NTC Hawaii Newsletter

Here's the quarterly newsletter from NTC Hawaii.  There is information about the new PLS Series and what you can expect when you attend the new Mentor Trainings next year.  :)

SY 2014-2015 Dates for Mentors and Beginning Teachers

Joanna and I worked on our Calendar for next school year.  Here are our tentative dates.  We used feedback that we got from Mentors and Beginning Teachers and have made changes to our PLCs in hopes to increase attendance.

As always dates are subject to change and locations are to be determined.

Kahikukala:  Central District Induction and Mentoring Program

Calendar SY 2014-2015 as of 5/19/2015

***Dates subject to change, locations to be determined.   

***Courses will be uploaded to PDERI.  Please sign up at least one week prior to the event

Summer Symposium July 15-16, 2014 @Mililani Uka Elementary 8:00-3:00

New Mentor Informational Session

August 7, 2014 TBD 3:30 – 4:30

New Teacher Center Mentor Training

PLS-1:  Instructional Mentoring June 23-24, 2014 8:00-3:00 @Kaimuki Middle School

Register on PDE3: Course #CM17844, Section #262250

OR

Year 1:  (10 spots reserved for CD LMW)

PLS-1:  Instructional Mentoring: 8/18-19, 2014

PLS-2:  Observation and Conferencing: 9/15-16, 2014

PLS-3:  Using Data to Inform Instruction: 2/5-6, 2015

PLS-4:  Designing Effective Instruction: 4/16-17, 2015

Year 2:  (18 spots reserved for CD LMW)

PLS-5:  Creating Conditions for Equitable Instruction: 10/23-24, 2014

PLS-6:  Advancing Instruction to Support Language Development: 12/8-9, 2014

PLS-7:  Differentiating Instruction to Support Diverse Learners:  1/22-23, 2015

PLS-8:  Mentoring as Leadership: 4/30-5/1, 2015

***additional dates may be available via State Office

Social Events

August 29, 2014 TBD 3:15 – 5:30

December 12, 2014 TBD 3:15 – 5:30

May 22, 2015 TBD 3:15 – 5:30

Mentor Forums

August 28, 2014 TBD 8:30 – 11:30 (full day sub available)

November 20, 2014 TBD 8:30 – 11:30 (full day sub available)

February 12, 2015 TBD 8:30 – 11:30 (full day sub available)

May 14, 2015 TBD 8:30 – 11:30 (full day sub available)

E Ho’olokahi: Central District New Teacher Mentoring Program Professional Development Course:

3 PDERI Credits, Course #BT178722, Section #26319

Sites: To be determined at rotating school sites

Seminar 1: Saturday, August 23, 2014, 7:45 – 11:45 (4 hours)

Seminar 2: Friday, August 29, 2014, 3:00 – 5:30 (2.5 hours)

Seminar 3: Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 3:00 – 5:30 (2.5 hours)

Seminar 4: Wednesday, October 8, 2014 (Fall Break), 7:45 – 11:45 (4 hours)

Seminar 5: Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 3:00 – 5:30 (2.5 hours)

Seminar 6: Friday, December 12, 2014, 3:00 – 5:30 (2.5 hours)

Seminar 7: Thursday, December 18, 2014, 3:00 – 5:30 (2.5 hours)

(20.5 hours face to face contact time)                        

Mentor PLC #6 is on Thursday, March 6, 2014!

Our next get together with Mentors is this Thursday at 3:00 pm at Mililani Uka Office. Hope to see you all there!!  Agenda is attached.

BT PLC #6 on Edmodo!

Aloha,

We will be testing out having our BT PLC in an online forum format.  Please join the Kahikukala Edmodo group by clicking on the link:

https://edmo.do/j/yjgdub

Then go to the small group:  BT PLC #6.  https://www.edmodo.com/home#/group?id=7685365

Assignments are listed for you to complete at your leisure:

• Watch teachinghchannel.com video and answer questions
• Watch Harry Wong video and answer questions (you tube link will be loaded shortly)
• Review Power Point and free write

Once the assignments are completed log back in to the Edmodo site to participate in online discussions (questions are posted).

We are hoping that this format will help us to continue to learn together even when we're too busy to meet in person.

Thanks for participating!

Lucky we teach Hawaii!

Today I am observing one of my fabulous Kindergarten teachers.  The kids are having an amazing experience.  They just finished a lesson with their Hawaiian Studies Kumu and learned about pupu. The kids got to touch and feel beautiful opihi and conch shells.  Their next activity is to make and paint fish.  Later today, as part of the "So Ono Fresh!" Program they will get to taste Rambutan fruit.  I love my job!!!

BT PLC #6: Online!

We will be holding BT PLC in an online format.  The link to the online chat room will be posted shortly.  In the meantime, here's the Power Point.  :)

We will be watching two videos.  One by Harry Wong and the second is housed on teaching channel.org:

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/coaching-planning-lesson-planning?fd=1

Great article!!!

You think you know what teachers do?

