DVR-PASCD Newsletter - Winter 2019

Advocating Whole Child

for the

Safety & Wellness

Pennsylvania Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development Delaware Valley Region

OFFICERS

Winter 2019

Dorie Martin-Pitone………................President Cindy Kruse..............….….......President-Elect Meredith Denovan….................Past President Matt Friedman........…..............Vice-President Martha Butler.................................Treasurer

http://www.dvrpascd.org

Spring Event Spotlight

Table of Contents President’s Letter ..............................................................Pages 1-4 Social and Emotional Learning: Essential Skills in a Blueprint for Student Success ............................................Pages 5-6 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents ....................................................Page 7 Connect With DVR-PASCD ....................................................Page 8 Supporting Student Learning Success ..............................Pages 9-10 When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing ..................Pages 11-12 Virtual Book Study Brings Educators Together Around "The Whole Child" ...................................................Page 13 DVR-PASCD Sponsors ....................................................Pages 14-18

To submit articles, information, or feedback, please contact: Monica Conlin Monica.Conlin@ssdcougars.org Editorial Team Monica Conlin & Nicole Stulak

President's Letter Dear DVR Learning Community: The winter season is making its presence felt as we work toward better test scores and hope for sunnier days. Please try not to let the iciness of the weather infiltrate your passion for your profession.

I am fortunate to work with a team of administrators, supervisors, teachers, instructional assistants, secretaries, maintenance, and all members of the MNSD educational community who keep the focus on what is best for kids. Their gestures of kindness, compassion, and caring throughout the school day are the sparks, which spread the warmth during the coldest of seasons. When a member of my team reminds me to keep a balance - I listen.

They keep me mindful of what matters in our journey. The one thing that continues to get me out of bed every day is the belief that I am contributing to a greater good, having the faith that we are in a noble profession that is doing all we can, with all we have at our disposal- to do what is best for kids.

My President letters are not examples of prolific pieces of writing, nor are they full of cuttingedge research, but they are full of a small dose of simplicity in perspective.

Let us continue to focus on the “people work� of education. Let us move forward with a humanistic approach* to our profession.

With appreciation,

Dorie

* Humanistic, humanism and humanist are terms in psychology relating to an approach that studies the whole person, and the uniqueness of each individual.

The humanistic perspective is an approach to psychology that emphasizes empathy and stresses the good in human behavior. In counseling and therapy, this approach focuses on ways to help improve an individual's self-image or self-actualization - the things that make them feel worthwhile.

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President's Letter

DVR-PASCD Board Members

Dorie A (Martin)-Pitone, Ed.D. - President Director of Teaching and Learning Marple Newtown School District Email: DMartin-Pitone@mnsd.org Twitter: @dorie_martin

Monica Conlin - Newsletter Editor Assistant Principal Springfield School District Email: jimandmonica.2012@gmail.com Twitter: @mmc219

Cindy Kruse - President Elect Consultant Cindy Kruse Consulting Email: krusecindy@gmail.com Twitter: @cindydkruse

Nicole Konert Stulak, Ed.D. - Newsletter Instructional Coach Downingtown Area School District Email: nstulak@dasd.org Twitter: @nstulak

Matthew Friedman - Vice President Chief Academic Officer Downingtown Area School District Email: mfriedman@dasd.org Twitter: @mfriedmanPGH

Rina Vassallo, Ed.D. - Constitution & Policy Chair Consultant Email: rinav818@gmail.com Twitter: vassallo_pascd

Martha Butler, Ed.D. - Treasurer Teacher, English Language Arts Garnet Valley School District Email: mrs.marthabutler@yahoo.com Twitter: @MrsButler_GV

Linda Bluebello, Ed.D. - Constitution & Policy Consultant Email: lbluebello@gmail.com

Joy Rosser - Secretary & Higher Ed Teacher, Science Kennett Consolidated School District Email: jandj.rosser@verizon.net

Anthony Gabriele - Higher Ed Supervisor for Learning, Development & Professional Growth, Arts, Humanities, Literacy, & Federal Programs Garnet Valley School District Email: gabriea@garnetvalley.org Twitter: @mrgabriele

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President's Letter Steve Subers, Ed.D. - Professional Development Consultant Email: stephensubers@comcast.net Joel DiBartolomeo - Professional Development Principal The School District of Haverford Township Email: joeldibartolomeo@mac.com Brooke Mulartrick - PAECT Representative & Website Instructional Coach Montgomery County Intermediate Unit Email: bmulartrick@gmail.com Twitter: @brookem1015 Jeff Kuciapinski - Social Media Chair Teacher, Special Education Marple Newtown School District Email: jkuciapinski@mnsd.org Twitter: @jkuciapinski

