Let’s Talk About Our New School Year: Part 1
The new school year is now five weeks into the school year and things have started well for our schools. From the student activity perspective of our year, there are many positives. The boy’s cross-country team has a large number of student participants (over 30 to start the season) with boy’s varsity winning two tournaments and placing in all other meets. Our girls continue to work hard having several team members place in meets as has our middle school runners. Our girl’s golf team has placed 3rd twice to date this year. The football teams are on a roll having lost only one game at the varsity level and also only one game at the 7th-8th grade level. Our volleyball teams have been equally as good having lost only two high school varsity matches (JV sits 7-8; C team 5-10) while our 7th-8th grade team is 6-2 (A team), 3-1 (both B & C teams). The school spirit among our students at all schools has been great. We have wonderful coaches who possess great character working with the development of our student athletes.
On the academic side of our work, we continue to implement the Kansas College and Career Readiness (KCCR) state standards in our schools. As we discussed on a couple of occasions last year, these are challenging for both our students and teachers as the standards introduce some concepts at younger ages and requires students to think as they solve problems and then explain their work. Last year our parents of elementary age students saw this change as we introduced the Journeys reading series. So too, parents of our middle and high school aged students also saw these changes as our schools moved to a conceptually based instructional format in mathematics. Parents also should see the increased rigor and critical thinking being used in Social Studies and Science.
This year we are continuing our implementation of the KCCR standards. In addition to the work we have been doing for the past few years (the KCCR state standards have been in place for over four years now), our schools have added a couple new curricular tools. This year we are using the Collections English Language Arts textbook series for this work at the middle and high school levels. This series effectively integrates writing and grammar with challenging reading passages. Assessments require students to think at higher cognitive levels than past textbook series. One of the great features of this textbook tool is that it allows for teachers to do more individualization work with our students.
In math, our elementary teachers are using a math series called EngageNY / Eureka Math. This too is a conceptually based math series that challenges students to think about math in addition to memorizing math facts and various algorithms (a series of steps used to solve a mathematical problem). Just like our math work with students the past couple of years in middle and senior high school, we know that this is a change in approach to teaching math. At the time we moved to this math series, we knew that there would be some limitations when it came to home support so we continue to search for tools that we can share with parents to help their student with home work. We also knew that there would be concepts that students may have not been introduced to yet from their previous years of math instruction. Our teachers are working hard to help students fill in the gaps and we have restructured our schedules so that teachers and students have more time for math. As the year has progressed, teachers are telling us that our students are understanding better what they are being asked to do, in particular how to work through multi-step processes to solve a problem and to explain their work. In Part 2 of this article, I go into more depth on the topic of conceptual math and why this change in approach to math education is so important for our students.
This school year we may well see several changes taking place in our school system. To begin the year however, we could not ask for a better start. Our students are engaged, they are working at challenging tasks, and are experiencing success. Our teachers have been terrific as they work with our students, coaching and supporting them throughout this work. As I have said before, if we want our students to be successful in the future, we have to prepare them now for their future. Challenging our students through the use of metacognitive (thinking about one’s own learning or thinking processes) techniques with terrific support from teachers is a great way to prepare our children for their future.