Commitment to College Celebrations 2010

At IDEA Academy Mission we began the tradition of holding annual end of year events called "Commitment to College Celebrations."  Essentially, it's a night planned by each grade level to celebrate the children and their progress toward college.  We very consciously decided not to hold the traditional Kinder graduation, but, instead, chose to have this event.  We felt strongly that in a community where only about 50% of people have a high school diploma and only 13% have a bachelor's degree, that we needed to find ways to raise our sights to, ultimately, college graduation.  We felt it was a travesty that every year so many children "graduate" from kinder only to one day end up with the above abysmally low statistics.  A few parents here and there have a tough time accepting that their child won't walk across the stage in a cap and gown at the end of kindergarten, but we assure parents that the Commitment to College Night is a really big deal.  Teacher put countless hours into preparations and children and families dress up and enjoy a nice evening together.  For the really adamant parents we suggest they have "graduation" pictures taken at a local department store.  Most parents, however, understand why we've made this choice and appreciate the added focus on college.

One of my teachers suggested that a collection of photos or video footage could be helpful for the new teachers who come to our school each year and help plan the event but didn't attend one in previous years.  I've put together a few things in the video above--definitely doesn't show a whole lot, but hopefully enough to give an idea of what it's looked like in the past.  One thing I think that's important to remember is that it needs to feel different to be memorable.  If it feels like every other awards night or end of year family event then this won't stand out as something different to parents.  To make college stand out in their minds then this night needs to stand out as something extra special and unique!  The traditions need to really feel like important traditions and the unique teacher/grade level touches need to speak to how special this event should be.  It should be an annual build-up to the students' College Signing Day their senior year.

The goal is for this evening to be completely college-focused and for it to be a big celebration!  Certain traditions are a part of the evening each year (Commitment to College certificates from the principal, "Hopes and Dreams" letters written by parents for us to save and give to children on their College Signing Day their senior year, student songs & readings, slide show, etc) but grade levels are also encouraged to add some unique touches to the event.  We want students and families to leave completely re-committed to doing whatever it takes to get these children to college.  No giving up!  The event, as with all our family events, is 100% bilingual.  We try to ensure that approximately half of the presentation is in Spanish, half in English.

We also give out our end of year awards, which are the following:

ACADEMIC HONORS
1 student per classroom with the highest average in the following subject areas:
Reading in L1
Reading in L2
Writing in L1
Writing in L2
Math
Our World
Physical Education

PHOENIX AWARDS
1 boy and 1 girl per classroom:
Flying Phoenix (equivalent of Student of the Year)
Rising Phoenix (equivalent of Most Improved)
Global Phoenix (equivalent of Good Citizenship)

ATTENDANCE AWARDS
Perfect Attendance (with less than 3 tardies)
Perfect Attendance (with more than 3 tardies)

In addition to the video above, I'm attaching some other planning resources that could be helpful for anyone else trying to plan a Commitment to College night.  These are a mix of our 2009 and 2010 planning resources.

Planning Template 2009
Program Minute by Minute 2009
Parent Invitation 2009 (Spanish)
Parent Invitation 2009 (English)
Parent Tickets 2009*
Teacher Awards Forms 2010
Commitment to College Certificate 2009
Awards: Academic Honors**
Awards: Phoenix Awards
Awards: Attendance


* As a new and growing school without a cafeteria or gym yet, we've had to get creative in finding space for events such as these.  In 2009 we rented a nearby hall and provided dinner.  Every child could bring 2 family members free & then pay for additional family members--unfortunately we had to limit numbers as we were very limited by space.  In 2010 we were faced with much less money and we also didn't want to have to limit the number of family members who came (one of the biggest reasons we hold this annual event is to remind children AND their families of the importance of our long-term college goal and help make it a part of our school and community culture), so I approached the principal of a more established IDEA campus that did have a gym and she graciously allowed us to reserve their facility for the Kinder and 1st Grade nights.  We used the local Chamber of Commerce building for the PK event.  This coming year IDEA Mission will have their own "cafetorium," so finding a space will be much easier!


