We Salute You

At Chets, we not only celebrate the departure of our 5th graders as they set out to explore another chapter, but we also take the time to celebrate with our faculty. We celebrate to thank teachers for their hard work and dedication in educating the children in their care and reward teachers with public recognition that have gone above and beyond the call of duty.

The last day of school is a half day, students depart at noon, teachers lock their classroom doors, and travel to a lunch destination. An elegant lunch is provided by our principal, Susan Phillips. Teachers enjoy the opportunity to dine, build stronger relationships, and reflect on a year full of great accomplishments.

Rich Relationships
The awards event this year started, as always, with Susan reading a few heart felt letters she had received from parents and staff recognizing the dedication of particular learning leaders. The letters wreaked of obstacles hurdled and personal triumphs, you could feel the intense appreciation of parents because these teachers stayed ever committed to academic and emotional success of their children. This is such a fitting way to say thank you to the teachers, so they wrap up the year and leave for summer knowing that their hard work this year is so appreciated.

Next we celebrated our, Mouseketeers. Our beginning teachers who are rewarded with an autograph pen that reminds them to autograph all their work with excellence.

The Spirit of Quality and Excellence award then recognizes our new Nationally Board Certified Teachers, our Teacher of the Year, our Employee of the Year, and this year the Duval Math Teacher of the Year who was selected from our staff.

In a perfect fit with this year's theme, next we celebrated our Dreamers, Believers, Darers, and Doers. The Dreamers included learning leaders who had a dream and made it happen. The Believers were teachers who took special care of our humanitarian efforts. The Darers took a leap into a new area, this year it was blogging. And, the Doers were the dedicated leaders in each area of Daniel Pink's book Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. These teachers received words of recognition and each walked away with a special gift signifying their accomplishments.

To wrap the awards, we celebrated the Park Closing with those that are leaving us to embark on new adventures.

Our last leg of the journey on this special day includes a glance forward into next year. The anticipation has built throughout the event and teachers readily await the blinds closing, the lights dimming, and the video beginning....where will next year's adventure take us?

The Fifth Grade Clap Out

The last day of school can bring with it much laughter and many tears. As students depart for the summer, some do so with an attitude of relief to have the summer to relax and enjoy the freedom, knowing full well that they will return to their school home in the fall ready to get back to work. And, some do so with a heavy heart because they are leaving us for other destinations-other schools, other states, and for 5th graders--middle school.

So as tradition holds, we say farewell to those who are leaving us, wishing them well, and praying that the lessons we've taught them will be far outreaching. That their lives are better because they have joined us for this season, and because of us, they leave prepared to conquer their next quest.

To fully honor those 5th graders departing from our community, we hold the annual Chets Creek Clap Out. Approximately 15 minutes before the rest of the school is dismissed, fifth graders pack up for the last time and graciously hug their teachers and classmates, they leave the room together in one long line. The rest of the school's students have gathered along the hallways outside their classrooms to "clap out" the 5th graders. The song "Pomp and Circumstance" plays over the sound system, adn the 5th grade students, led by Principal Phillips, walks each hallway one last time as they are applauded by our community. The parade of honor and farewell ends in the front lobby full of confetti to outstretched parent arms and many tears. We honor our graduating students and wish them well as this chapter of their lives closes and the next chapter begins.

Leaping into Next Year

As we are closing out one school year, we are anxiously awaiting the journey that will begin next year. Part of this focus for next year comes because our principal has recently shared teacher assignments and room changes with staff. As tradition holds, we have many teachers looping, entering new grade levels, or preparing to co-teach for the first time or with a new partner in the upcoming school year. This level of change could bring with it much upheaval and anxiety. However, at Chets, teachers are filled with anticipation and great excitement, because several systems are in place to avoid apprehension and generate enthusiasm. Two specific systems include New Team Working on the Work Days and a Co-Teaching Workshop.

1)New Team WOW Days
The new grade level team meets in the administrative conference room while their kids are rotating through their WOW resources. They gather for 1/2 a day to meet one another, share their professional and personal backgrounds, and rally around their new team mates. This is a forum for discussion, questions, and the penning of grade level non-negotiables. Conversation is based on a wide range of topics from instruction to grade level management including selecting a new team leader and committee members, sharing classroom schedules, getting an overview of grade level homework, discussing common assessments, planning for diagnostic assessment, glancing at content pacing guides, and conversing about standards, portfolios, and word walls. Teachers leave exhilarated and ready to take on this new challenge, because they have fewer questions and can begin planning for their new experience.

