Cathy Larson
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The Best 7 Hours

4/18/2016

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I attended a College and Career Readiness workshop this past week facilitated by EPIC School Partnerships, an organization representing a new approach for improving student outcomes, grounded in over a decade of research by David Conley, author of “Getting Ready for College, Careers, and the Common Core.”

As hard as it is for me, or any classroom teacher for that matter, to spend time away from the classroom and leave our charges in the hands of an albeit qualified and well-intentioned substitute, I took advantage of the opportunity to participate in this professional development day. And like most PD days, I walked away with something that will change my teaching for the better. I love to learn. I love to be exposed to new ideas. I love to sit in a room with other educators and discuss our practice. It’s transformative. This day was no different.

“The best 7 hours” -- this is the phrase from the conference that resonated with me.

In fact, I picked my son up from school after the workshop and asked him, “How was school?” This question sound familiar? We all ask it when our kids come home from school. From my daugher, the answer is always filled with highs, lows, laughter and stories. For my son, the answer is always, “What do you think? It was school.” His answer comes with snark, sarcasm, bitterness. Granted, he is a teenage boy, so he isn’t nearly as verbose as my daughter, but, nevertheless, it makes me sad he doesn’t enjoy his time there.

This day, I pushed for a little more information. I asked, “Is school ever the best 7 hours of your day?” He looked at me and rolled his eyes. I continued. I shared with him that this question came from my day’s experience at a workshop, and the presenter reminding us -- the teachers -- that we should strive for this for our students. He responded, “Why would they do that?” More snark. He’s a tough audience.

Our kids today are part of a new generation. I know, we hear this all the time. But this workshop forced me to think about what this means?  And it dawned on me that this “new generation” is one that can’t even compare to my own. Whereas we have lived through the birth of technology innovation and have learned, and potentially even embraced, it as an add-on to our lives, our kids are tech-innate. Technology IS their lives. They know nothing else. They don’t have any idea what it’s like to have to go to the library to get an answer to something. When my kids don’t know something, they “Google it.” Their world is information rich; it always has been. Since day 1. The learning of knowledge for them isn’t the end product, because knowledge is everywhere.

Our world is no longer about what we know -- it’s about what we DO with what we know.

Our kids today want to DO. They want to use this abundance of knowledge. The want to create, to invent, to act. We all know they still need to “learn” in order to “do,” but the learning no longer has to be straight facts; rather, it can be patterns, creativity, collaboration, higher-level thinking processes, strategies, skills -- imagine, even, the power of their learning how to be curious.

If these were the traits of our local schools for EVERY PERIOD, EVERY DAY, then I can guarantee my son would love school. He would be doing. He would be active in his learning. He would see the connection of the content to his life; he would see relevancy and purpose. He would begin to think about his future and actually start designing it.

This isn’t a teacher issue -- it’s a system issue. And a system is hard to change, but it’s going to have to if we are going to inspire our kids for life beyond high school -- college, career, community -- and to inspire them to dream for a better world.

My hope is that our schools begin thinking about the seven hours they have and begin dreaming big. Remember the old KFWB mantra -- “Give us 24 minutes, and we’ll give you the world”?

Imagine the power of having seven hours -- the world would only be the beginning.

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It's time to talk calendar

3/28/2016

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My daughter’s soccer team had a scrimmage this past Saturday, and I spent some time chatting with another parent on the team who is a teacher in Los Al. He was giddy -- my word, not his -- about his upcoming Spring Break. He asked what I was going to do with our week off, knowing my kids were also starting their break on Monday. “Nothing,” was my response, “my Spring Break was two weeks ago, long since enjoyed and over.” That prompted a discussion about my district’s school calendar.

I work in the Anaheim Union High School District, right next door to Los Al, and a few years ago our teachers, district and unions decided to discuss a re-vamped school calendar. We investigated starting the school year in early August and ending at the end of May. After several surveys, multiple discussions in a variety of forums, outreach to the community, and due diligence in reading supporting research, we all quickly determined that a change was a great idea. So with this school year, 2015/2016, we began our new calendar adventure.

This year I started school on August 12, 2015, and we will end before Memorial Day on May 26, 2016. Here are a few of the factors that lead to my district’s change.

Our first semester now ends before Winter Break. This is a beautifully natural break for instructional purposes, as opposed to dragging semester finals into January after a long vacation.

Our school year will end with a holiday weekend, providing vacation opportunities for families and staff that don't cost the district dollars in lost ADA for absent students or substitute costs for absent teachers when a three-day weekend is extended into four.

Our new calendar provides three extra weeks to prepare students for AP exams that occur during the first two weeks of May.

