Kentucky Teacher

Teachers and administrators can join international experts and practitioners as they showcase successful practices for implementing standards and effective assessment practices at the Meeting the Challenge: Implementing Standards and Assessment Practices conference.

This event will be July 16-18 in Lexington, and early-bird registration has been extended to May 25.

Pre-conference sessions provide an in-depth focus on implementing Highly Effective Teaching and Learning (HETL), focusing on the standards, assessment, literacy and leadership for effective change. Conference sessions provide a variety of curricular, instructional and leadership strategies for educators at all levels to assist in providing high-quality instruction to students, improving their learning and ensuring they are college- and career-ready.

A maximum of 450 participants can participate.

Go to http://www.uky.edu/p12mathscience for more information.

By Matthew Tungate
matthew.tungate@education.ky.gov

First-grade teacher Marty White helps Nicolas Phillips sort beans to illustrate addition and subtraction problems at Chandlers Elementary School (Logan County). Photo by Amy Wallot, Jan. 9, 2012

If a team of professors from the University of Kentucky’s College of Education had its way, Kentucky students would be graded only on their academic achievement – not whether or not they turn in all their homework or bring in tissues for extra credit.

The three have worked with dozens of school districts in the state and published an article calling for schools to use standards-based grading rather than a single percentage or letter grade. Standards-based grading requires teachers to list individual areas of knowledge within a subject area or course and assign a level of proficiency or mastery to each area for each student. It also requires splitting grades into academic factors, such as assessment results, and process factors, such as behavior and turning in homework.

Education Professor Thomas Guskey stresses the increased honesty and meaning this brings to grading. With traditional approaches to grading that combine everything into a single symbol, a student may ace the Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) exams in calculus, for instance, but get a C in the subject because he didn’t do the homework, Guskey said. Another student also may get a C by turning in all the homework and being compliant with teacher requests without learning the subject and doing poorly on tests, he said. Read the full story

The U.S. Department of Education has asked Westat to conduct national focus groups to inform the planning of two national meetings on College and Career Ready Standards and Educator Evaluation Systems that will be held in March 2012.

Three states – Florida, Idaho and Kentucky — have been selected to conduct the focus groups. The findings from the qualitative data collected from the focus groups will be used to better inform the planning of the national meetings in March.

Westat will conduct interviews with three panel groups representing district administration, school-building administrators and teachers from the Bullitt, Jessamine and Magoffin County school districts. Group discussions with Westat have been scheduled for Friday, February 17 at KDE. Representatives from the Division of Next-Generation Professionals and Division of Program Standards will represent Kentucky at the national panel discussion in Washington, D.C.

By Susan Riddell
susan.riddell@education.ky.gov

Gina Benham helps 7th-grade student John Monson with a decimal problem during her mathematics class at Woodland Elementary School (Kenton County).

Woodland Middle School (Kenton County) teacher Gina Benham has taught mathematics for four years, but when it comes to stocks and investing she is just like any one of her 7^th graders.

“I love an opportunity to learn alongside my students,” said Benham, whose class began involvement with a program in October that ties investing to a real-world mathematic curriculum. “Value is added to this experience when the kids realize they are learning something some adults know little about.”

All 7th-grade classrooms at Woodland Middle and Turkey Foot Middle School (Kenton County) have been participating in the “Investing in Students, Making Math Count” initiative. Following the October kickoff, the students played the PortfoliosInvestment Simulation Game with volunteers from Fidelity Investments to get a feel for the game.

The volunteers meet with students at both schools on a monthly basis, using investment and finance as a context to address concepts in the 7th-grade mathematics curriculum, according to Jennifer Barrett, Kenton County school district middle and high school mathematics consultant. Read the full story

By Susan Riddell
susan.riddell@education.ky.gov

Rebecca Logan helps students come to their own conclusions during her 5th-grade STEM class at Elkhorn Elementary School (Franklin County). Photo by Amy Wallot, Nov. 9, 2011

A 5th-grade girl in Rebecca Logan’s class at Elkhorn Elementary School (Franklin County) had barely spoken during the first two months of the school year.

“She was so shy, and I don’t remember her being excited about anything in class,” Logan said.

But when the class was working on a Mars rover STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) curriculum project, the girl’s model design was chosen by her team to be built and used for competition.

