January 31, 2020

By -
Happy Friday and last day of January! As we enter February we are getting closer and closer to warmer weather. I will be concluding department meetings next week so hopefully I can get to work on the master schedule for next year. 

 We will do our make up extra hour meeting on Feb. 5. The two scheduled extra hour meetings are Feb. 19 and 26. For the Feb. 5 meeting, please meet in your department to work on building in intervention/enrichment times into your unit plans. You should now be planning intervention/enrichment times in all of your classes for the remainder of the school year and keeping track of the data. During the March building in-service we will meet in grade levels to discuss your intervention data. By this day, please submit your unit plans in the shared drive folder for your area' showing what interventions were done, along with the data spreadsheets that indicate what students received the intervention and the results. This will also help document meeting Standard 7 and 8 of the Iowa Teaching Standards. Just for your review, Standard 7 is Engages in professional growth and Standard 8 is Fulfills professional responsibilities established by the school district. This is an expectation that it will be done.

 I would like to thank you for the discussions you have been having on intervention or enrichment. I know many of these conversations have been taking place during lunch or other times when you are with your peers. These discussions are important and will help shape who we will become. Please continue to have these discussions as we work towards reshaping who we are as a school and staff. The way we do business is changing and I know this can be stressful. Please see me if you are feeling overwhelmed or don't understand what I am asking from you. 

 We have had several achievements that have taken place in the last few weeks that I haven't recognized in the Friday Focus. The girl wrestling team participated at Girl's State Wrestling last weekend. The team placed 22 and Brooke Rood placed 7th. The Jazz Band had their state competition and received a division 1 rating. We had several students that attended the NWI Honor Orchestra on Thursday, they are: Sarah Meis, Abigail Tilberg, Amanda Martin, Ellie Madsen, Caroline Meis, Luke Geitz, Bailey Goodman, Devin Hansen, Jack McInnis, and Spencer Schnetzer. 

 Dates to be aware of: Midterm of 3rd Qtr is 2/13. Trimester 2 ends on 2/25. 

 Have a great Monday!
Mark

Assistant Principal's Happenings

We have a lot of events/activities kids are involved in coming up.  Please communicate with your students so they can keep up with classwork.  If you get the opportunity please support our students.  They truly appreciate it when they see staff members take an interest in them outside of the classroom.

I've had more than a few teachers in my office discussing students copying/cheating.  Please repeat the expectations for students and hold them accountable if they are caught.  Don't let them deflect their own decisions and claim everyone else is doing it as well.  If you need suggestions on how to handle these students please let me know.  A call home usually goes a long way.

I am including a short article about meeting the individual needs of students.  Our conversations about interventions are directly related to that idea.  If we want every kid to grow each year we can't expect they will all learn the same way.  Sometimes we need to challenge them more (enrichment) and others we need to take a step back and come up with a new strategy to meet their needs (intervention).  

Notes from the Librarian/Student Council

Thank you for your help with sending care packages to deployed troops. We will have students pick up your boxes Thursday or Friday of next week. We are hoping to pack Monday, Feb. 10, but I'm not sure we will have it all sorted by then. We will not interrupt class time if we do NOT pack on Monday. In the meantime, if you know of any deployed troops, please send addresses my way. Currently, we have 2 alumni deployed of which I am aware. They will get extra care packages! In addition, please encourage your advisory students to make cards for them. You can use plain paper or the template Maddi Pippett emailed out earlier.