DVR-PASCD Board Members Nicole Hazelwood - Social Media Teacher, Special Education Upper Perkiomen School District Email: nicole.c.hazelwood@gmail.com Twitter: @NickyHazelwood Thomas Calvecchio, Ed.D. - Professional Development & Policy Administrator on Assignment Chester County Intermediate Unit Email: Thomasc@cciu.org Thomas Conway, Ed.D. - Higher Ed Assistant Professor of Teacher Education Cabrini University Email: trc23@cabrini.edu Twitter: SouthPhilly220 Christopher Pugliese, Ed.D. - Membership Director of Pupil Services Upper Darby School District Email: cpugliese3872@gmail.com

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Social and Emotional Learning: Essential Skills in a Blueprint for Student Success Cindy Kruse

DVR-PASCD President-Elect

Cindy serves as President-Elect for the DVRPASCD Board. As an independent educational consultant, Cindy partners with educational organizations to develop and deliver professional learning opportunities for educators through workshops and instructional coaching. Her areas of expertise are: literacy, Growth Mindset, gifted education, engaging classroom instruction, and effective classroom management.

Successful builders recognize the importance of a blueprint. With the blueprint to guide them, the builder knows which materials to use, where to run electrical wiring and the exact dimensions of the rooms. Blueprints contain all of the necessary information needed to build something successfully. They begin with the ending in mind. When we consider teaching students, we should begin with the “end in mind” as well. Identifying what we want our students to know and be able to do as a result of their learning in school helps to inform both how and what we teach.

The Essential Skills Educators, as well as those in the business world, have come to the realization that academic learning is just one piece of the final picture. In order to ensure that our students reach their potential in school, in work, and in life, they must have the skills that help them to process and act on information effectively with others. These are often referred to as “soft” or “non-cognitive” skills. Using these terms tends to conjure a negative connotation. A better word to describe them would be “essential skills”. Daniel Goldman refers to these skills as “emotional intelligence”. In an article for The Harvard Business Review, Goldman states: “The most effective leaders are all alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but…they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. My research, along with other recent studies, clearly shows that emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership.

Without it, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.”

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Social and Emotional Learning: Essential Skills in a Blueprint for Student Success Cindy Kruse

DVR-PASCD President-Elect

Social and Emotional Learning - a continuous thread Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL, 2005) as the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

The research by Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor and Schellinger (2011) and others suggest that teaching SEL has a positive impact on student learning and achievement.

This broader view of teaching and learning has been embraced by ASCD as part of the “Whole Child” initiative. In addition, the Wallace foundation has recently released a publication which explains how ESSA can support Social and Emotional Learning.

In an effort to address the social and emotional needs of students many schools and/or districts have adopted SEL curriculum or trained staff on specific strategies, such a mindfulness.

While these may be helpful, in order to be most effective, educators must be trained on how to weave social and emotional learning into the curriculum throughout the school day. Social and emotional learning should be a thread that is continually woven into the fabric of our classrooms.

The teaching of these skills should be evidenced as part of the discussions that occur spontaneously during read alouds, taught explicitly as strategies to those students that are struggling with self-regulation, and reinforced as teachers give positive feedback when noticing steps taken by students toward achieving a self-created goal.

Students won’t reach their potential if we teach these skills haphazardly as a stand-alone piece of the instructional day. This would be akin to a builder building a house and deciding that an extra bathroom would be a good idea, and then adding it on without considering the blueprint. In the next issue, we will focus on the key components to consider as you create a blueprint and share resources to guide you in creating learning environments where students feel connected and are supported so that they are able to reach their potential academically, socially, and emotionally.

Reference How the Every Student Succeeds Act Can Support Social and Emotional Learning, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, RB-9988WF, 2017. As of February 20, 2019: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB 9988.html

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180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents Martha Butler Martha serves as Treasurer for the DVRPASCD Board. She is an ELA Classroom Teacher at Garnet Valley Middle School, in the Garnet Valley School District.

The book 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents, written by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle, invites educators to think about how they engage students while increasing the amount students read and write. The authors present a plethora of activities, projects and resources to help educators invigorate their teaching. The authors planned and taught together for a year.

One teacher on the east coast and one on the west coast. The book captures what the authors learned about their planning process, their students, and their lessons.

Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle want to help students discover the joy of reading and writing while studying the ‘moves’ writers make.