2)Co-Teaching Workshop
All learning leaders beginning a co-teach journey or with a new co-teach partner meet with two experienced co-teachers who lead a ½ day workshop on valuable topics. The day begins with an ice breaker to get the teachers acquainted and then transitions into a personal teaching survey, The Kind of Teacher I Am. Teachers reflect and share their survey with their partner. The survey generates dialogue from arrival and departure times to teaching strengths and weaknesses to favorite and least favorite parts of their day. The presenters then share five Co-Teaching Models. Some teachers, at this point, ask questions to clear up misconceptions about what co-teaching is and what co-teaching is not. Next, the presenters share the Chets Creek Co-Teach Non-Negotiables. Teachers must commit to certain criteria to enter this “school marriage” including: find effective compromises, plan together, communicate effectively and respectfully, supervise outside at recess, both teachers attend parent conferences, both teachers write notes to parents etc...To conclude, teachers are given three big topics to discuss: Planning/Communication, Behavior Management, and Classroom Systems. They are left with tools to complete and discuss to learn more about each other. This valuable workshop allows teachers to plan so the transition into co-teaching is an enjoyable one.

Having these two planning sessions in place has diminished most anxiety and gives teachers the security of entering their new experience with a group of caring professionals. I would highly recommend these two practices to allow a smooth transition into a new school year.

Classroom Inventories...Preparation for Next School Year

As the school year swiftly comes to a close, the coaches' job remains as busy as any other month of the year. However, the shift has been made between being a classroom supporter, instructional specialist, learning facilitator, and school leader to being a resource provider. A resource provider, not in the sense of ordering and handing out materials, rather a resource collector to ensure that as next year begins you have the professional resources needed to fully support the teachers' implementation of their content workshops.

In ELA, this is an important process because you are dealing with leveled libraries, genre libraries, genre study kits, vocabulary kits, author studies, touchtone texts, and professional literature that are grade level specific. Add to that, teachers looping between multiple grade levels, and a growing number of classrooms at specific grade levels, and the process of cataloging and distributing materials at the start of a year could be almost impossible. Therefore, the coach must spend time thinking ahead to next year, collecting materials, ordering new materials if necessary, and redistributing resources to ensure a smooth transition.

To start, it is easiest to have a detailed inventory of materials for each grade level. Not simply to list on the inventory, poetry genre study, but to list the teacher guide and all children's literature that goes with it. For example,

Climb Inside a Poem Genre Study
Teacher Manual: Reading and Writing Poetry Across the Year
Teacher Manual: Lessons for Climb Inside a Poem
Big Book for Climb Inside a Poem

Children's Literature for Poetry Genre Study
All the Small Poems and Fourteen More by Valerie Worth
Fireflies in Midnight by Marilyn Singer
Mites to Mastodons: A Book of Animal Poems by Maxine Kumin
Pocket Poems by Bobbi Katz
Ride a Purple Pelican by Jack Prelutsky
Sing to the Sun by Ashley Bryan
Surprises by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Talking Like the Rain by X.J. Kennedy
Toasting Marshmallows: Camping Poems by Kristine O'Connell George
When a City Leans Against the Sky by Allan A. DeFina
One Hundred Years of Poetry For Children by Michael Harrison
Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? by Kenneth Koch
A Family of Poems by Caroline Kennedy
The Giant Book of Poetry CD by William Roetzheim
The Other Way to Listen by Bryd Baylor
Color Me A Rhyme by Jane Yolen

The next step is to hold a Teacher Meeting to pass out the inventory, explain all the items on the inventory, and how items will be cataloged and redistributed. The key to this is being very specific. In second grade, for example, they were asked to box leveled books and genre books, report the number of books respectively, and pass the library on to a specific 2nd grade teacher. With respect to other materials, which are housed in plastic bins with lids, they were asked to inventory and bring them to me. I will collect them, sign off on their inventories, and redistribute items.

With this inventory process in place, the coach can ensure that teachers have the necessary materials and resources to delve into workshop instruction in the year to come, and that items do not walk or get lost from one year to the next. At grade levels where this process has been perfected (K-2 at Chets) the transition from one year to the next happens with ease. In other grade levels here, we are working hard to get this in place.

To see a complete 2nd Grade ELA inventory, click on the widget below.

Duval Elementary Math Teacher of the Year-- Angela Phillips

Yesterday, our own Chets Creek Elementary math extraordinaire, Angela Phillips was honored as the 2008 Duval Elementary Math Teacher of the Year! This award was handed from one deserving Chets Creek math teacher, Rick Pinchot, to another, Angela Phillips! This honor could not have been bestowed on a more humble and deserving teacher. Angela exemplifies the characteristics of a stellar mathematics teacher and coach. She is adored by those who call her leader, by her Chets' colleagues as a whole, by her students and their parents. In fact, the word math is rarely mentioned in our community without Angela's name attached!

Angela has 16 years of teaching experience. She joined the Chets community in 1999 just a year after the doors opened and single handedly redesigned the way in which we work. She aligned standards, instruction, and assessment, wrote diagnostics, implemented common formative assessments, and penned homework sheets for the intermediate grade levels. She implemented the departmentalized design, oversaw the implementation of a new program--Math Investigations, and ran intermediate math professional development. She began the Elementary Math Cohort which went district wide two years ago and became the Academy of Mathematics. She's attended and presented at local, state, and national conferences, and consults nationally.

