2017 -18 Goals

DIRECTIONS:  For the coming evaluative cycle, all PAHS teachers will set goals related to components outlined in your Pathwise booklet Components of Professional Practice. ** A lot of BP time will focus on scales & student benchmarks (assessment) and use of Scholarly Habits. Thus, time is built in for you to do your goals work. **

Note:  This document serves as a template for supporting your thinking about goals aligned to the Components of A Framework for Teaching. Consider previous evaluations, ideas taken from professional development activities, district initiatives, and our PBL and Schoology work. Above all, consider goals which are most likely to lead to improved performance by your students. If you wish to choose additional goals, you may do so.

It is useful to frame the goal using the acronym SMART:  Specific Measurable Achievable; Related to student achievement; Time bound.

* Copy and paste the text below into your blog from last year. Then write your plan in  your blog. Email Phil if you don’t know how to find your blog. This year, we will reflect & link evidence of your work and growth into your blog during several BP or in-service times. *

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Teacher:  Trevor Putvain        Highlight Supervision Group #:     II     Date 9/19/2017

Grade Level - High School Subject(s)-

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Goal 1: Domain 2 I will focus on Component:  Establishing a Culture for Learning

1. Describe what aspects of this component you will focus on: This year I will be working on incorporating the aspects of our M3 work into the classroom. We can't just have students teach this in TA - Teachers need to reinforce the lessons and make the ideas of M3 live in the actual classroom.

2. Strategies for working toward achieving the goal: Well, the most obvious is taking the M3 Grad class and learning at a deeper level the strategies for effective brain based learning. For instance - one of the sessions is about study techniques and how the brain makes links - but the TA lesson doesn't go into specifics about what those techniques are. The lesson material from Sousa and the course do fill in those gaps however and I will use them in class to further develop the curriculum.

I think this starts by being super (can't think of word) about it. Its explaining to students that we are going to do this this way because as we learned in M3 the brain likes it when we do this. It means calling out examples of growth and fixed mindsets when we see it. I've actually done this for years - but just kind of winging things on my own. Now I have researched based info to use and common language with students. Another strategy is changing what an assignment or task looks like. Instead of me assigning just one technique - it would be cool to point to a poster of options and tell students to choose or experiment with different techniques and assess how well they work for them.

3. Evidence which will be used to assess goal attainment (What will this look like, sound like in your classroom?): I think I can assess this in the Scholarly Habit of Mind Set. I can observe - but that is tricky to make sure that you have solid evidence for every student. I suppose that student reflections are a possibility. I fear that this might be one of those after thoughts that I have to squeeze in because the curriculum is already so full of other things. I could use help here with how this evidence could be collected without it becoming burdensome.

Goal # 2: Domain 3 I will focus on Component:

1. Describe what aspects of this component that you will focus on: Using Assessment in Learning: It seems like we just keep resetting and starting over from scratch every year on this goal. But, once again the goal has to be to align the curriculum to the Grad Profs and then create the scales. Then once the scales have all been rewritten I can start using them with students.

2. Strategies for working toward achieving the goal: We've got to do this as a department because are scales have to written at a graduation level. Last year all the scales I wrote were lesson level and now I see that is not how we are going to track them in Schoology. Also I had scales for MRG's and now all assessments have to be anchored specifically to a Global Citizenship - so I need to rethink what every assignment and unit assesses and how it does it and how that fits into a four year progression.

3. Evidence which will be used to assess goal attainment (what will this look like in your classroom?): Hopefully by the second semester the scales for all Global Citizenship profs will be written. Students would have copies of them all and be able to identify where they are at on the scale and have a goal for where they are trying to get to next. Not to make it all doom and gloom - Currently I have two that are ready to go and students have in their hand.

Trevor Putvain

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Teacher Signature              Date

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Principal’s Signature Date

2017 Goal Reflections

Goal Reflection 2016-17

Please complete this template as a BLOG post concerning your professional goals. Feel free to include links or photos of supporting materials/artifacts that help provide insight or reflection on your goals. (ex- student work, photos, journal entry, etc.) Thank you.  

Teacher name: Trevor Putvain Date: 4/25/17

1. Please list some highlights or discoveries that happened this year as you tried to achieve your goals?

2. How do you assess/ know your progress? What evidence do you have? Describe the things you did and/or things that were obstacles for you along the way that helped you meet your professional goal(s). You can reference your previous BLOG posts here and do not need to repeat something that you already wrote.

3. What things helped you reach your goals and what other supports do you wish you had to help you move toward your goals this year and next year if you are considering continuing with the same goal?

4. Do your reflections provide any insights or thoughts about goals for next year?  

Goal One: This year I will work towards aligning old work habit expectations to the new Scholarly Habits scales.  

Overall - I would say this did not go as smooth as I had hoped back in September.  Here are some insights I have gained along the way though.  

