High Expectations

Research shows that students will meet and exceed expectations when they are held to high standards for success.  Every child we serve deserves to have high expectations for academic success.  How do we ensure we are holding students to these high expectations?  Here is a comparison of teacher behaviors for low and high expectations from the "Disrupting Poverty" book by Kathleen Budge and William Parrett.  Thanks for always making sure our students are encouraged to do their best daily!  

Teachers who hold HIGH Expectations. . .

   - Articulate the belief that student can achieve at high levels

   - Create warm social-emotional relationships focused on strengths, funds of knowledge, interests and aspirations

   - Provide informative feedback on performance to scaffold learning

   - Teach content and use tasks with high cognitive demand

   - Ask frequent, high-level questions

   - Encourage a productive struggle (refrain from giving answers, allowing wait time, guiding to answer)

   - Maintain close physical prosimity

   - Interact Frequently

   - Use positive nonverbal communication

Teachers who hold LOW Expectations . . . 

   - Call on students less frequently

   - Provide less "wait time" for answers

   - Provide answers or call on another student without wait time

   - Reward low-quality or incorrect answers

   - Criticize more frequently for failure

   - Interact less frequently

   - Seat students far away from teacher

   - Rely on tasks with low cognitive demand

   - Overuse independent/seat work

School Notes: 

* ISTEP Test Schedule - Attached to the email is a daily ISTEP schedule with coverage listed.  EVERYONE should please look at this list to see if they are required to help cover students.  Thank you to everyone for their flexibility and help these next two weeks!  You can find the document for 2018 ISTEP Groups in the Teacher Resource folder in Google Docs.  Please help make sure students know where they will be testing and when! 

* Book Study!  We are very excited about our book study!  Please remember our first post in the Google Classrooms are due March 9th.  This first post is just an overview of the book - take a look at the Table of Contents and just flip through the book to gather a sense for what the book is about and share with us what you hope to gain.  We will have questions for the first three chapters of your book posted soon and feedback will be due by Friday, April 6th.  If you need help accessing Google Classroom, please see Phil.  

* Reminders:  The end of the grading period is now Friday, March 16th.  Report cards will come out on Wednesday, the 21st, so the window for finalizing grades will be shorter.  We will NOT meet after school for a PLC meeting on March 14th.  PLC Data will be due by April 6th.  You are encouraged to use your WIN team time to finalize this data.  Documents will be available in the PLC Organization Folder.  

Important Dates: 

Friday, March 2nd - Pep Session for Boys Basketball Sectional!   Boys will play at 5:30 p.m. at Castle High School on Friday night!  Go Commodores!!

March 13th - Aspire Event for all 10th grade students.  Students will be gone from 9:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

March 22nd - Virtual Day for students/Teacher Professional Development Day with safety as the topic

March 9 - Book Study entry due