As I reflect on our first week back at it, I am really excited about how it went. I talked with a lot of students who were excited about school, their classes, and their teachers. That is a tribute to the preparation, mindset, how each of you contributed to our team. Together, this culture will continue throughout the whole year, and we'll avoid the dip that sometimes presents itself later in the year. A huge thank you to each person on our team for a great start!
IE Starts Monday
Kids will report to their IE groups on Monday. Our IE time will take on a bit different look this year with a different plan for our E groups.
IE GROUPS are ready to go. Please share with students on Monday morning during Homeroom.
Students logging into IC
The main goal of Monday morning will be getting students logged into their IC. Please refer to the email I sent last week for details about how students should log in. If a student does not remember their password, and cannot log in, they should put an x in the far right column on
the spreadsheet and Anna will change their password. It may take the week, but hopefully by Friday, all students should be set.
Connections Team during Nutrition Break
We know that kids connected with one or more caring adults do better at school. Our Nutrition Break provides a good time for those connections to form. I thought having at least one person in each area, each day looking for students to strike up a conversation with or check in with during Nutrition Break, can help us accomplish that goal. Please check out the
Connections sign-up, and commit to one or more of the slots.
PMS Schedule of Events
I started to put together a year long
Schedule of Events for the school year. I really would like some input and to bounce a couple of ideas off of anyone that is interested. If this is something you'd like to be a part of, come to my office at 3:00 tomorrow to work with me on this. I appreciate the perspective.
Couple of Reminders
-Please check to make sure your Lesson Plans folder is shared with me
-Please remember to update the Grade Level Blog weekly outlining what's to come in your class
-As a reminder to think about the Puma Pride standards you will be posting in Infinite Campus. We need at least 1 weekly "Follows Classroom Expectations" and at least one of the following: "Puts Forth Effort to Produce High Quality Work" or "Completes and Returns Work in a Timely Manner".
Lost at School Resource
The
Lost at School book shines a bright light on an approach that we can take with students to help us respond effectively with students that exhibit frustrating behaviors that are the result of their lagging skills in a certain area. Heather Snyder put together this
RESOURCE to help in conversations with students that will help uncover these skills and also a list of skills that are common for students to be lacking in schools. Thank you Heather.
Safety Post
This year I will try to put in short reminders each week about School Safety in a new "Safety Post" category each week. Each classroom should be equipped with a safety bucket, and a medical kit (like Kris shared during our Nurse training). Please be familiar with the locations of these items in your classroom.
Resource of the Week
Our resource this week comes from an article that appeared in the magazine
Psychology Today. In a summary of the article, which is put out by AWSA's "The Marshall Memo", associate editor Matt Huston sets out to set the record straight on the human brain and its relation to behavior.
Pushing Back on Ten Myths About the Brain and Behavior (from The Marshall Memo)
“It’s high time we put the most enduring myths about human behavior to bed, and see the mind – and the world – as it is,” says associate editor Matt Huston in this article in Psychology Today. Here’s his debunking list:
• Myth #1: Ten thousand hours of deliberate practice will produce mastery. “One hour of practice is not necessarily going to result in the same amount of gain for two different athletes or musicians,” says Huston. Just as important as the quantity of practice are other factors, including the age when a person starts, the type of practice, coaching, working memory capacity, intelligence, and motivation.
• Myth #2: The brain’s right hemisphere is intuitive, the left analytical. “The right and left hemispheres do specialize in different mental functions,” says Huston. “But the notion that individuals rely more heavily on one or the other glosses over the complexity of the left-right relationship.” Brain imaging shows a complex interaction between the two sides with language, perception, and other capabilities. In addition, there’s variation among individuals.
• Myth #3: People have visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning styles. “The idea that educators should match their instruction to students’ individual learning styles… has been around for decades,” says Huston. “But scientific reviews have found scant justification for this practice… Unsubstantiated ideas about what differentiates students could distract from what boosts all of them.”
• Myth #4: There are multiple intelligences. Huston says that Howard Gardner’s theory of eight distinct intelligences – linguistic, mathematical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, kinesthetic, musical, naturalistic – has not been proven experimentally, and its usefulness to educators is unclear. There’s no getting away from the importance of general intelligence (sometimes called g) as an important factor (along with conscientiousness and other personal factors) in life outcomes, says Huston.
• Myth #5: Male and female brains are basically the same. Although there is more overlap than difference, says Huston, some differences are significant, probably stemming from evolutionary pressures:
- Women tend to engage in more altruistic behavior and rate higher on certain measures of empathy than men.
- Men on average do better at spatially rotating an object, while women are better at remembering the location of objects.
- Males are much more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
- Rates of mood disorders and Alzheimer’s disease are higher among women.
- Exposed to traumatic events, boys are more likely to exhibit externalizing, disruptive behaviors while girls have internalizing symptoms, including self-blame.
- There’s evidence that medications have different effects on males and females.
• Myth #6: Birth order shapes personality. The idea that one’s position in the family pecking order determines how assertive, agreeable, imaginative, conscientious, experimental, conformist, conventional, and risk-taking one is has been disproven by recent studies. There is some evidence that firstborns have a slight I.Q. advantage (1.5 points in a German study), but this finding has not been widely replicated.
• Myth #7: People’s attachment style is set early in life. It used to be thought that adults’ ease forming close relationships, versus being anxious or avoidant, is shaped by how they related to parents and caregivers in infancy and early childhood. But insecurity as an infant can be overcome by warm and loving parenting, attentive and supportive teachers, and positive experiences as an adult – and vice-versa.
• Myth #8: There’s a depression gene. “Scientists have failed to turn up reliable evidence that any single, common genetic variant matters much when it comes to mental illness,” reports Huston. “…The connection between one’s genetic profile and vulnerability is highly complex.”
• Myth #9: Grieving people move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who first posited the five sequential stages, later said that not everyone goes through the same order. “In reality,” says Huston, “grief is not so regimented… Grieving people take many different paths; some clearly recover from loss more easily than do others.” About ten percent take much longer, and they may need treatment.
• Myth #10: Compulsive, problematic sexual activity is an addiction. Psychologists have specific criteria for what constitutes addictive behavior, and this kind of sexual activity doesn’t qualify. People caught in affairs and other self-destructive and hurtful actions may be trying to deflect blame by labeling their bad behavior as a mental disorder.
Huston concludes with five psychological findings that have stood the test of time and replication:
- Adults’ personalities as measured by the Big Five “OCEAN” traits – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism – mostly stay the same.
- We are swayed by what we believe others think. For example, if prejudiced comments seem acceptable to the group, it’s more likely a person will make them.
- We seek to confirm existing beliefs and overestimate how predictable an event is. Confirmation bias and hindsight bias (having observed an event, we think we knew it all along) are very common.
- Choices are affected by how options are framed. For example, saying that meat is 90 percent fat-free is more enticing than saying it contains 10 percent fat.
- We may recall seeing something we didn’t actually see. “Memory is far from perfect,” says Huston, “and there is evidence that people can be induced to recall invented details of past experiences.”
“Ten Myths About the Mind” by Matt Huston in Psychology Today, September/October 2019 (Vol. 52, #5, pp. 52-61, 88), no e-link available
Images from the Week