**We hold quarterly awards ceremonies by grade level during the year.  At each of these the expectation is that every student receive an award.  At the end of year awards, every child receives a Commitment to College certificate, but not every child receives an additional award (though they could if they earned the attendance award!).  We decided that this approach balanced the need to have all children recognized most of the time but then to also have situations in which children (ahem...parents) learned that it's OK if they don't get something and that they should congratulate those who do with grace and sincerity.  Children are usually better at this than their parents are.  :)

Some people have asked how we make college a part of our ongoing school culture--not just at the end of the year.  The most important aspect of having a truly college prep school is rigorous high quality instruction that leads every student to meet very high expectations every year, but it's also important to make college and specific college-related vocabulary an everyday part of the school culture.  A few things IDEA Mission does in this area:

College Mascots

Every homeroom has their own college mascot that teachers use to build unity and class identity.  Students identify themselves with the university, its mascot, and its colors.

College Flags

Each homeroom's college flag hangs outside the classroom.  The hallway is, therefore, a colorful display of colleges.

Chants and Signs
Each homeroom creates a brief chant and "sign" that represents their mascot.  They use this during school assembly roll call to show that they are present.

School Chants & Song
During assembly, we teach children a number of college focused chants in both English and Spanish.  These chants are about college, reaching goals, reading, knowledge is power, etc.  We also have a school song--I rewrote the words to BYU's Cougar Fight Song and turned it into IDEA Mission's Phoenix School Song.  The kids love it!

Here's the BYU Fight Song--just sing the final "Go Phoenix" EXTRA loud (over "Go Cougars!" at the end).  Otherwise, it's ready for IDEA Mission teachers to use with their students!



Rise & Shout School Song Lyrics (English & Spanish)


College T-Shirts
While students must wear the standard school uniform on Mondays - Thursdays, on Fridays they can wear jeans with a school spirit t-shirt or a college t-shirt.

College Home Projects
This is actually done in conjunction with our Commitment to College Celebrations, but our tradition to have every student do a home project focused on the college they want to attend.  These projects are then worn or displayed on the night of the CTC Celebration.  For example, PK created college posters, Kinder made college sashes (both seen in the video above) and 1st graders created a college medallion.  This gets parents and students discussing children's strengths and talents, their career aspirations, and the types of universities that would be a good fit for the child and family.  It also helps us know which families aren't yet fully committed to our college goal or who are committed but not aware of the options.   This is great information to help us know which families need additional support and info from us!

College Visits
Each year every grade level visits a college.  In sixth grade the students will begin to go on IDEA's multi-day college field lessons around the state and country, but until then we make sure that students (and any family members that want to attend) set foot on a local 4-year college campus at least once a year.

What are some things that you and/or your school does to make college a key part of your student and family culture?

Spring Jamaica 2010

We've worked hard this year to celebrate family, language, and culture in even richer ways.  Our 1st Annual Spring Jamaica (held at the Veterans Pavilion on S. Inspiration Rd) was a huge success!  Children and families celebrated spring, family, and culture through food, games, singing, and dancing.  Spearheaded by our amazing Assistant Principal, Mrs. Lozano, everything came together beautifully and it ended up being a highly successful fundraiser.  Enjoy some pics from the big event.

Jose-Luis Orozco Concert

We celebrated Dia de los Niños and 5 de mayo with a fantastic concert by bilingual children's songwriter and performer Jose-Luis Orozco.  He performed at Quest (paid for by money raised by Mission's parent association) so Mission and Quest K - 2 students enjoyed a true musical treat.  Here are some pics from the event--we hope to make it an annual tradition!

 Here's a video clip from an appearance Jose-Luis Orozco made on Telemundo:


Telemundo - De Mañanita from José-Luis Orozco on Vimeo.

Dual Language Revision Committee

I knew I needed to engage teachers in every step of the "revision" process as we made changes for the 2010 - 11 school year. I also knew that different teachers want to be involved to varying degrees. So, I decided to set up a Dual Language Revision Committee that would meet at least 3 times after school and have as much input as they wanted on changes I would be proposing for the coming school year. Anyone could join--I had two takers: Blanca (1st grade) and Christine (Kinder). My assistant principal, Luzdivina, also wanted to be involved but hasn't been able to attend either meeting so far due to after school duties/incidents.  Hopefully she'll be able to attend this final meeting.

