September 16, 2018

Good afternoon-

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend.  It was great to see so many of you at Ashland Day.  I hope all of the groups had fun and raised lots of funds!  

We've got one more disjointed week coming. Please be conscious of student time in relation to religious traditions when assigning homework this week.  

I will be out of the building quite a bit this week but I am always available for phone and email. Monday I will be at the MIAA for the afternoon, Tuesday I will be at the MSAA for the morning, and Friday I will be at Medfield High School for the morning.  You can always leave anything needing a signature in the red folder behind Linda's seat.  

As you start filling out PD, field trip, and other forms please remember this should all be done online.  Claudia Bialzik shared the folder of Curriculum Forms on September 7.  Be sure to save the folder to your drive and make a copy of the form before using it.  

I have attached the APSLearns information below. If you are looking for a great PD opportunity please check it out.

#APSLearns PD form
What a great way to guide your own learning!

If you get a chance this week check out the AHS STAT blog.  I loved this quote..."I learn and do best when I am allowed to choose my path and create what best fits me..." Galwin- STAT team member

We should always be thinking about how to encourage students to choose their path in every class.

Next week we will once again participate in the national Start With Hello campaign, organized by Sandy Hook Promise.  Encourage students to meet someone new and make sure all students feel welcome.  Consider mixing things up in your classroom and giving students an opportunity to work with someone different.  

Parent Night is scheduled for Thursday, September 27 from 6-8pm.  Attendance is required for all faculty.  

Clocker Store- get your spirit gear here!

Food for thought this week.....

The Balance Between Struggling and Developing Strengths

4. Tracking and Achievement Grouping in High-School Classrooms

“Sorting students into tracks is a primary means of structuring opportunity,” say Anysia Mayer (California State University/Stanislaus) and Kimberly LeChasseur and Morgaen Donaldson (University of Connecticut) in this American Journal of Education article. The rationale for achievement grouping and tracking is to allow teachers to more efficiently meet the needs of students with different learning profiles. This is especially important for students who need extra time and support to master the curriculum. The argument against sorting students by perceived ability is that it results in lowered expectations and inferior instruction for low-achieving students and widens existing gaps in academic achievement.

In this article, Mayer, LaChasseur, and Donaldson report on their classroom observations of teachers in six high schools, watching the same teachers as they worked with low- and high-track ELA or mathematics classrooms. The researchers used the CLASS-S observation tool to focus on teachers’ proficiency in three areas:

• Emotional support – Classroom climate, teacher sensitivity, and regard for adolescent perspectives;
• Organizational support – Productivity, behavioral management, and instructional learning formats;
• Instructional support – Conceptual understanding, analysis and problem solving, and quality of feedback.

In most classrooms, the researchers noticed significant differences in how high- and low-track students were treated on all three dimensions. Some examples:

• Emotional support – With his high-track students, one English teacher expressed genuine interest in conversations about their activities outside class; started class by asking how students felt about a test they’d taken the day before and listened attentively; said “That’s okay” to a late-arriving student and helped him catch up; gave students the choice of working alone or with a partner; and said he was flexible on the deadline for an assignment, asking students what would work for them.

With his low-track classes, this teacher was noticeably less warm, made fewer inquiries about students’ lives outside school, used sarcasm, and snapped at a student who complained about having to hand in work: “It’s not my fault that you’ve used your class time unwisely.” Students had much less autonomy in choosing work partners and moving around the classroom, and the teacher didn’t deal with pockets of students who seemed not to be paying attention while he was reading aloud from a novel.

• Organizational support – With his high-track classes, another English teacher who was teaching a Shakespeare play gave students clear learning targets, actively facilitated the lesson, used a variety of strategies, asked students to create two truths and one lie about themselves, and had high student engagement throughout the lesson – no heads down, no social chatting.

Working with a low-track class, the same teacher did not use a variety of strategies, spending most of the class going through a PowerPoint presentation at a slow pace. Observers noted “lots of long pauses,” low student engagement, and the teacher reacting to inattention by saying things like, “You need to focus now,” “Quiet please,” and “Shhhh.” A number of students had their heads down.

• Instructional support – In this domain, there was the biggest difference between instruction of high- and low-track students. With her high-track ninth graders, one teacher structured opportunities for students to interpret Romeo and Juliet and “freewrite” about their own opinions on the play and justify their insights in an all-class discussion. “How did you figure that out?” prodded the teacher at one point, and there were multiple exchanges with students, with a tight “feedback loop” and students doing a good deal of interpreting, analyzing, and making connections to the text.

In her low-track classes, this teacher gave students fewer opportunities to practice higher-level thinking or problem solving. In a 55-minute class, students spent 15 minutes reading silently and then another 15 minutes copying vocabulary words and definitions from the whiteboard. There were no opportunities for critical thinking or feedback. Then students did a grammar worksheet (identifying adverbs in sentences) that had no connection to Of Mice and Men, the book they were reading. After that, students worked in small groups filling out another worksheet ranking the seriousness of various crimes, which the teacher said would help them understand Of Mice and Men; students weren’t asked to explain their thinking. The bottom line: this teacher’s lower-track class, say the researchers, was “much less intellectually stimulating” than her high-track class.

The good news is that Mayer, LaChasseur, and Donaldson found three teachers (of the total sample of 26) who provided higher levels of emotional, organizational, and instructional support to their low-track students than they did to their high-track students, and another three teachers who gave their low-track students higher levels of support in at least one domain. All these teachers were able, to one degree or another, “to defy the institutionalization of poorer-quality instruction for students tracked into low-level classes. (Interestingly, the researchers didn’t find any teachers who gave identical levels of support to high- and low-track students.) Some examples:

• Emotional support – In his low-track geometry class, one mathematics teacher fostered a culture in which students helped each other, had options in how to demonstrate learning, showed kindness to one another, and openly posed questions to clear up misconceptions. He also had students take leadership roles in the class, fostered productive peer interactions, and connected math content to students’ lives. At one point, the teacher asked a student to put something away, the student refused, and other students urged him to comply. Among this teacher’s common utterances: “Very good,” “You got it,” “Thank you, “My apologies,” “I’ll help you,” and “Are you with us?” Students were comfortable taking risks as they learned challenging material. In his high-track classes, this teacher was much less warm, used no references to students’ lives, and seemed intent on covering the curriculum in a businesslike fashion.

• Organizational support – In her low-track English classes, another teacher maximized learning time through clear expectations, pacing, facilitation, having students give quick summaries, and using a variety of student writing, presentation, and discussion. In contrast, her  upper-track classes were less productive and varied, with dead time while she handed back papers and a lack of feedback and discourse while students read out loud.

• Instructional support – With his low-track students, the math teacher described above paid careful attention to misconceptions, broke down concepts to manageable pieces, provided scaffolding, and pushed students to deepen their analysis of problems, repeatedly asking them “How?” and prompting them to explain their thinking. By contrast, with his high-track students he spent 15 minutes going over homework, posed questions to which he supplied the answers, and explained concepts without drawing out students.

“However,” conclude Mayer, LaChasseur, and Donaldson, “these teachers represent a small subset of our sample. Given the significant differences in instructional quality between low- and high-track classes for the majority of teachers in the study, it seems unlikely that intervening without reorganizing into heterogeneous classes would improve access for the majority of previously low-track students.”

“The Structure of Tracking: Instructional Practices of Teachers Leading Low- and High-Track Classes” by Anysia Mayer, Kimberly LeChasseur, and Morgaen Donaldson in American Journal of Education, August 2018 (Vol. 124, #4, p. 3445-477),

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/698453; Mayer can be reached at

apmayer@csustan.edu