Angela had the vision and oversaw math implementation at Chets Creek, and for that I am grateful. I've had the privilege of reaping both the personal and professional benefits of having Angela as a colleague. And, our students are young mathematicians because of the foundation Angela has built. Thank you, Angela for all your hard work and dedication, and Congratulations to our 2008 Math Teacher of the Year!

Embracing the Scores

Each year, teachers wait in anticipation for the FCAT Writing, Reading, Math, and Science scores to come in. The teachers are excited to celebrate overall classroom success, but also, and more importantly, individual student's successes. The teachers have poured their hearts and souls all year into maximizing each minute of the day, preparing focused lessons that propel students to be self-directed learners and deep thinkers, and lovingly scaffolding each student to perform at their fullest potential. They want this FCAT success for the child. They want this FCAT success to validate their hard work.

The minute the scores become available on-line a buzz begins to envelope the front office. As word travels from the principal to instructional coaches to teachers, the buzz begins to escalate. The principal jumps into action and begins crunching numbers as teachers begin to swarm her office. Teachers, with their class rosters in hand, take the school print outs and begin filling in their rosters with student scores. In no time, teachers are high fiving each other to celebrate individual student's success, classroom averages are calculated and celebrated, and word travels like wild fire throughout the school that the news is in...and it looks good!

Thursday, the 2008 FCAT Writing scores became available on-line. The office was a buzz as this scene once again unfolded. Fourth grade teachers had 92% of their students score a Level 3.5 or better this year, an increase of 3% over last year's results! As remarkable, not one student scored below a Level 3.0--a first in Chets history! I am so proud of the teachers and the students for these incredible results! I celebrate the fourth grade teachers and students and every teacher that built this student's foundation from Kindergarten up. It takes 180 days every year to prepare the child for top performance. And, once again, I am stand in awe of their success.

Integration Across Content Areas

As a coach, I often get the opportunity to hear teacher's frustrations with never having enough time in the day to get all of the standards and content taught. They complain, and rightfully so, that there are not enough minutes in the day, and generally, the areas slighted include Social Studies and Science. These conscientious hardworking teachers know the importance of Science and Social Studies, but when something has to give, they prioritize reading, writing, and math.

Our conversation continues to turn to the integration of subjects to maximize time and get more bang for our buck. We know in theory this is the way to go, however implementation has been more difficult to achieve. In the primary grades this is easier because the teacher has the students all day and teaches all subjects. They can grapple with the placement of content on the pacing guide and tend to integrate more. In the intermediate school, Grades 2-5 at Chets, this is more difficult, because we are departmentalized. One teacher teaches only Math/Science/Social Studies and the other teacher is the ELA teacher covering Reading, Writing, Skills Block, and Spelling. Getting the two teachers to plan together in order to achieve integration is ideal, but many times with time constraints and pacing guide constraints, simply doesn't happen.

However, recently, I've heard many teachers recommit to make integration a priority. Most of the buzz is coming from our co-teach classrooms where two teachers teach together all day long. This is giving teachers the opportunity to see where the content areas logically fit together.

Yesterday, I saw a perfect example of this integration. One of the 4th grade co-teachers who is identified as the ELA lead hosted the 4th grade ELA WOW demo. The other three 4th grade ELA teachers met in her classroom for a one hour Writers' Workshop demonstration lesson on report writing. Cheryl's students, in a previous lesson, had selected a report topic based off their 4th grade social studies standards. With a Florida History topic in hand, this particular mini-lesson taught them to identify the audience of their report (their peers), survey their classmates to generate ten questions their peers had about their topic, and begin to research answers to the questions. The teacher perfectly modeled this survey strategy to her students and gave them active engagement time to practice before their work period. Students were engaged and focused on this task as they diligently took their survey during work period. In closing session, topics and questions were shared as a whole group. The teachers follow-up lesson will focus on identifying the main idea questions based off the survey and supporting questions, so students can generate their subheadings. Report writing on a Social Studies topic is clearly underway, and being able to administer a survey is a fourth grade math standard to boot! Certainly, integration at its finest!

My only regret as I looked around Cheryl's room was the absence of the Math/Science/Social Studies counterpart teachers. At the time we were watching the demo they had set off to cover content in their subject area. This was disappointing to me because at that moment ELA teachers were scribbling down notes, outlining their next steps for implementation of the same lesson, and most importantly, were clearly excited about Social Studies. I know their counterparts would have been totally over-the-top to see the excitement that was generated. And, in their defense, I'm sure no one even thought to invite them to the demo. Clearly, a missed opportunity, by no one's fault. Maybe, as integration becomes more prevalent, all team members will be present and can get excited about integration together.