Our calendar also eliminates downtime after AP exams. With Los Al’s current calendar, there may be a full five weeks “to kill” between AP exams and the end of the school year. This is not the case for me. My students take their AP exams, follow that up with a week of class finals, and then school ends. In our model, all instructional minutes are intentional and purposeful; we don’t have any wasted time.

Finally, my discussion with the teacher from Los Al illuminated for me one final salient point: CIF is changing its calendar. With so many districts moving to this more “college-like” schedule, CIF is taking note and adjusting sports’ schedules. If Los Al doesn’t make any changes, it is likely that high school sports will need to start before school actually begins.

Therefore, we all voted to ratify the change. And once we made the decision, we just “tore off the bandaid,” making the change in one summer. Last summer was awfully short, I grant you, with school ending in mid-June and starting up again in early August, but the pain was assuaged with the promise of an extra paycheck. Also, it meant we only had one short summer, rather than the three we could’ve had if we’d transitioned one week at a time instead.

Now with my own kids on Spring Break this week and me back at school, I am reminded again about how sad I am. Not only do we not have the same week off, but also they aren’t reaping the same academic benefits.

I challenge our community to challenge our district to revisit the Los Al school calendar. If the discussions progressed the way ours did, they all revolved around what’s best for kids. Shouldn’t that be what drives our decisions as educators? As districts? As parents?

It's definitely worth a discussion -- one that shouldn’t happen just on a soccer field -- but one that potentially drives real change.
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Writing can be fun.

3/15/2016

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If you're the parent of children who love to write, then consider yourself, and your children, lucky. This love of writing will serve them well throughout K-12, into college and beyond.

I was this kid, and I still am. I love to write. I write all the time for a variety of audiences and purposes. I love the process, the discovery that comes from it, the quiet introspection, and the feeling of accomplishment that comes from reading my finished pieces. This doesn’t mean I think writing is easy; I grapple with ideas, phrasing, organization, focus and revision with everything I write, including this weekly column.

And I love working with kids who enjoy writing. These kids embrace the process, get excited to try new strategies, and even write at home on their own for fun: short stories, fan fiction, blogs, poetry.

But if you're the parent of children who avoid writing, complain about any writing task, and struggle to get words on a page, then join the ranks of those of us who feel your pain.

As much as I like the prolific young writers, I also love working with kids who struggle. I believe these kids who struggle do so because they've lost their way. They’re stuck and disgruntled. They've had no freedom in the only environment where writing is expected while growing up -- the classroom. In this environment, they are expected to write what they're told, when they're told, and how they're told. Then when they turn in the piece into which they've poured time and energy and heart, a teacher tells them all the things they've done wrong, bleeding red ink all over their papers. I don’t blame these kids for hating the process. Who would want to continue to write after that?

As parents, we need to be proponents for asking teachers to give choice back to our young writers. We need to fight to have them give back to our kids the freedom to explore ideas and find topics that interest them, in order to help them discover that writing can be fun again. We need to demand that more time be spent developing this lifelong skill.

I know it’s a crazy idea, but what if a classroom teacher actually pulled kids out from behind their sterile desks -- and let them write on the playground, sitting on a bench, or lying on the shady cool grass. Would it end in chaos? Pandemonium? Nope. What we’d ultimately end up with is a generation full of kids who've learned to love to write again.

This transition, from hating to loving to write, can’t happen overnight. And it also can’t happen if the only writing that’s ever done is limited to one, 1-hour block every couple weeks. Writing is just like any sport or activity or hobby or dog training -- it takes practice to master.

The problem with writing, however, is that the practice happens alone. Writing isn’t like basketball where you can see the players sweat, get hurt, get back up, and finally collapse from exhaustion at the end of a game. With writing, the agony and struggle is just as real, but it’s much less overt. So when we see thousands of novels at Barnes & Noble or at the library, kids simply believe the authors were all just born with talent -- that they were all each able to just sit down and write their masterpieces in one sitting. No sweat. No struggle. Oh, how I wish our kids could watch me craft this column every week -- to see just how wrong they are.

We need to continually remind our struggling young authors that writers have to practice, too.

The next immediate swing in education and our local school district needs to be to make writing ubiquitous. It needs to be happening in every classroom, every day, across every subject. The writing tasks can be long, short, high-stakes, low-stakes, individual or with a partner. It just needs to be done.

And the more engaging and purposeful the writing, the less resistance we’ll get from kids -- and the more they’ll all learn to love it, too.
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A New Approach for Sick Days

1/25/2016

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It is flu season. And with flu season, for a teacher, comes the endless parade of students into the classroom asking for make-up work for instructional days they’ve missed.

As a parent, a sick day is just as frustrating. Miss a day or two from school and your child’s grades can plummet. Whether this is from gaps in instruction, missing assignments or untaken tests, the frustration is real. It is palpable.
This past weekend, ironically while sick in bed myself, I had plenty of time to think about sick days. I came away with a few ah-ha’s.