Success Center Updates

I read an interesting article this week that discusses the decisions teachers make and their interactions and impact on the classroom environment. The authors introduce three key decisions teachers make constantly: Selection of teacher behaviors and interaction patterns; Selection of teaching strategies and teaching models; and Selection of content, tasks, activities, and materials.  While there was extensive conversation about all three of these, the one that really made me think was the discussion on teacher behaviors and interactions.  This ties directly with what we have been thinking about and working on in our PD this year. "The questions teachers ask, the wait time I and II they provide, the non-verbal behaviors they exhibit, and how they respond to students' ideas together have an enormous impact on the classroom environment, determining what students think, and helping students make desired connections. Yet teachers are largely unaware of their personal behaviors while teaching and the impact they have on students. For instance, teachers can, and often unknowingly do, convey the message that they do not value students' ideas in a number of ways - by the kinds of questions they ask, the little time they provide for students to think and formulate answers, their unintentional negative body language, ignoring unwanted student responses, and only acknowledging or using desired answers" (Clough, Berg, & Olson, 2009, p. 827).  We often think about the decisions we make regarding teaching strategies, material, and content, but this made me realize it is absolutely worth the time to consider our behaviors and interactions and how they impact both our students and our classroom culture.


Clough, M. P., Berg, C. A., & Olson, J. K. (2009). Promoting effective science teacher education and science teaching: A framework for teacher decision-making. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, (7), 821-847.

Technology Tidbits by Mr. Wingert

Rubrics are here in Google Classroom and Tom Mullaney shows us how to use them. Tom has 3 short videos that show how to create and to use the rubric tool in Google Classroom.

 This is a bit of a lengthy read but an interesting current event that could affect all of us. Clearview AI was written about in the the New York Times with "The Secretive Company that Might End Privacy As We Know It". It scrapes social media websites for people's faces and works to recognize people for purposes of intelligence services.

The best places to get the "same" text written for different levels. While one of the old standbys, Newsela, is referenced, there are several that were new to me such as Text Compactor, which lets you paste text into it and then automatically shares different versions with fewer words.

 I have recently acquired a new skill that you might find useful. If you give an assessment in Google Forms and would rather read the information in a Google Doc vs a Google Sheet I might be able to write a script that will do just that for you. If you are curious or want to see an example...contact me and I can show you what I am doing with this right now.
As you are performing your 15 day challenges consider using a coach to assist you. We can help with data collection, data analysis, interventions, and enrichments. 

Upcoming Activities

Friday, January 31
4:00 pm JV Boy/Girl Basketball vs CB TJ
5:30 pm Varsity Girl Basketball vs. CB TJ
7:00 pm Varsity Boy Basketball vs. CB TJ

Saturday, February 1
Show Choir Clinic
9:30 am JV Wrestling @ Kingsley
10:00 am Bowling LeMars Invite

Sunday, February 2
2:00 pm Large Group Speech State Performers Showcase

Monday, February 3
3:30 pm JV/Varsity Bowling vs Multiple Schools

Tuesday, February 4
4:00 pm JV Boy and Girl Basketball vs. Sioux City North
5:30 pm Varsity Girl Basketball vs. Sioux City North
7:00 pm Varsity Boy Basketball vs. Sioux City North
7:00 pm Varsity/JV wrestling @ MOC

Wednesday, February 5
TBD - IHSMA Show Choir Festival

Thursday, February 6
5:30 pm Boy JV Basketball @ Cherokee
6:00 pm Girl Freshmen Basketball @ Sioux City East
7:00 pm Boy Varsity Basketball @ Cherokee
7:15 pm Boy Freshmen Basketball @ Sioux City East

Friday, February 7
TBD - Morningside Jazz Festival
4:00 pm JV Boy/Girl Basketball vs. Sioux City West
5:30 pm Varsity Girl Basketball vs. Sioux City West
7:00 pm Varsity Boy Basketball vs. Sioux City West

Saturday, February 8
8:00 am IHSAA Large Group Speech State Contest

Monday, February 10
1:00 pm Bowling @ Thunderbowl 
6:00 pm Freshmen Girl Basketball @ SBL
7:30 pm Freshmen Boy Basketball @ SBL

Tuesday, February 11
4:00 pm JV Boy/Girl Basketball vs. Sioux City East
5:30 pm Varsity Girl Basketball vs. Sioux City East
7:00 pm Varsity Boy Basketball vs. Sioux City East