“That just validated something in her, and she totally took off with the unit we were studying,” Logan said. “I’ve just been blown away by this project and the curriculum. It’s really given my quieter students a voice and the confidence to take on more leadership roles. Every child is engaged. It’s just been amazing to watch.”

This past spring, Logan’s class piloted a STEM Mars rover project, which involved students working with radio-controlled car parts and batteries to create cardboard-constructed models. The lesson, made possible by Franklin County High School engineering instructor Mark Harrell and Project Lead the Way, was such a big hit with her students, Logan spent her summer researching ways to fill her curriculum with STEM activities throughout the day.

“I teach language arts in the morning, and the rest of the day is devoted to STEM,” Logan said. “STEM is just so important today if you are looking at the workforce. I think it’s a great idea to go ahead and introduce young students to it. Read the full story

By Susan Riddell
Susan.riddell@education.ky.gov

Sophomore Tiara Brand, right, gives a humorous and informative speech about freshman Mason Stamm, left, for her first speech of the year during Steve Meadows Speech 1 class at Danville High School (Danville Ind.). Photo by Amy Wallot, Aug. 16, 2011

For Steve Meadows, an English teacher at Danville High School (Danville Independent), the emphasis on speaking and listening standards in the Kentucky Core Academic Standards makes perfect sense.

“For me personally, it’s an exciting shift in emphasis to include what I’ve always loved best – speech and speaking – as part of the general curriculum,” said Meadows, who has been an educator for more than 20 years. “I’m a great believer that our job in language arts is to empower students to be able to communicate clearly for the rest of their lives.

“Students will communicate more through speaking and listening in real life than they will through reading and writing, so including the full range of literacy in the standards and in our coursework makes sense to me.”

Meadows coaches the Danville High forensics/speech team that won the 2011 Kentucky Educational Speech and Drama Association (KESDA) state title.  Read the full story

Alex Tumey and Kacie Clements research the Empire State building during Amanda Caudill's class at Harrison County Middle School. Photo by Amy Wallot, April 5, 2011

By Matthew Tungate
matthew.tungate@education.ky.gov

Even as Kentucky teachers are implementing new national English/language arts and mathematics standards this year, two national groups are working to create new standards in social studies and science.

 When, and if, those standards will be adopted for use in Kentucky schools still remains to be seen, but educators from the commonwealth are involved in their development. Read the full story

Kentucky teachers will have a new 21st-century instructional tool when they return to the classroom for the 2011-12 school year. The Continuous Instructional Improvement Technology System (CIITS) is a searchable online database of Kentucky academic standards and student learning targets aligned and linked to high-quality instructional resources from Discovery Education.

The system is designed to help teachers as they implement the new Kentucky Core Academic Standards in mathematics and English/language arts (which also include literacy standards for science, social studies/history and technology classes in grades 6-12). Read the full story

The Conceptual Framework for the Next Generation Science Education Standards was released Tuesday, July 19, by the National Academies. It is available to download or read online for free at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165.
This document is not a set of standards. Rather, it is the conceptual framework from which the new science standards will be created. Schools are cautioned to make only very limited decisions based on the information in this document. For more information on both this document and the standards creation process, click here.

English teacher Kelly Clifford has found the curriculum monitoring binders helpful for planning at Owen County High School. “These binders not only saved my first year teaching and made it a successful experience for me, but also helped me develop rigor in the curriculum.” Photo by Amy Wallot, May 23, 2011

By Matthew Tungate
matthew.tungate@education.ky.gov

Leslie Robertson had a problem when she became curriculum specialist at Anne Mason Elementary School (Scott County) in 2007. Several teachers had left the high-performing school the previous year and taken all of their teaching materials.

“Here we had these high scores, and pretty much nobody in the building had ever taught that grade level,” Robertson said. “We didn’t have any kind of uniform curriculum system, so here we are hiring people for that grade level and there’s this panic of, ‘Oh my God, we had over 100 (index score on state accountability tests) in that particular grade level in certain areas, and how are we going to duplicate that? We don’t know what it was that we did.’”

As she began pulling the curriculum together for new teachers, “I thought, ‘This is not going to happen to us again,’” Robertson said.

Read the full story