Update on the Showcase Plan

This is our plan for the showcase.

Willie is posting the data of the study skills inventory on the tri-fold poster along with his set of questions from a video they watched. His topic is note-taking and his set of questions is forcing students to use note taking.

On the tri-fold poster, I will have my WH - Question Sheet posted as well. I am working with Functions of Questions. Jenny will put up a grade-tracking with a to-do list and her weekly planner she created for her students. She is working with time-management. Also, Jason Dolezal will have sample student work of annotations. Lisa has a student interactive student notebook laid out. She used Cornell notes with her class note-taking.

Next week, we plan to work on the tri-fold poster and fancy it up.

PLC Showcase Brainstorm

Our PLC group have our main goal and this is solely study skills. This is how we are going to present in our showcase.

Jason Dolezal and Jenny - Annotations

Willie - Listening and Note-taking

Kristie - QH questions (Question Answer Relationship)

Lisa - Cornell Notes 

Jason Drew -

As far as time management researching goes, this is what's put to practice.

Jenny created a weekly planning guide to help her advocacy with time management. Lisa is being more intentional and more structured in her advocacy by displaying the time allowance for each student activity like work on tracking grades, checking edmodo and assignments, etc... Grades need to be above C in classes. If nothing to do, free time.

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On a very different note, we are conversing about mistakes. We need to make mistakes or maybe purposefully make mistakes for students to point it up. Have them investigate and that's the power and process of learning.

Sharing our Inventory Results

Lisa, Willie, and Jenny both used the study skill inventory in one or more classes to see where our students are at in those study skills.

Lisa addressed that her results are invalid since she sensed her kiddos probably do not understand what each statement means.

Willie and Jenny both shared that their students noted struggling across the time scheduling, concentration, listening and note taking, exams, reading, and writing skills.

We are unsure of what we can do with this. We do want to work with study skills - just don't know where to start.

Here's what we're going to do now. We're going to research about different strategies of time management and staying focus to help our students.

WH questions / Narrowing our focus, maybe?

I shared a document that I created about "WH" questions with our PLC. Here is the weblink to the file in case if someone wants it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kf17w96fkqjxcf/WH%20Question%20Words%20and%20Functions.docx?m

I indicated that anything italicize and colored red means that these types of question and functions are found and used in ACT testing. Teachers can use this to help establish test questions in their classrooms. Students will be able to learn the types of functions in questions and define an appropriate answer when it comes to study skills and ACT testing. We discussed that some students do struggle with learning the functions of questions. This document may help.

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Narrowing our focus:

We discussed that perhaps we need to target one thing as our focus. Willie brought up these three things earlier this school year to ensure that our focus will produce these following:

1. Ensure that students learn
2. Culture of collaboration
3. Focus of results

We are considering using a study skills inventory for our classrooms to see what study skill needs for each student. That way we can see where to start to produce good results!

Brainstorming our focus

Jenny Mitchell and Jason Dolezal has joined our PLC. Today, Jenny proposed that perhaps what we can work on is study skills this semester since Willie has talked about different strategies to keep them engaged and Lisa has been talking about note-taking.

I talked about how I am teaching my students about annotating last week. There was an annotating guideline given to me during last week's content meeting and I used it later that week. That experience was wonderful. Here's how it works:

1. Students read a text.
2. Students read and then take notes on the text.
3. Students pair and discuss.

It was engaging and it was full of learning to the max with content and language.

I also shared another website that I yet to try but found very useful in the future. It's called:

http://socrative.com/

More information to come about this website.

Here is what we plan to focus. Each of us is going to take part in one of the following:

1. Study Skills - Mitchell
2. Listening - Notes - Quirke
3. Test Taking - KLee
4. Test Anxiety - West
5. Time Management - Nation
6. Annotate - Dolezal

Expectations:

We will each bring back something to share next time. 

Debriefing over the semester

·      What thoughts, ideas and learnings did you take away from the PLC Showcase? 

    The Showcase was something that allowed myself and other teachers to meet and share. Since we were using QR codes to demonstrate different activities from using it, a pondering question was answered by another teacher who I don't see about installing a software to enable laptops to read QR codes using the webcamera. I immediately went online and google searched a QR reader for Macs and tested it out. The QR reader software worked but it still has its slowdowns. Nonetheless, this shows possibilities for our students and classrooms.  If I didn't know this information through meeting this teacher I wouldn't have the drive to explore and know about it today.

     Some other things I took out from the showcase is a writing piece that will allow my ESL beginners to start writing language. I found out about some websites that I do plan to use such as glogster, animato, and educreator. 

 

·      Thinking back over your PLC work this semester, what were some of the lessons you have learned? 

 

l learned that you don't know possibilities until you try especially with student activities. When technology doesn't work, find another way to accommodate.

 

·      How might the information gained in questions 1 and 2 impact our professional work? 

The information that were discovered and learned stretched me and my teacher repertoire to be better than who I was and to use my learning in the classroom so mistakes are less frequent and student success is more.