So far we've discussed revisions to our model and daily schedule. Our district has mandated some big changes by eliminating our weekly early release day (for staff development) and requiring that school instructional hours are neither more nor less than 7:45 AM - 3:45 PM. This was incredibly hard for me to swallow at first as it meant shortening our regular full day schedule (already packed to the max due to the extra time demands inherent in a dual language schedule) AS WELL AS eliminating our weekly 2-hr block of staff development...another critical element of dual language launch, particularly those first couple of years. I'll admit that I freaked out at first, then got angry and went into protest mode, and finally have come to accept that it is what it is and I'd better find a way to make it work. (Ah...the grieving process in miniature). Interestingly, I'm actually really pleased with the results and believe we've really found some great ways to make it work.  Should I admit that I might even like our new ideas better than what we're currently doing this year?  Humble pie.  Eating lots of it.

So I went to work trying to figure out how to maximize a shorter school day and how to fit in substantive professional development without having to spend thousands of dollars for substitutes to provide release planning/PD time. Some things had to go, unfortunately. Right now we have a daily assembly or class meeting time. Next year we'll only be able to have school assembly once a week and an extended (20 min) class meeting once a week. I also had to eliminate our 30 min daily intervention block and, instead, add 20 minutes to centers time to allow for pull-out/push-in interventions for struggling students during that time. Saves 10 minutes without having to do away with it altogether. I created a special planning time schedule (STEPP Days...stands for Staff Time for Evaluating a Problem of Practice) :) where one grade level a week will have a 2 hour period without students (kids will be in an extended enrichment rotation in PE, Art, etc...) during which we'll engage in intensive PD activities. Got that idea from Sharon at Quest. However, it will only be tri-weekly for each team (1 team per week) instead of the current weekly PD time. Better than nothing. Also, it won't be the entire school together--it will only be by grade level. Again, better than nothing.  Download Proposed Master Schedule

Blanca & Christine provided valuable input during meeting 1 and then came back with additional thoughts from other teachers during meeting 2. That's when I shared with them a very new idea I'd hatched for Kinder and 1st grade--a Teaching Fellows program. I'll give further details in a post dedicated just to this idea.

Here's my plan for meeting 3 (this is the email I sent yesterday):

Hi Ladies,

For some reason I’d calendared Tuesday 3/23 as the final dual language revision committee meeting date. Instead it will be the following Tuesday (3/30) at 4:15 PM. I’d like your feedback on the following two things:

1) Unit Planning Template
I’m attaching a unit planning template for next year that I’d like feedback on.  Download Proposed Unit Planning Template  I’m also attaching an “overview” help sheet that includes questions to think about at each stage of the planning process. The template I’ve created is based primarily on the Understanding by Design (UbD) backwards planning model (something I’ll be developing you all on at the beginning of the school year and throughout) and will allow us to “beef up” the tremendous work that’s already been done in planning our units. I anticipate this document going onto Google Docs so that all grade level team members could access them simultaneously and collaboratively and use the template to together create a detailed plan for each unit of inquiry. While you’ll see that it’s primarily UbD, I’ve also tweaked/revised it to ensure it includes critical aspects of our dual language planning expectations as well as some key pieces of IB’s PYP unit planning process (particularly the stage 4 post-unit reflection...this isn’t a part of the UbD framework). If you want to find out more about UbD’s planning framework to help you better understand the template’s organization, you can learn more (as well as see sample unit plans for different grade levels) at: UbD on Google Books.  It’s actually a pretty fascinating read. :) After participating in a book study of this text, I used UbD as my primary unit planning approach as a teacher and found that it really pushed me to think very critically about how I planned, taught, and assessed units of study.

2) Website: Teaching & Learning Central
I’d also like you to take a look at a (VERY rough) draft of a website I’ve been working on to better organize & streamline all the information we need to access as well as our collaborative planning documents. I’ve invited you each to view: https://sites.google.com/site/ideaprimary/. The invitation was sent to the gmail accounts you use to access Google Docs. Some of the links on the website are “live” and accessible, many are not, so just play around for a few minutes and see what you think. I’d love questions, ideas, & critical feedback.