Thursday, February 13
7:00 pm Varsity Girl Basketball vs. Storm Lake

Friday, February 14
4:00 pm Freshmen Boy/Girl Basketball @ Vermillion
5:15 pm JV Boy/Girl Basketball @ Vermillion
6:30 pm Varsity Girl Basketball @ Vermillion
8:00 pm Varsity Boy Basketball @ Vermillion

Saturday, February 15
8:00 am Robotics Super Qualifier@ Le Mars
9:00 am Freshmen Girl Basketball @ Sioux City West
10:15 am Freshmen Boy Basketball @ Sioux City West
1:00 pm JV Boy Basketball @ Sioux City East
2:30 pm Varsity Boy Basketball @ Sioux City East

Monday, February 17
TBD Freshmen Girl Basketball
TBD Freshmen Boy Basketball
TBD HS NWI Jazz Festival

Tuesday, February 18
TBD Freshmen Girl Basketball
TBD Freshmen Boy Basketball

Thursday, February 20
TBD Freshmen Girl Basketball
TBD Freshmen Boy Basketball
7:30 pm HS Band Winter Concert

Friday, February 21
Dance Exhibition

Saturday, February 22
8:00 am IHSSA Large Group Speech All-State Festival - Ames

Thursday, February 27
7:30 pm HS Orchestra Winter Concert

Friday, February 28
7:30 pm HS Show Choir Home Performance

Saturday, February 29
TBD - Show Choir @ Heelan
8:00 am IHSAA IE Speech District Contest - TBD

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

March 7, 2025

By -
Image
  Friday Focus  Happy Friday! I hope everyone had a great week.  On Monday, I attended a DCAP workshop. You may be asking what is a DCAP workshop? DCAP is our District Career Academic Plan. Just like the student ICAP, Individual Career Academic Plan, the district must have one also. In the DCAP, we spell out what we are doing to prepare our students for college career readiness and employability skills. The DCAP consists of 7 sections, the main sections deal with course planning, work-based learning, and 5 essential components of ICAP.  The course planning section deals with the students 4 year plan and how the students and parents are advised on progress towards graduation. This is why we have the grade level registration meetings, our 8th grade CTE day, 8th grade parent meeting, etc so we can meet this requirement.  I am sure by this point, you are asking yourself how does this apply to me? This gets us into the next few sections with what we do in class matte...
Read more

May 16, 2025

By -
Image
  Friday Focus Happy Friday! I hope everyone had a great week. We made it through graduation breakfast, practice, and award night. I was thinking that Wednesday is just as about as busy of a day as the Friday of homecoming for me.  This will be the last Friday Focus for the school year, so I'll try to remember to have everything you need to know to get through the last week of classes. Please remember contracts are due to Central Office on the 23rd. I do have a basket on my desk where you can turn it into me and I'll get it to Central Office.   We will be running the advisory schedule on Monday. On Tuesday, we will use the last day of school schedule. On the last day of classes students will be checking out. Please sign their check out sheets. If they have school property that needs to be returned, please document it on the sheet. During advisory that day, they will turn in their laptops. Please look at each laptop and make them turn it on for you. If there is any da...
Read more

September 19, 2025

By -
Image
  Friday Focus Happy Friday!   I hope everyone has had a great week. Today is midterm of the 1st quarter. Please make sure all grades are up to date. Amy will run midterms and we will hand them out during 8th period.   I have had my first PASS plan turned in, congrats to Ms. Hommes to be the first one to get one done. Unfortuately is is for a senior that needs his credits. Next week is homecoming, let the fun begin. Monday night at 7:30 pm is the coronation. Come out to the competition gym to see who will be crowned this year's King and Queen.  On Monday, we will have class meetings so students can sign up for the different competitions. Freshmen will be in the Little Theater, Sophomores in the Library, Juniors in the Commons, and Seniors in the Competition Gym. Teachers with the asterick by their name in the Teacher Handbook are the lead teachers and will need to take charge of these meetings.  Dress up days for Homecoming Week. YOU CAN PARTICIPATE!...
Read more