College Focus Event - TCC Mobile Go Center

Today was an exciting day at IMMS!  The TCC Mobile Go Center came to Castleberry High School, and they allowed us to bring over 80 of our 8th graders for a quick lesson focused on College and Careers.

Have you ever seen the unit?  It is pretty neat...The theme is Success is Within Reach, and after leaving, our students talked about all that they learned with a renewed sense of excitement.

Here are a few pictures:

Of course, I LOVE the large Texas A&M flag on the wall, but the two rows of laptops were really neat!  Students used the website, www.texasrealitycheck.com to choose how they want to live after college, then the website provided career choices that made a salary high enough for the students to support their chosen lifestyle.

Thanks to the TCC Go team, the CHS counselors, and Ms. Roz & Mr. Martinez (our IMMS counselors) for making this happen! I hope that all of our 8th graders can attend next year!

If you are in the Texas area, you should look into having this great program come to your campus! What college readiness programs have you used on your campuses?  How do you spark an excitement for college with your students?  I look forward to hearing your ideas!

New Year Means New Committments

Happy 2015!  The beginning of a new year is always exciting to me, especially in the world of education.  It's exciting in a different way than the start of the school year.  At this point, everything has been rolling along over the fall semester, and now we have an opportunity to refresh our spirits, re-prioritize initiatives and renew our commitments to ensuring that students, our "digital natives," are challenged and successful in their 21st century learning endeavors.

At Irma Marsh, we are continuing to work on our Instructional Rounds Momentum Plan.  While there are some educational initiatives that I haven't been as excited about during my career, I have to say that the results of our efforts are really paying off in in the most important way - our students are showing success and confidence in their learning!  Kuddos to my staff for all their hard work and willingness to try new things, as well as to our administration for their district level support!

If you are curious about what we are working on with our Instructional Rounds, feel free to hop on over to my digital portfolio for ALL the details!

One of the pieces that we need to focus on is Academic Vocabulary, and specifically, how it is incorporated into lessons and displayed in the classroom.   Here is a video showcase of some of our teachers (and 1 student) sharing strategies used to teach academic vocabulary:

Some of the ideas to enhance academic vocabulary instruction shared in our faculty meeting are:

• Utilizing STAAR4Ward Field Guide to identify vocabulary for each TEK.
• Using vocabulary strategies before, during and after learning.
• Word Sorts - Provide participants with word cards and allow them to sort THREE different ways.  Allow them to explain their reasons for sorting the words.
• Concept Circles - Basic level: Students can categorize words and justify the connections between and among the words. Students write about the connections they see between the words and phrases. Why are these words in the Concept Circle together?  Students can be asked to shade the words that go together or the word that doesn't belong with the others. They can then write about the word or attributes that caused a word to be included or excluded.

• Utilize Concept Maps
• Frayer Model
• Contextual Redefinition: Teacher selects words that will be upcoming in reading but are unfamiliar to students. These are presented in isolation  with  the rest of the sentence missing. Students make predictions  about possible meanings for the word based on their background knowledge and knowledge of word parts.  Students are then provided with the context for each of the words to determine context clues that are helpful for confirming  or determining meanings for the target words.  As students use context clues that are helpful they will list what helped them use the context clues. 
• Semantic Feature Analysis: Provide a grid with topics.  As students read about the various people, concepts, topics, etc.  They can complete the grid as the information is taught.  This can also be used to summarize at the end of the chapter, unit or topic.
• Keep vocabulary artifacts in a journal or notebook.
• 4-2-1 Summarizer (TPR): For this summarizing activity ask participants to: 

1. Generate four words that capture the most important aspects of the topic/concept.

2. Share with a partner.  What words do you have in common?  What two words capture the most important aspects of today’s learning?

3. Determine the 1 word or big idea that best represents TPR, then share this big idea among the entire group.

• Have a Word Wall that has understandable definitions, pictures and/or content examples.  A timeline is a great tool for history classes!
• Teach prefixes and suffixes that can be applied to other words!
• Study Blue and Cahoot are great web apps to help reinforce vocabulary!

I know that there are so many great strategies out there!  Please comment below and share some of yours so that we can all learn from each other...I look forward to hearing your ideas!