Technology is great. With Google and email and Twitter reminders, teachers can connect with students and families at any time on any day. In fact, technology is so advanced, and some teachers so technically savvy, classroom lessons can even be videotaped and uploaded to YouTube. So when students get sick and miss a day or two of class, we all have a tendency to want to look to technology to fill in the gaps for them: watch the video lesson, download the handouts, read the posted notes, review the PowerPoint or chat with a classmate. This way they can finish the missed  work before they even return. Sounds ideal.

But is it?
​

I haven’t been bed-ridden with a cold in years, so I admit I haven’t really thought about sick days for a while. Turns out that when you’re home sick, it’s because you feel horrible! I can’t imagine, this past weekend, having watched anything academic or completed any worksheets or talked coherently with any friend. I just wanted to sleep. And even when I returned to work on Monday -- without having missed an actual day of school -- I was ineffectual. I mustered my way through the day, but it was rough.

This left me thinking about our expectations of students.

A student determines that he is too sick to attend school. Whatever his symptoms, he decides to stay home and recuperate. One day. Two days. Whatever it takes to finally feel better and join the land of the living again. He returns to school, let’s say after having missed two days, and he is expected to be performing up-to-speed immediately. I do this all the time in the classroom. I know a student has been absent, but I continue on with the day’s lesson or give the day’s quiz or ask for a written response to something we reviewed the day before, as if no one has missed a beat. Hence the plummeting grades, frustrated students, and often-reoccurring sicknesses.

As I rolled around in bed this weekend, I promised myself to be more proactive. More understanding. More student-centered. I also realized that I need to be more mindful of the work that actually needs to be “made up” when a student misses class -- whether for sickness, family emergency, field trip or extracurricular activity.

Here is what this means for me. My instruction is driven by a target. This means I know exactly what I want students to know at the end of a unit. Popham, in” Transformative Assessment in Action,” calls this the “target curricular aim.” What I like about this approach to teaching is the freedom in being able to decide what building blocks are necessary for students to obtain mastery of that target. For example, in the course of a unit, I may assign twenty activities to get my students to the final target. But not all twenty of those are necessarily key to mastery; maybe only five of them are critical and the others are simply additional support or reinforcement.

I’ve always run my classroom this way, but haven’t always handled absences with this in mind. After this weekend, I am changing things up.

When a student misses class, I need to ask myself, “Is this a significant building block?” If it is, then I need to take the time to help that student get caught up. That may even mean the lesson on his first day back can be dismissed. But if the missed assignment from the sick day isn’t a significant building block, then maybe that’s the one I need to excuse. I never again want a student to return after an excused absence and have not only make-up work, but daily work, too. This just seems excessively harsh when trying to also get healthy at the same time.

Students who parade into my classroom this week after having missed a day or two of school will find a more compassionate, less rigid teacher who will work diligently to alleviate their re-entry stress.

I hope my own kids’ teachers will revisit their approach to sick days, as well, because we are all in the same business -- the “well”-being of our children.
​

Here’s to a healthy 2016.
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Vertical What?

9/26/2014

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I went to an event a few days ago to introduce myself to the community and talk about why I’m running for Los Al school board. I presented my prepared talking points, got a pat on the back from the candidate sitting next to me for “making it look easy” and shook a few hands on my way out once the event was over.

I felt as if the afternoon had been a success. Then on my way out of the room, heading to the parking lot, I ran into two women who asked me a few last questions. One was a retired teacher and the other her guest at the event.

The retired teacher asked me about vertical alignment – literally. She asked, “What is vertical alignment?” I realized at that moment I hadn’t been clear about what this is exactly, especially if someone retired from my own profession isn’t clear what I’m talking about. I mention this concept in my platform, at all speaking opportunities, when talking about the race with friends, throughout my blogs, and during conversations when I get worked up about curriculum. But I’m a teacher, and I have a tendency to speak in educational acronyms and jargon. The time has come for me to present the basics of this topic and give everyone a chance to understand its power … and know why we need to start talking about it in Los Alamitos Unified.

When I first started teaching twenty years ago, I walked into my ninth grade classroom on day one, sat at my desk, and set about planning the year. I worked in isolation on curriculum and standards. I decided what to teach and when to teach it, and did just that. I thought back to my own education, pulled from memory those activities and assignments I found valuable and fun as a kid, and incorporated them into my classroom. I used the CA State Standards as a driving force, but was free to do as I pleased day in and day out.

When I started at Oxford Academy eight years ago, I walked onto a campus whose English department taught philosophically different from my early teaching experiences, using a different approach – an approach called vertical alignment.

And it changed everything about how and what I teach.

