait until the test to get this information
- Use pre-tests to identify what students already know and build lessons on prior knowledge
- Model organizational strategies, model sample essays, sample projects, sample lab write-up, sample oral reports, etc.
- Use a “think aloud” approach: talk through the steps of problem solving strategy as you teach it so students can understand and internalize those steps. Have students use the same “think aloud” approach.
- Allow students to improve their grade by redoing work, fixing test questions or retaking tests/assessments once he/she has reviewed the work with teacher
- Collaborate with resource room teacher regarding instructional strategies that work best for students
- Keep lessons structured and clear and directions simple
See: “intervention Central,” a web-based resource for RtI.
October 2010 Volume 68 Number 2
Interventions That Work Pages 23-27
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January 10, 2011 - The Words Students Need
Joshua F. Lawrence, Claire White and Catherine E. Snow
Whole-school, context-rich vocabulary instruction is an intervention that boosts middle school students' reading comprehension.
When students enter middle school, they encounter increasingly difficult textbooks and instructional materials. Many students begin to struggle with reading comprehension because they lack the vocabulary to understand academic text (Buly & Valencia, 2002; Snow, Porche, Tabors, & Harris, 2007). Not surprisingly, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000) advocates direct vocabulary instruction as an effective instructional method for enhancing students' reading comprehension.
In our work with schools to help them improve student literacy, we have observed that middle school teachers do not usually teach vocabulary. The vocabulary instruction that does exist is fragmented among content areas, and (perhaps as a result), middle school students often find textbooks and other academic materials unengaging. A system of cross-content, whole-school vocabulary instruction can result in better reading comprehension. Here is what the research says about the basic components of such a system.
Choose the Right Words
When a teaching team designs and implements a program of whole-school vocabulary instruction, its most important decision is which vocabulary words to teach. Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2002) suggest teaching not the common words that all students are likely to know or the words that students are only likely to encounter in texts for one content area, but rather general academic words. Unfortunately, the category of general academic words has rather fuzzy boundaries.
The Academic Word List (www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist) is a set of words developed by Coxhead (2000), who analyzed a range of introductory college texts to identify words that appeared in multiple academic contexts across genres. Examples include distribute, conclusion, proceed, logical, obtain, acquire, retain, exclude, attribute, assume, capacity, enable, perspective, relevant, perceive, component, restrict, generate, distinct, assess, alter, amend, and contrast.
These words appear in their different forms in many content areas, often with varying meanings. The word distribute, for example, might occur in any text, from literature to history to math. In social studies, it might be used to refer to such concepts as the distribution of power or income redistribution. In math, students might learn about frequency distributions or the distributive property of multiplication. Coordinating vocabulary instruction across different content areas can help ensure that students understand the full range of uses of academic words.
Although the Academic Word List is a good source of cross-content words, it provides limited information about the frequency of words that students encounter in middle school reading because it was developed using a body of materials for adult readers. Frequency is a good predictor of word difficulty, and the most frequent words are most important to student learning. Students appear to learn words in a relatively consistent sequence as they progress through the grades, and they generally learn high-frequency words first (Biemiller, 2003, 2005; Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995).
A number of word lists and tools can help teacher teams identify high-frequency words for instruction. For example, WordCount (www.wordcount.org/main.php), an online tool created by Jonathan Harris, presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of frequency. There are also commercially available word lists created from words that students encounter in primary and secondary school texts (Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995), which are also available in searchable software versions through Questar Assessments (www.questarai.com).
Ensure Repeated, Rich Exposure
Probably the most consistent finding related to good vocabulary instruction is that students need multiple exposures to a word to learn it well (Lawrence, 2009; Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985). Although some students may come to a basic understanding of a word after one exposure, all students need additional encounters in different contexts to ensure that they develop rich orthographic, phonological, and semantic knowledge of the word (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). McKeown, Beck, Omanson, and Pople (1985) found that students who had 12 instructional encounters with target words learned the words better than students who had only four.
To provide the multiple experiences students need, we suggest that teachers select just five to seven words to focus on each week, planning at the start of each week how to embed the word into writing or debate prompts, homework assignments, quizzes, and lessons. Cross-content teaching teams can work together, with teachers in each content area taking responsibility for providing instruction on the target words one day of the week.