• The language of the Scholarly Habits were a real logistical issue. It was just impossible to isolate one particular goal or have uniform language across the scale that was useful to students.  That made it very frustrating for students to use them and to create rubrics in Schoology to actually be able to track them.  I think the work we are doing on the rewrite team though should help to rectify this issue for next year.  
• I dealt throughout the year with the issue of to what extent the scholarly habits should be “graded”.   I started out in the camp of giving as many of them mastery grades as possible but am coming around to be more comfortable with them not being graded.  I am also much more comfortable with having students record their own performance.  Most often they are right where I am at and when we aren’t on the same page we can have a conversation about it.  But, there needs to be a way to track student progress even if it does not work into a grade.  I hoping that next year we will have scales created in Schoology that will allow us to record this information.  
• My highpoint came recently when I gave 9th grade students an essay assignment and saw completely different reactions to how they approached the assignment.  By April I could see those in class who read the instructions and new right what to do with it.  Then there were the students who just put their head down on their desk.  In a 30 second scan of the room I knew those students who were going to make proficiency at the end of the year and those that wouldn’t.  It was very powerful visual evidence.  So I pulled out my SH to see what language fit this. I tweaked some language to make it meaningful and the next day I had created this reflection part to the assignment and we spent an entire class discussing what evidence of “responsibility”  looks like.

Scholarly Habits:  

	I Can Transfer: Proficient with Distinction	I Can Do This: Proficient	Basic Proficiency	Making Progress	Getting Started
Responsibility Respectfully speak up for yourself as a learner; ask questions that will improve your learning	I independently seek challenge and use these challenges to improve my understanding and performance. In these challenges I seek feedback and revise work to improve my learning. I’ve got some ideas about how I could make this even more challenging for myself.	I seek feedback and repeat my efforts, practicing until I can demonstrate understanding and proficiency in the task at hand. I know there are multiple strategies toward success and am willing to try them. I want to improve and am ready to use what I’ve learned to do it on my own.	I work to improve my understanding and performance even when material is difficult. I take opportunities to seek feedback and revise work. I take advantage of supports provided and work toward a goal of independence. I want to improve and I’m going to ask for lots of help to get there	I want to improve my understanding and performance even when material is difficult. I sometimes take opportunities to seek feedback and revise work. I sometimes take advantage of supports provided. I’ll give it a try - but I’m not really interested in improving my abilities	I understand that academic growth means challenging myself and making efforts to progress.   I recognize that class time is a place for learning and I know where I have been given resources and supports to help me learn. I don’t know where to start and I’m hoping this will all just go away

Highlight in red where you think you were at when you first received this assignment.  

  Where you marked yourself is your claim.  Now provide me with 2-3 pieces of evidence that proves that is where you are at.  What does that look like?  

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When you have finished,  remark yourself in blue.  

Again - give me 2-3 pieces of evidence that you could capture to back up your claim.  

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Some highlights from the activity

1. It was much more meaningful for students when they had a specific assignment to think about their reactions to.  Many of them remarked that when they had picked a goal in TA they were just saying they were totally proficient at this.  But when they thought about how they were approaching this assignment they could see where they truly were.  
2. One of the standards we’ve been working with all year was using evidence to support claims.  I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this could just be another exercise that.  It made it much more meaningful to students when they realized their comments like “can we go outside today” was evidence that they were not proficient at taking responsibility to get things done.  

Finally - I took this to the next step in the next major project by giving students three different SH’s to choose from.  Rome Project Scholarly Habits

Goal Two: I will align learning objectives for each unit and the entire World History 1 course with the now available MRG’s and Global Citizen Grad Proficiencies.

At the outset of the year, the plan in our heads was that we would be able to identify a distinct GP for each unit in WH1 to be the theme for that unit.  For the first 3 units that worked out ok and I was able to rewrite the curriculum and learning scales for those.  But as we worked further into the year, I think what we found as a department is that it didn’t necessarily always work out that simple.  Not every unit of study as we traditionally define it (Greece, Rome) conveniently work into just one GP.  We also started to realize by mid year that just because we picked on GP to focus on per unit that the results did not show that all students had reached proficiency in it and how were we to now come back to it and allow students more practice.  

What is becoming more clear are what GP’s are being universally hit throughout the course and that this is what the course is really truly about.  These are tending to be less of the GP’s around Geography, Economics, Conflict, and Government - and more the Historical Thinking and Historical Literacy skills.  

Overall, I think I am feeling that the entire WH1 and 9th grade curriculum needs to be started over from scratch.  If the goal of the year was to align the current GP’s to the WH1 curriculum, it really should have been to see how we align a 9th grade curriculum to the current GP’s.  This is a discussion that we are going to have as a department starting next week.  