An interesting article in the Washington Post by Sarah Blaine from the blog:

parenting the core

The Teachers

161

by Sarah Blaine

We all know what teachers do, right? After all, we were all students. Each one of us, each product of public education, we each sat through class after class for thirteen years. We encountered dozens of teachers. We had our kindergarten teachers and our first grade teachers and our fifth grade teachers and our gym teachers and our art teachers and our music teachers. We had our science teachers and our social studies teachers and our English teachers and our math teachers. If we were lucky, we might even have had our Latin teachers or our Spanish teachers or our physics teachers or our psychology teachers. Heck, I even had a seventh grade “Communications Skills” teacher. We had our guidance counselors and our principals and some of us had our special education teachers and our study hall monitors.

So we know teachers. We get teachers. We know what happens in classrooms, and we know what teachers do. We know which teachers are effective, we know which teachers left lasting impressions, we know which teachers changed our lives, and we know which teachers sucked.  

We know.  We know which teachers changed lives for the better.  We know which teachers changed lives for the worse.

Teaching as a profession has no mystery. It has no mystique. It has no respect.

We were students, and therefore we know teachers. We denigrate teachers. We criticize teachers. We can do better than teachers. After all: We do. They teach.

We are wrong.

We need to honor teachers. We need to respect teachers. We need to listen to teachers. We need to stop reducing teachers to arbitrary measurements of student growth on so-called objective exams.

Most of all, we need to stop thinking that we know anything about teaching merely by virtue of having once been students.

We don’t know.

I spent a little over a year earning a master of arts in teaching degree. Then I spent two years teaching English Language Arts in a rural public high school. And I learned that my 13 years as a public school student, my 4 years as a college student at a highly selective college, and even a great deal of my year as a masters degree student in the education school of a flagship public university hadn’t taught me how to manage a classroom, how to reach students, how to inspire a love of learning, how to teach. Eighteen years as a student (and a year of preschool before that), and I didn’t know shit about teaching. Only years of practicing my skills and honing my skills would have rendered me a true professional. An expert. Someone who knows about the business of inspiring children. Of reaching students. Of making a difference. Of teaching.

I didn’t stay. I copped out. I left. I went home to suburban New Jersey, and a year later I enrolled in law school.

I passed the bar. I began to practice law at a prestigious large law firm. Three years as a law student had no more prepared me for the practice of law than 18 years of experience as a student had previously prepared me to teach. But even in my first year as a practicing attorney, I earned five times what a first year teacher made in the district where I’d taught.
I worked hard in my first year of practicing law. But I didn’t work five times harder than I’d worked in my first year of teaching. In fact, I didn’t work any harder. Maybe I worked a little less.

But I continued to practice. I continued to learn. Nine years after my law school graduation, I think I have some idea of how to litigate a case. But I am not a perfect lawyer. There is still more I could learn, more I could do, better legal instincts I could develop over time. I could hone my strategic sense. I could do better, be better. Learn more law. Learn more procedure. But law is a practice, law is a profession. Lawyers are expected to evolve over the course of their careers. Lawyers are given more responsibility as they earn it.

New teachers take on full responsibility the day they set foot in their first classrooms.

The people I encounter out in the world now respect me as a lawyer, as a professional, in part because the vast majority of them have absolutely no idea what I really do.

All of you former students who are not teachers and not lawyers, you have no more idea of what it is to teach than you do of what it is to practice law.

All of you former students: you did not design curricula, plan lessons, attend faculty meetings, assess papers, design rubrics, create exams, prepare report cards, and monitor attendance. You did not tutor students, review rough drafts, and create study questions. You did not assign homework. You did not write daily lesson objectives on the white board. You did not write poems of the week on the white board. You did not write homework on the white board. You did not learn to write legibly on the white board while simultaneously making sure that none of your students threw a chair out a window. 

You did not design lessons that succeeded. You did not design lessons that failed. 

You did not learn to keep your students quiet during lock down drills.

You did not learn that your 15 year old students were pregnant from their answers to vocabulary quizzes. You did not learn how to teach functionally illiterate high school students to appreciate Shakespeare. You did not design lessons to teach students close reading skills by starting with the lyrics to pop songs. You did not miserably fail your honors level students at least in part because you had no books to give them. You did not struggle to teach your students how to develop a thesis for their essays, and bask in the joy of having taught a successful lesson, of having gotten through to them, even for five minutes. You did not struggle with trying to make SAT-level vocabulary relevant to students who did not have a single college in their county. You did not laugh — because you so desperately wanted to cry — when you read some of the absurdities on their final exams. You did not struggle to reach students who proudly announced that they only came to school so that their mom’s food stamps didn’t get reduced.

You did not spend all of New Years’ Day crying five years after you’d left the classroom because you reviewed the New York Times’ graphic of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and learned that one of your very favorite students had been killed in Iraq two years before. And you didn’t know. Because you copped out and left. So you cried, helplessly, and the next day you returned to the practice of law.

You did not. And you don’t know. You observed. Maybe you learned. But you didn’t teach.

The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don’t. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don’t listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.