Teachers are often tempted to begin and end vocabulary instruction with dictionary definitions. Student-friendly definitions do support learning (Bolger, Balass, Landen, & Perfetti, 2008), but teachers may find such definitions difficult to develop. A good online tool is the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (www.ldoceonline.com), which presents clear definitions using only the 2,000 most common words in English.
Definitions alone, however, are not enough. If the purpose of vocabulary instruction is to improve long-term comprehension, the most effective method is to provide students with multiple exposures to words in meaningful contexts (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982). Some contexts make the meaning of a target word more transparent than others. The sentence, The boy was tardy does not provide much of a clue to meaning for a student who does not already know what tardy means. The sentence, The boy was 10 minutes tardy, so his teacher was upset with him provides much better support to help the learner infer meaning. Because it can be difficult to immediately come up with interesting sentences that provide context for target word use, we suggest that teachers write them at the start of each week as part of lesson planning.
Encourage Use and Experimentation
Most secondary teachers have encountered students who overuse vague, general words like nice and stuff in their academic discourse and writing. These students may be avoiding the use of richer academic vocabulary because they have only partially mastered more advanced words and are afraid of using them incorrectly.
To encourage students to expand their written vocabulary, teachers need to support student experimentation and reward use of even partially known words. In assessing student writing, teachers should include rubric categories for not only correct word usage, but also the range of academic language used. That way, teachers can give credit for attempts to use rich language even if the student's first attempts are only partially correct.
Teach Word Learning Strategies
In the example of the word distribute, we treated the words redistribute and distributive as synonymous with the target word even though they are actually morphological derivatives. For adult readers with a strong awareness of morphological relationships, the semantic connections between these words are clear. Adolescent students, however, may not understand such relationships.
Research suggests that students with better morphological awareness have better vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2008). Therefore, we advise teachers to use a range of words related to the target word and to explicitly discuss how prefixes (such as re-) change its meaning. These strategies can deepen students' knowledge of the target word and provide them with tools for analyzing and understanding other unfamiliar academic words. Teachers should also draw students' attention to different word forms whenever the class encounters them.
An online tool that will help teachers think about sets of related words is the Visuword Online Graphical Dictionary (www.visuwords.com/search). This site provides a visual representation of a range of meanings for any target word and illustrates up to 15 distinct relationships among words by connecting them with color-coded links.
The Word Generation Program
Beginning in 2006, we developed a whole-school, cross-content program based squarely on the research described here. Operating under the Strategic Education Research Partnership (www.serpinstitute.org), the Word Generation program was implemented in five Boston middle schools. This program introduces students to selected academic vocabulary words in the context of a high-interest passage about a controversial topic (for example, Should people be able to rent a pet? or Should parents be allowed to keep some adoption information private?). Each Monday, students read the passage in English class. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, they encounter the words and the topic again in content-specific activities in math, science, and social studies. (In social studies, for instance, students debate the topic in class.) On Friday, students write persuasive essays defending their position on the topic. Thus, Word Generation's focus on vocabulary also supports reading accuracy, fluency, syntax issues, background knowledge, and comprehension.
In 2007, we began a quasi-experiment to compare students attending five middle schools that self-selected themselves to adopt the Word Generation program with students attending three middle schools that the district recruited to serve as comparison schools. The majority of students in both the Word Generation schools and the comparison schools were from low-income homes.
We administered a multiple-choice test of 40 of the 120 Word Generation words as both a pre-test and a post-test to students in grades 6, 7, and 8. An analysis of one year's results (Snow, Lawrence, & White, 2009) found that students in Word Generation schools started the study with lower vocabulary and reading achievement than those in comparison schools.
The post-test results showed that students in the Word Generation program learned approximately the same number of words that differentiated the scores of 6th and 8th graders on the pre-test—in other words, participation in 20–22 weeks of the program was equivalent to two years of learning during business as usual. Students who participated in the Word Generation program learned more words than students in the comparison schools, and English language learners who participated in the program benefited even more from program participation than did students who spoke English at home.