Ultimately, this final meeting will be the time to provide final feedback on any of our committee discussions:

• Next year’s proposed model
• Next year’s proposed schedules
• Teaching Fellows proposal
• Unit Planning approach
• Improving our use of Google Apps (website)
• Any other aspects of dual language planning you want me to take into consideration

I’ll then integrate your feedback and ideas and synthesize everything into proposals to be shared with the faculty as a whole. Please let any of your colleagues know that even if they haven’t attended a meeting yet, they’re still more than welcome to come to this final meeting. Just have them let me know they’re coming and that they need access to the website to review beforehand.

Thanks!

Bethany

Gearing up for change

An important part of a dual language model is ensuring a complete and equitable balance of both languages...at both the academic and social levels.  The way we've built our schedule we do have an equal balance of exposure to academic language, however, we had to figure out how to achieve a similarly equal balance in students' exposure to social language. Because our teachers ONLY speak their language of instruction--even during non-instructional times--we had to make sure that children (for example) who were assigned to their English teacher's homeroom (where they begin/end day, eat meals, go to recess, etc) also received the opportunity to spend equal non-instructional time doing the same things with their Spanish teacher. We decided to achieve this by switching each class' homeroom teacher at mid-year.

I was starting to get very nervous about this transition, primarily because I was anticipating a lot of misunderstanding from parents and was afraid that they'd see it as a much BIGGER change than it really is.  It really just means that the child eats his meals and leaves his backpack in teacher B's classroom, instead of teacher A's.   I worried that parents wouldn't understand that the "new homeroom teacher" will simply be the teacher their child already spends half a day with and that therefore it is truly a minimal change.  I shared these concerns with kinder and first grade teams and solicited their feedback. At first most teachers agreed that it might not be worth the potential parent backlash. One teacher, however, began to push our thinking that if we don't make the change, that we'll never really help our parents understand that their child truly does have 2 teachers instead of just 1. She pointed out that if we message the change powerfully enough and for long enough, we would likely educate them well enough to help them understand our unique two-way model. That began to change our perspective on the issue.  Another teacher then shared that the transition would likely be a fairly easy one for children given the fact that they've already been teaching them for half a day every day for several months; we're not talking about breakfast and lunch procedures with an entirely brand new group of kids. During the kinder meeting one teacher pointed out that she really saw students speaking lots of English during meals in her classroom and knew lots of Spanish was being spoken by her team teacher's homeroom students during those same times. She said she felt it was a disservice to the students to NOT make the mid-year shift.  Kinder has been previewing and preparing for this shift with the children for some time to ensure that they transition easily.  A great point of feedback was that if, school-wide, we'd done a much better job calling every class by only their college mascot (instead of sometimes still referring to them as "Ms. Lopez's class" or "Mrs. Herrera's homeroom") it would make for a smoother transition because it would focus their class identity more on their mascot than on one teacher vs the other.  Teachers reported that kids had lots of questions like: "Where will we keep our things?" "Will you still be a Hurricane, Ms. Lopez?" etc.  We determined that in order for the transition to go smoothly, we'd need to do the following to prepare parents:

1) Remind them of the change every week in the Family Connection newsletter, working hard to "minimize" the transition (as one teacher put it, "they'll be eating their meals with the other teacher....that's about it")
2) Send home a parent letter specifically about this, maybe with a list of FAQ's.
3) Teachers will address the change briefly during report card conferences on Feb 3 & 4
4) My assistant principal and I will set up a Dual Language Q&A room during report card nights so any parent can drop in and talk with us about questions and concerns.

We would then probably make the change the week following.   We'll see how this goes!


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December Staff Satisfaction

A synthesis of a mid-December staff satisfaction survey I conducted via Survey Monkey. Not necessarily directly related to dual language, but given what a challenge the launch year is, no aspect of staff satisfaction can be taken out of the context of two-way immersion and the work it requires to implement well.