School Improvement Plan

This past week, the Neary School Council presented accomplishments from this school year, as well as our School Improvement Plan for next year, to the Southborough School Committee meeting. To present our plan, we used a glog, which is an interesting multimedia presentation tool. There are two websites for creating glogs -- the one for use by educators, which includes management tools for teachers such as the ability to create templates for use by their students and the ability to keep the glogs private, is found at www.edu.glogster.com. The following is a link to the glog that was used in last week's School Committee presentation: http://wordsmith23.edu.glogster.com/neary-sip1/

It was fun working on the glog, and I am very excited about all the wonderful things happening at Neary this year!

Bullying 24/7 (Cyberbullying)

I was thinking about kids and cyberbullying this afternoon. I had spent all day at a conference, and thus had not checked my email since early morning. As I was sitting down to log onto my email, I realized that I was feeling somewhat tense, because I was thinking about a couple of emails I had recently written where I was not sure how the recipient would react, and I was worried about that. This train of thought led me to thinking about kids and online activity, why cyberbullying is such a huge change for children, and why it can be so destructive for kids.

Models of Bullying?

Bullying, obviously, is a hot topic these days, and it certainly should be. No child should feel sad, afraid or unable to learn because of bullying behavior by others. Unfortunately, though, I think some of the proposed solutions are too simplistic, and I'm feeling discouraged about current efforts to solve the problem. In my view, bullying is a complex problem, and one that will take all of us working together to solve. Let's begin with models of bullying -- as a society, we provide kids with models of bullying 24/7. As Derrick Jackson noted in his Boston Globe column on February 2nd, 2010, with the trash talk by professional athletes, "we adults have made it almost impossible for adolescents to know when they cross the line." He points out, "We glorify loud athletes, handsomely pay barking talk show hosts and accepted Presidents Bush and Clinton taunting military, political, and media enemies." Talk shows, blogs, and commentary on newspaper websites are rife with personal attacks and put-downs. (I'm feeling discouraged about those conversations, too, these days. Reasonable people can certainly disagree, for example, on whether a new police car is needed, but I'd love to see everyone treat others with respect, avoiding personal attacks and expressing disagreement in a manner that demonstrates respect for the other person and for his/her opinions.) Advertising, both print and media, frequently contains some sort of put-down or meanness played for shock value or for laughs. Then, let's look at television shows and movies, which, again, use disrespect, put-downs, and meanness for shock value and for laughs. Finally, if one reads the news, much of it is reporting who said what about whom, and much of that is "mud-slinging" or blaming someone for something -- again, disrespect and put-downs. All in all, kids are provided daily with a wide variety of models of bullying.

Bread Baking!

This past week, we had what I thought was a wonderful event at Neary -- our 4th and 5th graders participated in the life skills bread baking program sponsored by King Arthur Flour. This past Thursday, King Arthur sent a representative to Neary, along with 700+ bags of flour, packages of yeast, dough scrapers, recipe books. . . all the materials the kids will need to bake two loaves of bread. During the assembly, the students learned how to make bread from scratch, as well as how to use bread dough to make breadsticks, pretzels, braided loaves, cinnamon rolls, and pizza crusts. The students were wonderful -- they listened attentively, and seemed to enjoy the program. Each student went home with a bag containing two 2-pound bags of flour, a package of yeast, a dough scraper, a recipe book, and a plastic bag, so that each student can make a loaf to share with his/her family, as well as a loaf to bring back to school and donate to a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. What a wonderful project! I think this connects well with both the 5th grade study of colonial America and our whole-school commitment to community service and this year's partnership with the Southborough Food Pantry. I hope that students will not only learn something about the art of bread baking, but also enjoy sharing their new skills with their families and feel good about being able to donate something they made to help others. Thank you to 5th grade teacher Mr. Stubbart for organizing this program and making it happen for Neary students!

Race to Where?

