October 3, 2021

Good morning & Happy Monday-

It has been great meeting again to discuss goals for the coming school year. I ma impressed with the thought you have put in to where our students are and how you can best support them. If you have not set up a goals meeting with your primary evaluator, please get it on the calendar asap as our schedules fill up too and we need to meet prior to October 15.

If you are calling out sick with any symptoms that are COVID related please make sure to touch base with our nurses. Thank you! 

We are still in need of one faculty member to sit on the Site Council. Please consider joining us. We will meet monthly on Thursday at 4pm (most likely the 3rd Thursday of the month). Meetings last about 90 minutes 

Ashland Nutrition, a local smoothie & juice bar, has started Teacher Tea Tuesday's. Each tea is $6 ($6.42 with tax- a $2 discount) and they will deliver to AHS. If you'd like to order one the menu is attached. Complete this form if you would like to order: Teacher Tea Tuesday's order

Food for thought:

1. Rethinking “Rigor” in Secondary Schools

            In this article in Independent School, Percy Abram (The Bush School) and Olaf Jorgenson (Almaden Country Day School) say that academic rigor has been “catnip” for many parents, “associated with favorable outcomes ranging from high standardized test scores and weighted grades to the grand prize, admission to elite colleges and universities.” But what does rigor mean in the classroom?

            The usual association is with difficulty – rigorous classes are hard – and not necessarily that they are intellectually challenging and conceptually deep. Rigor is more often associated with piled-on reading, homework, and assignments that produce anxiety, sleep deprivation, isolation, and emotional fatigue. Rigor-as-suffering harkens back to the Latin derivation – stiffness, rigidity, harshness – and echoes contemporary dictionary definitions – inflexibility, strict precision, exactness, making life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.

            “This is not to suggest that academic achievement, ambition, or aspiration aren’t worthy and noble drivers,” say Abram and Jorgenson, “but there is an argument to be made against unnecessary, unhealthy, and inhumane academic distress – about the peril and the ethics of putting student achievement ahead of student wellness, and the fallacy that the two are competing aims.” The additional layers of stress placed on young people during the pandemic have added urgency to the need to rethink rigor in middle and high schools.

            The irony is that parents who push schools to implement the hard-nosed conception of rigor are not helping their children prepare for the “best” careers. Many elite companies are looking for a different set of skills: emotional intelligence, listening and empathy, collaboration, creativity, problem-solving, generosity, and fairness. “Certainly,” say Abram and Jorgenson, “students need exposure to direct instruction, core knowledge, memorization and recall, and automaticity – and some students truly blossom when fed and watered by facts.” But this is only part of what young people require to lead fulfilling lives.

            The authors propose a new definition of rigor: The degree to which a student is in equal parts intellectually challenged, engaged, enriched, and empowered. The big idea is challenge, not in the sense of an onerous workload but the “provocative, stimulating, sometimes vexing challenge of grasping complex ideas that make learning meaningful and rewarding (as well as empowering) to master.” And this has to be tuned to students’ incoming knowledge, skills and attitudes, so that work is at the Goldilocks level – not too difficult and not too easy.

“As schools courageously embrace a new conception of rigor that rises above merely a crushing workload,” conclude Abram and Jorgenson, “we expect to see both increased student wellness and higher levels of more-meaningful academic achievement.” They believe that even the most driven parents should be persuadable around the goal of producing graduates who are also healthy, well-adjusted, confident, and happy.

In a series of sidebars, Abram and Jorgenson share steps that several secondary schools have taken to tone down rigor-as-suffering and improve their students’ experience:

-   Later start times;

-   Block scheduling with fewer, longer classes that don’t meet every day;

-   Individualized work-study options;

-   Integrating co-curricular programs (versus piling them on top of academic courses);

-   Tweaking schedules to allow more unstructured downtime;

-   Expanding advisory programs;

-   Increasing teacher conferencing time;

-   Adding mental health counselors;

-   Providing forums for students to discuss their school experience;

-   Rethinking homework policies.

-   Allowing re-dos of tests;

-   Eliminating AP courses and replacing them with honors courses designed by teachers;

-   More emphasis on experiential learning;

-   End-of-term interdisciplinary, immersive experiences on real-life challenges;

-   Replacing final exams with expositions in which students demonstrate their learning.

 

“Out of the Shadows” by Percy Abram and Olaf Jorgenson in Independent School, Summer 2021 (Vol. 80, #4, pp. 70-77)

 

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Please add us to your safe sender list. As many as one in five students struggles with anxiety issues. Long-term anxiety can rob students of sleep and proper nutrition, leading to poor learning outcomes and compromised social, mental, and physical health.  In Strategies for Addressing Student Anxiety , you’ll learn how to:   Recognize anxiety dysfunction.  Develop classroom strategies to combat anxiety.  Teach students how to prevent anxiety escalation.  Understand how clinicians handle anxiety and how you can support students under their care.  With the strategies and interventions you learn in this course, you will be able to create a classroom environment where students can successfully cope with stressors and instead focus on learning.

Educators who bought this course also bought these: Motivating Unmotivated Students (Research and Practice) Nothing is worse than preparing an excellent lesson only to be met with a brick wall of unmotivated students. Explore the major theories of motivation and get strategies to help students develop a motivated mindset toward learning. Staying Present: Mindfulness for Better Teaching and Learning When teachers and students are centered and able to manage their emotions, they are more successful in and out of school. Create a culture where every member of your class is mindful and able to stay present even in stressful situations. Helping Students Overcome Trauma Help students transform from trauma victims to trauma survivors by supporting them to proactively deal with trauma. Learn strategies to help your school become trauma sensitive and a place of empowerment and outreach.

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