Friday, October 26, 2012

Student Video in the News!

Kendall Snee, a senior at PT,  produced and directed a video that got the attention of our local paper.  The video she created has high school faculty members lip syncing to the pop song "Call me Baby".  Her video has become the most popular one on the PT Warrior Video You Tube channel.  check out the newspaper article here, and the video here.  Great work!

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The PSBA Conference

On Thursday, October 18th, seven Penn-Trafford employees presented at the Pennsylvania School Board Association Leadership Conference. The PSBA Conference is a three day conference co-sponsored by the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.  Hundreds of people attend the conference from school districts from all over the State.  The conference designates booths to showcase innovative programs that are occurring in Pennsylvania public schools.  Our school district was honored to be chosen to present.

Erin Rizzer, Beth Miller and Karin Coiner from Sunrise Elementary and Devon Vaia, Larry Hohman, Kim Lantz and Jeff Swartz from Harrison Park presented on the school districts attempts at customized learning for our students.  As many of you know, these two schools are undertaking a pilot program to work through ideas of how to customize the educational experience for their students.  The team applied to PSBA last Spring to have a booth at the conference.  The team worked hard over the past few months to organize an informative booth that would spread the news of customized learning and offer advice to any school district that had questions.   The team handed out pamphlets they created explaining the process and had a video of an elementary child working through a customized learning experience.  As I worked my way through  the conference floor, many of my colleagues approached me and commented to me about our program.  Our team did a great job of engaging passers-by to promote customized learning. The team talked to over 100 people during our day manning the "Customized Learning Booth". Great Job!

Monday, October 15, 2012

PSSA Results


I am cheating a little bit and using my latest web page update as a blog post.  I am very proud of the work that all stakeholders have put into helping students learn and the PSSA test scores reflect great instruction in the classroom.

Once again I am proud to announce outstanding PSSA test results for our school district.  Our students are 91.4% proficient in Math and 88.5% proficient in Reading.  These test scores place Penn-Trafford #1 in Westmoreland County and in the top 20 of all school districts in Pennsylvania.  Penn-Trafford is achieving these results while providing an affordable educational experience for our taxpayers.  Penn-Trafford has the second lowest cost per pupil of school districts in Westmoreland County.  The PSSA scores and the affordability of our education is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our students, parents, staff, School Board and principals.  Outstanding academic results require a team approach, and we have a great team!

Monday, October 8, 2012

Personalization of Education

We have talked a lot about personalizing or customizing education at Penn-Trafford.  A legitimate question is, "What does that really mean?"  For those of us in education we have heard a lot in the past decade about "differentiating" instruction.  This is where a teacher attempts to reach all students through instructional strategies that best help individual students learn.  This is a great goal.  However, differentiation of instruction still exists inn the 19th Century learning model that is based on an industrial model of education.  For example, a school that just differentiates instruction still believes that the "Carnegie Unit" (or credits) are the best way to send a student through school.  A Carnegie Unit limits the school and the students because you can only teach a curriculum in a certain order at certain times. Thus, differentiation is teacher (or school system) centered, not learner centered. This is just one example of the difference between personalization and differentiation.  I found this wonderful chart that breaks down the differences between personalization, differentiation and individualization.  We are constantly moving forward at Penn-Trafford to provide the best learning experience for our students.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Learning More About Good Teacher Practice




I want to  share with you an article I read in this month's The Atlantic.  The article can be found here.  I am not going to give an in-depth critique of the article, but I do want to share something that I found interesting.  The article discusses how it really is important to get students feedback about their teachers.  After all, they are the ones that are spending the most time with the teachers.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have spent a lot of money over the past couple years studying teachers evaluation systems and how students feedback can be incorporated into a teacher evaluation.  School systems that participated in the pilot programs gave students a 36 question survey about their classroom.  The students were given the survey for every class they were in so the surveys were specific to the teacher in a specific class at a specific time.  These were not general surveys that simply asked "Do you like your teacher". The benefit of these surveys is that teacher effectiveness (at least according to students) stays stable over time, unlike teacher evaluations that are based on student test scores.  The surveys were designed to garner specific information about instruction, class climate, and work load in the class.  Here is what I find interesting.

When a researcher reviewed over 199,000 student surveys he found two things.  First, less than one half of one percent of the students did not take the survey seriously and tries to skew the results.  This shows that when students are given responsibility they will take it seriously.  Secondly, of the  36 questions on the survey, five of them were most correlated to student learning.  The questions were:

  1. Students in this class treat each other with respect.
  2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
  3. Our class stays busy and does not waste time.
  4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
  5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.
These are very straightforward expectations for any well-run classroom. As a matter of fact, #5 reflects the brain research that I learned in Phoenix; true learning occurs through trial and error and correcting mistakes. 

I am not advocating that our school district include this kind of information into our teacher evaluation; I think that it is an interesting idea.  I do think that a survey such as this can serve as a great conversation starter with a teacher as they reflect on their practice.  I do like the fact that the results in a student survey are more stable than student test scores (which fluctuate from student group to student group) and I believe that a student survey may be an option to consider to gain true reflection of how well teachers do in the class.  I am continually impressed with the quality of teachers that we have in the school district.  Our teachers care about helping students learn by providing engaging lessons every day.  I believe a student survey would simply reflect that reality.