By next week -- January 13th -- every school district in Massachusetts is being asked to sign and agree to a "Memorandum of Understanding" with the state pursuant to which each district promises to take certain actions, including, among other things, tying teachers' compensation to student performance on standardized testing. This project is part of Massachusetts' proposal to the federal government to obtain part of the federal funding for what is being called the "Race to the Top." (See the Massachusetts DESE website for more information -- www.doe.mass.edu)

In my view, the "Race to the Top" epitomizes everything that is wrong with the current wave of mandated "education reform." Now, please don't misunderstand me -- I am passionate about continuous improvement, and convinced that we can make all of our schools wonderful places of excellence and growth for our students. But I think there are two fundamental things wrong with current legislation relating to education -- the goals, and the methods for reaching those goals.

Thoughts on Bullying

Probably everyone knows that an anti-bullying bill is currently pending in the Massachusetts legislature, and I'm sure they will probably pass some version of it this session. Obviously, I am against bullying!! The bill, though, seems to assume that schools -- teachers and administrators -- simply are not bothering to do anything about bullying, as its primary mechanism seems to be to require schools to keep data and write reports about bullying incidents. If one assumes that schools are working to prevent bullying, the requirement to collect data and write reports doesn't change the tools available to schools but simply takes time away from time actually working with students (which is what I fear the main effect of the law will be); thus, the assumption of the law must be that schools need to be forced into addressing bullying. In my experience, this is not accurate. My observation, at least in our district and in the districts in which my friends work, is that teachers and administrators are working very hard with students to help them improve how they treat each other.

Writing, the Internet, Reading Development. . .

I had an interesting but strange event occur last week -- I learned that a superintendent in New York has been plagiarizing my writing, copying from my newsletters at Trottier and, a couple of weeks ago, from a posting on this blog, and passing it off as his writing in the newsletter that he sends to parents. I have a copy of one of his recent newsletters, the one that uses part of my previous blog entry, and it feels strange to see my writing in that context. I guess it's a compliment, in a way, but certainly a backhanded one. It's also a reminder that I think is a good one for everyone -- possibly particularly for young adults -- that the kind of Internet presence you establish is important, and that hiding and subterfuge are becoming less possible with the increasing "publicness" of life in the age of the Internet. For an insightful comment on the way in which posted material spreads rather than disappears, see last Sunday's Doonesbury cartoon (Sunday, November 8th) -- http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html. A very interesting book that I would recommend on this topic is Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, about the ways in which the social media are changing our lives; Shirky points out that the costs of group organization have in some contexts simply collapsed, and continues with a fascinating discussion of the results. Meanwhile, to the New York superintendent, if you are reading this -- thank you for the compliment, but please stop plagiarizing my work!

On a related topic, I have been thinking about reading a lot this fall. One thing that has been fascinating for me in my new role at Neary is to see the process of literacy development in children at an earlier stage, prior to middle school, and I have loved what I've been seeing in the classrooms that I've been in during the past couple of months. In the reading classrooms, students are learning and practicing reading strategies, instruction is tailored to the needs of particular students, and students are choosing their own books, spending time reading, and excitedly talking about the books they are reading. Teachers are using a variety of strategies to help students learn, including modeling strategies during read-aloud time, work with groups of students who are working on the same strategies, individual work with students, and providing time for students to practice. I'm talking every day with kids who are excited about reading, and having great conversations with them about the books they are reading!

To support what our teachers are doing in the classroom, I have a couple of suggestions for parents on the reading front, although you're probably already doing both of them. First of all, do read aloud to your children, as much as possible, and while you're reading discuss the story and occasionally talk through and model what you do as a reader to understand what you're reading (maybe you don't remember a character, so you go back and reread part of the previous chapter; maybe you don't know a word so you look at the context and think about what would make sense). The other suggestion, also emphasized by Dr. Ilda King, a reading consultant who gave a presentation on reading development last month (sponsored by the Northborough-Southborough Parent Advisory Council), is that kids develop into better readers by reading many easy books, so do encourage your children to read books that they understand and love to read. And your modeling is excellent -- if you are reading, and kids see that you enjoy it, they will, too. Obviously, I love reading -- and I hope that all our kids will come to love it and find it a source of lifelong pleasure!