We also conducted analyses to determine whether students who participated in the program improved in their reading ability, as measured by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). Word Generation students who improved their vocabulary scores also tended to improve their MCAS scores. We are not suggesting, however, that merely learning additional academic words was sufficient to improve student performance on a state-mandated achievement measure. Rather, we believe that the program's regular debate, persuasive writing, and critical-thinking activities improved both students' academic word knowledge and their broader literacy skills.
In a follow-up longitudinal study, we administered assessments in the fall and spring of the following year to determine how well students maintained and consolidated their knowledge of target academic words. In both follow-up assessments, students who participated in the program maintained their relative improvements (Lawrence, Capotosto, Branum-Martin, White, & Snow, 2010).
Expanded Vocabulary, Improved Reading
Although a randomized trial of the Word Generation program is still underway, the results from the quasi-experiment described here suggest that combining the research-based components of vocabulary instruction in a schoolwide program can improve student word learning in urban middle schools. In addition, these approaches to word learning appear to improve reading comprehension (as measured by improved word knowledge). Vocabulary gains for participating students are still apparent even a year after the instruction has ended.
Our experience with Word Generation provides evidence that cross-content vocabulary instruction can provide rich word-learning opportunities, which translate into improved reading achievement.
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Online Resources for Vocabulary Instruction
To identify high-frequency cross-content words:
To create student-friendly word definitions:
To support students' morphological skills and word learning strategies:
To obtain information about Word Generation, a whole-school, cross-content vocabulary program, and download free curriculum and materials:
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References:
Beck, I., McKeown, M., & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. New York: Guilford.
Beck, I., Perfetti, C., & McKeown, M. (1982). Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(4), 506–521.
Biemiller, A. (2003). Vocabulary: Needed if more children are to read well. Reading Psychology, 24(3), 323–335.
Biemiller, A. (2005). Size and sequence in vocabulary development: Implications for choosing words for primary grade vocabulary instruction. In E. Hiebert & M. Kamil (Eds.), Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice (pp. 223–242). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bolger, D., Balass, M., Landen, E., & Perfetti, C. (2008). Context variation and definitions in learning the meanings of words: An instance-based learning approach. Discourse Processes, 45(2), 122.
Buly, M., & Valencia, S. W. (2002). Below the bar: Profiles of students who fail state reading assessments. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24(3), 219–239.
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238.
Kieffer, M., & Lesaux, N. (2008). The role of derivational morphology in the reading comprehension of Spanish-speaking English language learners. Reading and Writing, 21(8), 783–804.
Lawrence, J. (2009). Summer reading: Predicting adolescent word learning from aptitude, time spent reading, and text type. Reading Psychology, 30(5), 445–465.
Lawrence, J., Capotosto, L., Branum-Martin, L., White, C., & Snow, C. (2010). Learning and maintaining academic vocabulary. Manuscript submitted for publication.
McKeown, M., Beck, I., Omanson, R., & Pople, M. (1985). Some effects of the nature and frequency of vocabulary instruction on the knowledge and use of words. Reading Research Quarterly, 20(5), 522–535.
Nagy, W., Herman, P., & Anderson, R. C. (1985). Learning words from context. Reading Research Quarterly, 20(2), 233–253.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Perfetti, C., & Hart, L. (2002). The lexical quality hypothesis. In L. Verhoeven, C. Elbro, & P. Reitsma (Eds.), Precursors of functional literacy (pp. 189–213). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Snow, C., Lawrence, J., & White, C. (2009). Generating knowledge of academic language among urban middle school students. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2(4), 325–344.
Snow, C., Porche, M. V., Tabors, P., & Harris, S. (2007). Is literacy enough? Pathways to academic success for adolescents. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.
Zeno, S., Ivens, S., Millard, R., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator's word frequency guide. Brewster, NY: Touchstone Applied Science Associates.
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December 21, 2010
Posted by Andrea Kiely
AVID Reading Strategy #2: GIST
GIST is a quick and easy strategy that is used frequently in the AVID classes. This strategy provides a way to help students to process the main idea of a short reading. It can also be used effectively to assist students in writing a summary of a lecture, lesson or class notes. Essentially, we want the students to get the ³gist² of the source material.
Step 1: Instruct students to choose 5 key words or phrases from the reading, notes, lecture or lesson. The students can either highlight the key words or phrases or make a list.
