1.  To articulate the building goals and make connections
to other professions
 To reflect on professional learning opportunities this
year and how strategies have helped lower expectancy
students grow
 To provide strategies for your group to help a lower
expectancy student achieve an upward trajectory of
growth by the end of the school year
MS Staff Meeting
4.16.15
Learning Targets:

2. Stand up and circulate around the room until the
music stops. Then find a partner for Question #1:
1) With your partner, articulate in your own
words what our two most important building
goals are for YMS. Be ready to share out.
Circulate
Now circulate again until the music stops. Then find a partner for
Question #2:
2) With your partner, name and/or describe specific
instructional strategies that you have learned and/or used this
year that have helped us progress toward these building goals.
(2 times)

3. Answers
1) Most Important Goals:
• To show growth in achievement for low expectancy students (especially
students with IEPs)
• To develop higher level thinking and problem-solving skills in all
students
2) Strategies That We’ve Learned/Used to Achieve These Goals:
• Higher level questions –adding “why”
• Kagan strategies
• Real world applications (making content relevant to students’ lives/engagement)
• Reading strategies – chunking
• Questioning games
• Differentiated Instruction training
• Chromebooks, TI training, technology
• Strategies learned from Instructional Rounds
• SBAC prep training
• Reciprocal Teaching UPCOMING TRAINING: Cold Call, No Opt Out, Strech It, Right is Right

4. The use of scales and differentiation in the P90X3 fitness videos
Modifier (Level 2)
(Below standard but
working toward
standard using a ball
instead of a weight)
Demonstrating the
model (Level 3)
(At standard, lifting the
weight from calf to
shoulder)
Teacher/Trainer
(Checking for
understanding,
providing feedback
and coaching)
Intensifier (Level 4)
(Above standard but
provided a more
challenging task to
continue improvement,
lifting the weight from
floor to above head)

5. Modifier (Level 2)
(Using a block as a
“scaffolded” way of
performing the task)
Demonstrating the
model (Level 3)
(At standard, reaching
down to the ankle)
Intensifier (Level 4)
(Beyond standard,
placing the entire palm
on the floor)

6. Teacher/Trainer is continually checking for
understanding, formatively assessing progress,
providing feedback, and coaching. He directs students
to “write down your goals and track the number of
reps and weights used” (progress monitoring).

7. Equity not only means differentiating instruction and providing what each student needs to access the learning but it
also means doing those things with the expectation that students will show adequate growth toward standards.

8. EXIT TICKET
Review your commitments from the exit ticket in March.
Are the strategies you have listed Instructional Strategies?
• If yes, how have you measured the effectiveness of the strategies?
Will you continue to use these strategies over the next 8 weeks or identify what
you will do differently?
• If no, what Instructional Strategies can you try to put the students on an upward
trajectory of growth leading into the summer? How will you measure the
effectiveness of the strategies?
ANNOUNCEMENTS (if time allows):
• NEXT TWO THURSDAYS – Trainings on 4 Strategies from Teach Like a Champion
• SBA Pep Talks

9. For a future training:
Four quotes that demonstrate the need for
accountable talk in classrooms . . .

10. “[From birth to age 4], an average child in a
professional family would have accumulated
experience with almost 45 million words, an
average child in a working-class family would have
accumulated experience with 26 million words,
and an average child in a welfare family would
have accumulated experience with 13 million
words.”
-from “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3” by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley

11. “[From birth to age 4], the average child in a professional family
would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouraging
feedback than discouraging feedback (6 affirmations to 1
prohibition), and an average child in a working-class family would
have accumulated 100,000 more encouragements than
discouragements (2 affirmations to 1 prohibition). But an average
child in a welfare family would have accumulated 125,000 more
instances of prohibitions than encouragements (1 affirmation to 2
prohibitions). By the age of 4, the average child in a welfare family
might have had 144,000 fewer encouragements and 84,000 more
discouragements of his or her behavior than the average child in a
working-class family.”
-from “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3” by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley

12. “Language [. . .] is how we think. It's how we process
information and remember. It's our operating system. Vygotsky
(1962) suggested that thinking develops into words in a
number of phases, moving from imaging to inner speech to
inner speaking to speech. Tracing this idea backward, speech—
talk—is the representation of thinking. As such, it seems
reasonable to suggest that classrooms should be filled with
talk, given that we want them filled with thinking!”
-from “Why Talk Is Important in Classrooms” in Content-Area Conversations
by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg

13. "In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary people--
lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen--the children's ears become early
familiarized with wide vocabularies. It is natural for them to pick up any words
that fall their way; it is natural for them to pick up big and little ones
indiscriminately; it is natural for them to use without fear any word that comes
to their net, no matter how formidable it may be as to size. As a result, their talk
is a curious and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by
the heavy-artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that it seems
to shake the ground and rattle the windows. Sometimes the child gets a wrong
idea of a word which it has picked up by chance, and attaches to it a meaning
which impairs its usefulness--but this does not happen as often as one might
expect it would. Indeed, it happens with an infrequency which may be regarded
as remarkable."
- Mark Twain's Autobiography