In a nutshell, vertical alignment is simply:
  • building students’ content knowledge and skills year-over-year, 
  • avoiding redundancy in sequential courses, 
  • holding kids accountable for their learning from one year to the next, 
  • building collaborative curricular teams of teachers focused on a common goal, and 
  • increasing access to advanced and AP courses for all students.

I’m going to use the English department at Oxford as an example to explain how this works.

At Oxford, we align our 7th – 12th grade classrooms with an eye on preparing all students to feed into AP Composition and Literature in twelfth grade – that’s our only English track. But we only have six years to get 11- and 12-year-old kids ready to perform at a college level for this exam, so it requires that as teachers we focus on the end goal.

Instead of teaching the same concept every year, we teach the concept in an introductory year and build on that concept every year thereafter. Here’s one simple example of how we teach the thesis and argument claim:
  • 7th – Introduce a 3-point thesis, including subject and position
  • 8th – Continue to master the basic thesis and introduce the counter-argument
  • 9th -  Experiment with phrasing of the thesis and work on clarity of relationships between elements of the thesis
  • 10th – Work on mastery of the thesis, adding elements of style
  • 11th – Introduce concept of sophisticated, complex and relevant logical sequence of knowledgeable claims; rhetoric focused and mode differentiated
  • 12th – Work on mastery of sophisticated and complex claim statement with expectations of complex ideas, complex argument and clear qualifiers

Again, I know this example is full of teacher jargon, but I’m hoping you see how the sophistication of the instruction and expectations grows year after year. And we include this level of alignment in all aspects of the English curriculum – reading, writing, speaking and listening. We plan from the top, but build vertically from the bottom to be sure all kids are ready when they take that capstone course in twelfth grade. You can walk into any English teacher’s classroom on my campus and hear him or her say something along the lines of: “I know you learned this last year.” There is power in these words … our students know we will hold them accountable for their learning and expect them to be able to apply that knowledge long after it’s been mastered. I believe vertical alignment is the cornerstone of our school's success.

I will agree that not all students are destined for AP capstone courses, but I will argue there is no harm in preparing all kids for the choice, closing the learning gap, holding kids accountable, taking advantage of the precious little time we have to teach and reach each child, and engaging children in their own education. I get more than a little frustrated when my own children come home with activities covering the same material that's been covered multiple previous years. I want to see more rigor, higher expectations,  and increased complexity.

The power in the vertical alignment model of curriculum development lies in its focus, and Los Alamitos has the advantage of being both small enough to be able to tackle vertical alignment with precision and count on our students to step up.

Let’s finally capitalize on our Los Al advantages - and watch our students soar. 

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Is a change in the school calendar worth discussing?

8/30/2014

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I work in the Anaheim Union High School District, right next door to Los Al, and a few years ago, our teachers, district and unions decided to discuss a re-vamped school calendar. When the options were initially rolled out, I think everyone's initial gut reaction was to scream, "What's going to happen to the summer?" But after several surveys, multiple discussions in a variety of forums, and due diligence in reading supporting research, we all quickly determined that it was a great idea.  When we we took the final vote, the overwhelming majority agreed that a change was in order. So with the 2015/2016 school year, we will begin our new calendar adventure.

Here's what it looks like:
  • Next year, school begins for us on August 12, 2015, and will end before Memorial Day on May 26, 2016. 

Crazy, huh!?


Actually, no so crazy after all. Here's why:
  • No summer is lost - it just moves three weeks earlier
  • The semester ends before Winter Break - a natural break for instructional purposes, as opposed to dragging finals into January after a long vacation
  • School will end with a holiday weekend - providing vacation opportunities for families and staff that don't cost the district dollars in lost ADA for absent students or substitute costs for absent teachers when a three-day weekend is extended into four
  • Three extra weeks to prepare students for AP (Advanced Placement) exams that occur the first 2 to 3 weeks in May - more in line with east coast schools
  • Three extra weeks to prepare students for the SBAC (Common Core) standardized tests
  • Less downtime after AP exams - students, rather than having six weeks after the culminating, high-stakes course exam, will take the AP exam, follow that up with the teacher's course final, and then call it a year - fully taking advantage of all instructional minutes

Once we decided as a school community to make the calendar change, we also just went for it in terms of implementation ... we are making the change to the calendar in one summer. This means we will end this school year in mid-June and begin the following school year in early August. Ouch! 

In the end, however, I see it simply as ripping off a Band-Aid quickly in just one strong yank - it only hurts for an instant and then its over. Ultimately, this is a much better solution than making the change gradually by phasing it in over several years, one week at a time. Personally, I'd rather have only one short summer than three.

Regardless the logistics of the implementation, as a teacher I'm excited about the instructional potential. 

Is this something we want in Los Al? 

I don't know, but I will argue it's worth a discussion - there's no harm in that!
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