Overall Yearly Reflection:

Although slightly more sane than last year, this was another incredibly busy year.  The opportunity to sit back and reflect now on these goals makes me realize how little time there was to reflect on and alter practice.  I’m just too busy.  Each day is a race against the clock to prepare for classes, assess work for 80 students a day, etc.  And should a moment come when I don’t have something that immediately needs doing - I am too exhausted to think straight.  As I write this, I have 60 essays submitted by 9th graders that will take me all of my prep time for the next 3 days to go through.  I have 11 hours of phone calls to complete with my online students in the next two weeks.  The time to focus on goals and practice is not there.  I know that I need to reinvent things, like the 9th grade curriculum and had the best intentions to do that.  But I can’t believe that its May already and I feel like it was just another year of trying to survive each week.

First Goals Reflection 10/19/16

Classroom Environment
Expectations for learning and attainment
     I think I would be at proficient - but the language on this entire scale is hard to judge.  There is a difference between where I think I am expecting students to perform and whether or not they choose to do these things.  I have some students meeting my expectations, but some who are choosing not to for many reasons outside of my control.

But, on the whole if this is about migrating to a proficiency based system, I'm pleasantly surprised at how well this is encouraging students to keep pushing.  The concept of practice work vs mastery work seems to be encouraging students to work hard, although I'm still dealing with a few students who think that as long as the assignment isn't graded there is no value in doing it.  But, more often I am having the conversation with students that go something like "I didn't do very well on the test because I didn't do the practice work for the assignment.  If I want to get my grade to passing, next test I need to make sure I do my reading assignments".  I think they are starting to realize the new culture.  I've also seen some great things with students who stress about high grades.  I am able to push them with things they've never done before, they don't achieve proficient on the task first try and they don't crumble into pile of tears.  Instead they are looking at the feedback and making adjustments.  Its not perfect yet.  On a recent mastery assessment, I probably had about 1/3 of students who did not make any adjustments to the note taking techniques that I had given them feedback on.  So, they got low scores on the assessment.  This then leads to the conversation that you need to make the adjustments I suggested.  So, its taking some longer than others to figure it out - but we've got to start somewhere.

Using Assessment
   All Rows
Basic

I feel like I'm hitting basic on all of these for one reason that impacts them all.  I'm still trying to do too much to make this work.  If I have too many targets that I am trying  to achieve then its just taking too much time to do each of these things to the quality of what they should be.  Its the end of the first quarter and I'm still in the first unit.  When you have 10 targets you are trying to achieve you don't have enough time to go over all the scales with students ahead of time, I'm collecting too many formative assignments and with student numbers it takes me hours per assignment to look at the work and provide feedback. (although I'm making progress on techniques to provide more group feedback) and by the time we finish all this work we are just out of time to do the level of personal reflection that I'd like.  This is the area that I feel like I'm working the hardest but I'm drowning in trying to make it work.  Its not sustainable.

My Draft Targets 10/19/16

World History One:

Targets

Thinking And Problem Solving
     Questioning Students pose questions to clarify and expand information
Organization of Information: Students can break down complex information by Topic, Main Idea and Details
    Selection of Evidence : Claim and Evidence

Global Citizenship:

Pivotal Events

Will be including others as rewrite the curriculum. Basically, whereas the course used to follow one theme, this year I am adapting it so that each unit focuses on a different EU in the Global Citizenship Profs. So, will hit Geography, Types of Government, Economics targets but they are being developed.

Communication:

Compose Synthesis  of Information

Express: Presentation

A question about these: I chose to use the scales as written in the MRG's. But, should I be using the targets in the Common Core Language instead?

Scholarly Habits

Focus

Reflection: There isn't really one in the scholarly habits - would like to find a universal scale for this - but I have one I created.

I've been organizing my scales and scoring rubrics on a google doc for each unit. So you should be able to find the corresponding scales and a unit level scoring rubric for each target on this link. Unit 1 Scales and Rubrics

I will have all of these scales available for P/T conference and thus can pick whichever one is most applicable to the individual student.  

Inservice Reflection and Goals

Let me start by saying this week has transformed my attitude and perspective.  Last semester I would describe my attitude as exhausted.  Curriculum Camp and summer I was lost, confused and frustrated. I felt like I know longer knew what I did and what I had done for years was not valued any longer.  I just couldn't see the big picture.  I came back on Monday with the attitude of giving this one more year and then reevaluating my career choices.

The things we received this week though have made things finally start to click.  I finally found my course in the Grad Proficiencies.  The continuum document provided me with clarity of what I do actually teach and a guide by which to start writing learning scales.  Tuesday the clouds parted and I could see a clear path to what I do, how to do it and what the end looks like.  I was excited to get going with a clear path no longer feeling like a flapping fish on a river bank.  I'm swimming up stream.  Lookout spawning grounds!

As evidence I'd like to share here a document that I started this week laying out the work of WH1 - its just the first unit - but a template that I hope to have completed by the end of the year.  It lays out the targets for each unit, and the continuum language I can share with students.  Using this language I can build the different grain size scales for each assessment.

WH1 Grad Profs and Scales

And finally here is a link to my goals.
Trevor Goals 2017