Cambridge Wins NEA Greater Public School Grant to Elevate the Profession through Teacher Preparation

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Peer Collaborating: CCS 2014-2015

                        Building Capacity

As Peer Collaborators we want to be available to facilitate collaboration among groups or between individuals. Peer Collaborators hope you will feel comfortable reaching out to us for reasons such as: 

• Brainstorming ideas for lesson planning or classroom management
• Observing individual student behaviors or group dynamics in the classroom
• Sharing ideas or best practices
• Informally reflecting on lessons and/or observations, 
• Lending a confidential ear to any issues or concerns that may arise

“As a peer reviewer I feel it is beneficial to both the person being observed and the observer. I have learned a great deal from observing and working with classroom teachers. It is a wonderful opportunity to observe your co-workers as well as their students. I have enjoyed seeing the routines and management styles of other rooms. I was able to get ideas and bring them back into my own classroom. In one classroom I co-taught a writing lesson. It was exciting to work with other students and rewarding to see their engagement. The teacher shared that she appreciated another set of hands, ideas and enthusiasm. Peer reviewing is a positive way to learn from one another.”                                             -Kristy Jeffords 

We are here for you! We want to help in any way we can!
Look for us in September 2015!
Mollie Bell, Hillory Hamilton, Kristy Jeffords and John Mooney

Falling in Love

Over the past seven months, Melissa Skellie and Kelly Toleman led a professional book club centered around Falling in Love With Close Reading by Christopher Lehman & Kate Roberts. Participants in this group included both High School and Elementary teachers which enabled a broad range of conversation focused around the strategy of close reading.

In these conversations, we started with a general summary of each chapter. Then, we narrowed our discussion down to a more specific conversation that included how each technique can be used in the various classes represented. This professional talk enhanced everyone’s understanding of how to successfully implement close reading strategies in the classroom.

A Really Great Tool: TurnItIn

On March 3rd, a Turnitin workshop was presented by our high school librarian, Terese Brennan, as part of a professional development faculty meeting.  

Turnitin, a software, CCS HS Library purchased, as a teaching tool to help students understand and avoid plagiarism, has the following three features: OriginalityCheck,  GradeCheck, and PeerMark.  The OriginalityCheck is the feature that checks a student’s paper against a database of sources to see how much of the paper is original and how much may be plagiarized.  The student is able to see a color-coded list of where his/her paper matches information from the sources in the Turnitin databases.  The student then has the opportunity to make correction to the paper and to re-submit it. The GradeCheck is the feature the teacher can use to make correction to the paper and then the student can view it and download the paper with a list of corrections that need to be made.  The student is able to read a definition of the editing suggestion a teacher makes to the paper. The PeerMark is the last features and enables students to peer review other students’ papers. Currently the first two features have been used, but as of yet, the third feature has not. Jason Sutliff participated in the presentation, as he was able to illustrate the practical classroom application of his students using this software.  Using his students papers, we were able to illustrate the first two features, so that our attendants could see Turnitin in action.

-authored by Terese Brennan

Shining the Light on Academic Optimism

View the full powerpoint here

On the afternoon of December 3rd, Terese Brennan, Mary Laedlein, and Audrey Brownell led a professional development workshop and discussion  on the topic of Academic Optimism. A lively discussion revolved around the following key attributes of Academic Optimism:

 

Academic Optimism of Schools is a collective set of beliefs held by the faculty as a whole that:

• The school faculty believes it can reach even the most difficult students-collective efficacy.
• The school faculty trusts students and parents-faculty trust.
• The School faculty emphasizes academics-academic emphasis.  

-Wayne K Hoy