Step 2: Ask the students to incorporate the 5 key words or phrases in 3-5 sentences for their summary. In addition to using the key words/phrases, the students should try to put the material into their words to encompass the main idea and demonstrate that they understand the meaning of the source material.
Students will understand and remember the information they learn if they take some time to review and process the information at the end of class (or within 24 hours). Writing a summary is an excellent way for students to reflect on what they have learned and use the information while it is still fresh in their minds. This is why there is a summary section on Cornell notes paper!
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December 14, 2010
Posted by Andrea Kiely
IHS GOAL
To improve students¹ academic performance through an interdepartmental emphasis on the literacy skills of testing/academic vocabulary and writing in terms of critical analysis and inferential thinking.
As we work to improve our students¹ academic literacy, critical analysis and inferential thinking skills, we need to teach them academic reading strategies. If students learn to use some of the same reading strategies in their core classes, they will be more likely to master and use the strategies on homework assignments, major assessments and in class. AVID offers materials and training in best practices for a variety of academic skills, including reading strategies. In fact, reading is one of the core components of the AVID curriculum.
All students will benefit from learning academic reading strategies. I will provide a series of posting based on AVID reading strategies that can be used in various disciplines to help students understand and analyze reading material across the disciplines. These strategies can be used with students at all reading levels.
SAY-MEAN-MATTER
Reading Material: This strategy can be used with a section of a textbook, passage from a novel, poem, primary source document or scholarly article
Procedure:
This strategy can be used for independent reading and/or a class discussion.
Handouts can include lines or boxes for each portion (say, mean, matter).
If you are familiar with Costa¹s levels of questioning, this strategy corresponds with the three levels of thinking and questioning. Therefore, this strategy leads students step by step to critical thinking.
* Say: Students read the text and determine the main idea that the author is trying to communicate. Students may use the author¹s words or quotes from the text or briefly summarize the information in their own words. This Costa¹s level 1. Students should be able to point to the information in the reading.
* Mean: Students put the main idea into their own words and explain the meaning. For reading material other than textbooks, students can be prompted to consider the author¹s purpose, intentions, historical background, social environment, etc. They can also relate the information to what they already know. This is Costa¹s level 2. Students may need to make inferences and compare/contrast.
* Matter: Students explain why this information matters or why it is important. They can be prompted to consider why the information is useful in helping us understand something, what effect the information has on people or society, how it relates to other information they have studied in class, or how the information can be applied. This is Costas¹ level 3. Students will need to use critical thinking skills.
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December 3, 2010
Posted By - Todd Noyes
From the Ithaca Journal: http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=201011280340
Anying Li and Mia Smith, both juniors at Ithaca High School, received honorable mention awards in the Advantage Testing Foundation's Math Prize for Girls competition held Nov. 13 at New York University.
Both girls tied for 18th place, with 16 other girls.
The Math Prize for Girls represents the world's largest math award exclusively for young women in high school. More than 200 high school girls from across the United States and Canada participated in the competition at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
The exam consisted of 20 complex problems covering algebra, geometry, trigonometry, combinatorics and number theory. The Math Prize for Girls has a purse of $49,000 distributed among the top 10 places. The overall winner, Danielle Wang, of California, took first place overall and won $25,000.
Anying and Mia are both members of the Ithaca High School Math Club, as well as the newly-formed Ithaca Math Circle, which is a group of high school students who meet weekly on Sundays to collaborate on challenging math problems. Anying Li is the daughter of Hua Li and Mingxiang Zhang of Ithaca. Mia Smith is the daughter of Andrew and Melissa Smith of Ithaca.
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DECEMBER 1,2010 - JANET ABOWD
**PLEASE CONTACT THE I.H.S. WORLD LANGUAGE OFFICE IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN INVITING ONE OR MORE OF THESE SPEAKERS TO YOUR CLASS***
I.H.S World Language Department and Cornell University
presents the Mandarin Speakers Series in Chinese I
Ithaca High School
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Speaker
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Time Frame
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Represents
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Topic / Format
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Morgan Fleischman
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December
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Study Abroad/Scholarship info
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Study Abroad: Powerpoint, photos, etc.