Students can begin to analyze the strengths and weakness in their own writing in order to improve. The goal is to expose students to a large volume of diverse literature and allow students to write in connection to the literature.

Teachers are also encouraged to write along with the students to provide a writing model.

It is divided into two parts: Planning Decisions and Teaching Essential Discourse. The first

DVR-PASCD Treasurer part, Planning Decisions, shares teacher’s decisions regarding the daily practice for students and how to balance the reading and writing when planning the curriculum. The second part of the book, Teaching Essential Discourse, delves into the planning of four units: information, narrative, argument, and multi-genre.

The book also includes video content that can be accessed using a QR code or the website referenced within the book. The videos allow educators to see how Gallagher and Kittle interact with their students during conferences and large group discussions.

180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents will reaffirm what you are currently doing in the classroom or shift your approach to reading and writing.

Reference Gallagher, K. & Kittle, P. (2018). 180 days: Two teachers and the quest to engage and empower adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Connect With DVR-PASCD! @DelawareValley RegionPASCD

@DVR_PASCD

@DVR_PASCD

Did You Know?

Your membership grants you access Your PASCD includes to the Gale Membership Resource Library, access to our Gale Virtual Library offering free access to 65 ASCD eBooks with eBooks from ASCD.

Check it out at www.pascd.org (You must login as a member to view)

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Supporting Student Learning Success

Monica Conlin DVR-PASCD Board Member

Monica serves as the DVR-PASCD Newsletter Editor and has been a part of the DVR Board since 2008. She is the Assistant Principal at Springfield High School, in the Springfield School District.

Without question, we strive each day to provide our students with the mindset for each to realize personal potential to reach new levels in learning and thinking, to be invested via windows of curiosity and to engage and question to reach learning goals. So interesting it is to consider the influence of students’ self-efficacy on their effort and persistence in reaching a learning goal and the influence of learning objectives, lesson design, assessment and feedback.

In his research Albert Bandura defined selfefficacy as the understanding of one’s capacity to reach a goal. Thus, in considering learners, we need to factor their understanding of themselves as learners and the opportunities for their self-assessment.

When considering lesson planning, providing specific student-centered learning objectives that include success criteria and discernible assessment elements provide the opening framework in a lesson design affording students to better understand the learning target in the lesson. Within his research, Bandura posits that one of the strongest

sources of self-efficacy is derived from one’s mastery experiences. When applying this to crafting a student-centered learning objective and structuring lesson design, intentionally scaffolding prior learning, where students meet with success criteria, and specifically identifying transitions that guide students in realizing their progression within success criteria, benefits students’ actualization of their potential.

Self-efficacy is also is considered as an influence on “an individual’s choice of activities, effort, and persistence” (Artino, 2012). When we reflect on students and the invitation to learn presented via the learning objective and the lesson format, a deliberate look at opportunities for students to engage and to have the confidence to question and to share and receive feedback is essential for students to initiate effort and to apply persistence. Fundamentally, for students to reach an understanding and appreciation for themselves as learners, creating learning experiences that afford student selfassessment with a keen connection to their applied effort, builds student stamina and persistence when coupled with feedback that gives insight about growth toward a specific learning goal- supporting student self-efficacy.

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Supporting Student Learning Success

Monica Conlin DVR-PASCD Board Member

In Chapter 3 of her book titled GRIT, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Dr. Angela Duckworth discusses “effort counting twice.” Duckworth defends the importance of persistence and realizing one’s capacity to reach a goal. Through her research on talent, skill and effort, Duckworth contends that “without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t” (p.51). When we consider students’ mindsets for learning, weaving the moves within a lesson’s format that arouse students’ efforts and allow students to clearly not only realize their potential for learning linked closely to their effort, but also to value persistence in applying their effort, we increase potential for student to succeed; thereby, increasing their attainment of mastery experiences.

As we strive to provide our students with pathways to their futures to be college and or career ready, designing learning experiences that enrich student self-efficacy through a realization of their mastery experiences and encouraging students to understand and to find an increased understanding of effort, persistence and self-assessment of their learning progression, we ignite students’ capacities and mindsets for learning and together.

References Artino, A. R. (2012). Academic self-efficacy: From educational theory to instructional practice. Perspectives on Medical Education,1(2), 76-85. doi:10.1007/s40037012-0012-5 Duckworth, A. (2018). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. New York, NY: Scribner.

What is Self-Efficacy? Bandura's 4 Sources of Efficacy Beliefs. (2017, April 08). Retrieved from http://positivepsychology.org.uk/selfefficacy-definition-bandura-meaning/

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When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

Rina Vassallo DVR-PASCD Board Member

Rina is a retired educator who now consults in education and career advancement. She has taught at all levels K-12 and has served as an Adjunct Professor at WCU. Rina was both Director of Teaching and Learning at Springfield School District and the Chester County Intermediate Unit (CCIU). Since earning her Ed.D. in 2007 from Widener University she has served on dissertation committees at area universities and volunteers for Wings for Success and Delaware County Women Against Rape.

rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology”.” Pink states that understanding your best times of days to function can make you more efficient so “we can be doing the right work, at the right time."

Daniel Pink, renowned author of A Whole New Mind and Drive has most recently published When:The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Amazon, iBooks, Goodreads, and Hudson Booksellers have named it one of the best non-fiction books of 2018.

Larks are identified as morning people and Owls as night people. Third birds are identified as somewhere in the middle- neither early or late, but they follow a predictable pattern of morning productivity, afternoon slump and evening rebound. 80% of people are identified as larks or third birds. Predictably, larks and third birds peak in the morning so that is the best time to do any analytical work that requires focus, such as strategizing, analyzing a financial statement or writing a report. In the afternoon their work declines as evidences by statistics regarding car accidents (the majority are between 2 and 4 pm), lowered test scores and rise in medical errors. Owls considered 20% of the population peak later in the day. By paying attention to your chronology type allows you to do the right work at the right time.

This book has been described as a “when to” as opposed to a “how to” book. Here Pink delves into scientific research in a very accessible and attention-grabbing fashion to explain in his own words why “everything is timing”. He begins the book by discussing “chronotype—a personal pattern of circadian

The book provides the reader with a quick exercise on how to identify his/her personal chronology. By understanding whether you are a lark, an owl or third bird you can identify your peak performance times and then work them to your advantage.

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When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

Rina Vassallo DVR-PASCD Board Member

This book has been recommended for people who want to increase their efficiency and Pink delivers. He provides a multitude of life hacks for best timing of a wide array of activities including, but not limited to: exercising, restorative breaks, temporal landmarks, start times, when to go first, when do you leave your job, and when to get married.

Pink also gives advice on how to work effectively as teams. He shares insights and research on midlife crisis, happiness stages and expectations.

A few take-aways include- the power of breaks, the nappuccino- coffee combined with a 20 minute recharge nap, drinking a glass of water when you wake up and lunch (not breakfast) is the most important meal of the day. But‌ there are many more. I urge you to read this book. Like any great book it delivers fresh ideas. It will allow you look at your work and life choices differently and most could possibly motivate you to make positive changes.

Reference Pink, D. (2018). When: The scientific secrets of perfect timing. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

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Virtual Book Study Brings Educators Together Around "The Whole Child" Nicole Stulak

DVR-PASCD Board Member

Nicole is an Instructional Coach for the Downingtown Area School District. She is a 2016 PASCD Emerging Leader, serves on the DVR-PASCD Board, and is member of the PASCD Conference Planning Committee.

Nicole's doctoral research focused on professional learning and instructional coaching, both of which she is passionate about. In addition, Nicole continues to leverage technology as a transformational tool, to empower students and challenge educators to rethink traditional approaches to teaching and learning.

This January, DVR-PASCD hosted its first Virtual Book Study, using Zoom Video Conferencing as a platform to connect members and educators around the "whole child." The ASCD book, With the Whole Child in Mind: Insights from the Comer School Development Program, was written by Linda Darling-Hammond, Channa M. Cook-Harvey, Lisa Flook, Madelyn Gardner, and Hanna Melnick, and was the focus of the three part series.

School Development Program (SDP) has been around for over 50 years. It was established in 1968 by child psychiatrist James P. Comer in conjunction with the Yale Child Study Center.

The foundation of SDP builds on the science of child development and a systemic approach to the whole child, a focus of our national affiliate ASCD.

The book served as a jumping off point for DVR-PASCD members and non-members who participated in the book study. Rich discussions around social-emotional development and the power of forming positive relationships among students, teachers, school leaders, and families were common themes over the three part series.

Participants shared challenges, strategies, and successes. However, a question lingered for all: How do we shift our focus and create a culture that supports the whole child in every school, despite testing and narrowly defined achievement?

Reference Darling-Hammond, L., Cook-Harvey, C. M., Flook, L., Gardner, M., & Melnick, H. (2018).

With the whole child in mind: Insights from the Comer school development program.

Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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