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Austin Volz
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December
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Cornell Falcon Program
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Cornell Falcon Program (and possible summer high school program) language preparation
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Jing Carlson
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January
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Calligrapher and Mandarin teacher for East Asia Program
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Lunar New Year/Calligraphy/ Growing up in China
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Yiqing Zhao
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February
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Sociology Freshman from Shanghai
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Life in Shanghai and as a high school student in China
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November 8, 2010 – Judy Hoffman
Charting Nursing’s Future - This is an interesting article in helping children reach their potential during school and beyond.
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October 29, 2010 by Todd Noyes
Fractals Art Show
The Fractals and Chaos class have just completed their work for the art show and their pieces are on display in several bulletin boards upstairs in H building. Twenty-three students have created at least three drawings each, using a very open-ended computer program. There are 6 displays, for 5 different categories (ferns, trees, realistic, spirals, artistic) and additional items. Come look at these imaginative works that are based on fractal self-similarity and illustrate the principles that the class has been studying. Fractals and Chaos is primarily a math class, but as this show demonstrates, there is also a strong component of art (and also science and philosophy). The show will remain on display for at least a month
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October 27, 2010 by Gwen Freeman
Reading in the Content Area
Consider Reading a Book about Content-Area Reading
In my years as a Reading/Literacy teacher I have grown accustomed to the yearly cry of the content area teachers.
“I’m not a reading teacher! How am I supposed to teach content AND reading? Isn’t that your job?”
Actually, the job belongs to all teachers. Content area teachers need to care as much about reading, as they care about the content area they teach. If they don’t, teachers may find their students ‘just don’t get it,’ whatever ‘it’ is. Engagement, support, excitement, and reading the ‘right stuff’ make all the difference in students’ willingness to read, and willingness is where the game is.
Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman have co-authored another book for educators, and this one is about content-area reading. If you really need a “book about content-area reading that’s just as useful to math, science and [social studies] teachers as it is to English teachers,” you need to read Subjects Matter, Every Teacher’s Guide to Content-Area Reading. It takes a good hard look at what we’re expecting our students to read, reviews what we are using for textbooks, and provides the reader with practical activities to help students understand and remember what they’ve read.
The book is lively and interesting, and the authors poke good-natured fun at just about everyone in education. It’s a real switch from the standard professional development text. The authors practice what they preach. (How nice.)
Below is a simple chart included in the book that you may find interesting, but reading the book will provide you with many other ideas to support your students.
More Less Chart
To strengthen students’ reading as an engine for learning in all subjects, secondary classrooms need:
More Less
Real books Textbooks
Teaching of reading Assigned reading
Student choice of reading Reading only the “classics”
In-class reading Take-home assignments
Workshop and Book Clubs Reading as an individual activity
Reading lots of books Many weeks on a single book
Reading for enjoyment Struggling through hard books
Reading as a life activity Reading as a school activity
(Excerpted from Daniels and Zemelman, Subjects Matter, Every Teacher’s Guide to Content Area Reading)
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October 25, 2010 by Jeremiah Salomon
PLATO AT ITHACA HIGH SCHOOL
Hello colleagues.
PLATO is the new-online course system being implemented at IHS. As this is a new program, there are questions I would like to try and answer up front so you can help support the program. PLATO, at the moment, has eight courses available for students to take: English 11 and 12, US History, Participation in Gov., Econ, Algebra, Geometry and Chemistry. For right now, we are offering these courses as a credit recovery opportunity, and will look to expand to a credit acceleration program in the future (Simply put, we are starting with students who have already failed the course). We also will be looking to expand the classes we offer as we move on through the school year. The goal of PLATO is to help students make up their credits in an alternative way to free up time in school for other classes they may need in order to graduate on time.
The way our program works is that students have the opportunity to take courses, one at a time, after school. They have the option to stay at IHS, or use one of the following sites: GIAC, the Village or Caroline Elementary School. We are also partnered with Newfield High School and students would have the option to work there as well. The students are required to attend a four hour session once a week with the instructors, with them putting in work on their own time as well. If you have any students who are interested or you think that would be a good fit for the program, please recommend the program to them or their school counselors who will then put them in contact with the instructors to get them started.
Thanks for your help and support and if you have questions, please feel free to contact either of the instructors at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
<https://exmail.icsd.k12.ny.us/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx> or
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
<https://exmail.icsd.k12.ny.us/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx> or visit our PLATO webpage at http://plato-ithaca.wikispaces.com/.
Thanks,
Jeremiah Salomon
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October 22, 2010 by Carol Spence
Inferential Thinking and Art
Where do artists get their Ideas?
How does an artist make artistic decisions?
How do artists make personal connections and meaning in their work?
Being comfortable with Ambiguity
Working from concrete to abstract activities
Bringing personal meaning to the subject matter by connecting it with prior knowledge.
Making educated guesses
Translating/creating symbols
Using brainstorming, Starbursts & Mind maps
Art Process= Inspiration>Research>Experimentation/Play>Personal Meaning>Solution>Assessment.
Skills:
- Asking questions: Inquiry & experimentation
- Collecting & analyzing evidence
- Making connections between prior knowledge and new information
- Making informed decisions/conclusions
- Imagining new meaning
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| October 15, 2010
English Department News
Shirley Kennedy
The weightiest piece of news from NYSED for the English Department this year is the change beginning in January 2011 from a two-day, six-hour Regents exam to a one-day, three-hour exam.
Recently the English Department and most of the members of the Special Education and AIS/ESL Departments spent a day at TST BOCES preparing for this new exam and learning to interpret data from the January 2010 exam.
Beth Dryer, TST BOCES Literacy Instructional Specialist, led the morning session guiding participants in taking the state-provided, sampler exam themselves and discussing the ramifications of the differences from the former exam.
The listening section will no longer have an essay to write. Therefore, there is no fixed focus for the note taking. Teachers entered into a lively debate on whether or not students should be encouraged just to listen to the passage during the first reading and not take notes or whether note taking actually focused their listening. The discussion eventually centered on the types of questions asked, mainly inferential, and which technique would work best for those questions. Teachers acknowledged that different learning styles could use different techniques on this section.
The group then took the second and third sections of the exam realizing that increase in multiple choice questions and the diminution of writing is an impetus for more multiple choice practice in their classrooms. The present portfolio final exam and the extensive writing work that is needed for this type of final leads to using fewer multiple-choice formats. The department recognized that this issue also will need to be addressed in its teaching practices.
The length of the exam with the amount of listening and reading plus writing the final critical lens--a full essay--forced the teachers to question in what order they should encourage their students to write the exam. Should they write the full essay right after the listening passage or should they read the lengthy passages and do the multiple choice and short responses first? No firm conclusion was drawn.
After the lunch break, Cheryl Covell, TST BOCES Data Analyst, introduced the group to several ways of looking at the data now provided by the scanning of the Regents exams. Disaggregated groups included: ethnicity, gender, economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities, general education, and cohort groups. Staff then articulated a goal that could address the observations made.
More work will be done on these issues at PLC and department meetings as well as the upcoming Superintendent's Day Conference where department members will share their findings in an interdepartmental setting.
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Oct 4, 2010 - Differentiated Instruction - Dr. Claudette James
Thirteen Things to Remember About Observing, Implementing and Sustaining Differentiation
presented by Nancy Letts
1. Keep it simple. The more sophisticated the Concept, the more difficult it is to comprehend and implement
2. Define differentiation clearly and provide a defensible model for all educators.
3. Some risk exists in aiming high, but more danger lurks in setting 1 the bar low.
4. Be consistent. Be in it for the long term. Students and teachers can hit any target as long as it doesn't move.
5. Establish a long-term, comprehensive plan, and provide ongoing support with t/me to reflect at each step.
6.Define your terms and make certain that all consultants, presenters, and members of your team use the terms in the same way.
7. Encourage role sharing. Students need to know that everyone in the school is a teacher.
8. All staff should take responsibility for all students.
9. Team or department meetings require the time to develop curriculum and discuss best practices.
10. Value and support the in-house expertise of teachers.
11. Label the non-negotiables of a differentiated classroom: respectful tasks, flexible grouping and ongoing assessment and adjustment.
12. Arrange to have all members of the school staff trained in order for each to understand his/her role.
13. Accept that a movement toward differentiation is a process that will take time and will need ongoing, flexible and responsive support.
Please see Nancy's "Glossary of Instructional and Management Stragtegies That Support Differentiation" which clarifies ideas, best practices and definitions of many best practices which support DI.
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