Positive Sticks & Prepping for Smarter Balanced Assessment

On Monday the entire Pulaski Community School District staff attended a professional development day which placed a large focus on the battle against bullying (with a new initiative called: Pulaski Kindness) and what to expect with the upcoming Smarter Balanced Assessment.

One of our district's major initiatives, related to bullying, is trying to instill being a more positive person.  We learned that bullying occurs, but that we can challenge it with positivity.  In our classroom, we always try to instill a community-like learning environment, but having students work collaboratively with nearly every classmate, no matter their expertise on a particular subject.  We instill that it is critical to be respectful to everyone, even if they are not your best friend.  We like to think that this has worked in creating a positive learning environment. 

In addition to some posters that are throughout our room, after Monday's professional development, we have chosen to add a new anti-bullying tactic, in the form of "Positive Sticks."  We plan on using these positive sticks when either a student feels compelled to do something kind OR when a negative behavior needs to be corrected with a positive one.  It is still in the experiment phase (just began it yesterday).  We are hoping to move it from being a silly thing, to something students enjoy doing, to something they will do without having to use a positive stick to come up with a positive idea.

The next item we had a professional discussion about was the upcoming implementation of Smarter Balanced Assessment, which will will roll out in 2014 and replace the current state testing (WKCE).  While we have been learning about this assessment for well over a year now in professional discussions and meetings, this past meeting was the first time we met as a K-12 district (pretty cool) to learn.  

Our biggest take away was two things:

1. Students need to be better prepared type for extended periods of time.  We have to provide our students with more typing experience, and not just when the time presents itself to do a writing project.  We have to encourage proficient typing skills, starting now.
2. The entire test is web-based, and will require an extensive writing portions, not just in the ELA section, but also math.  Students will have to describe what they know about a particular topic.

For fun (at least we thought so), we had our students explain my mistake to the following exponent problem in math yesterday.  They had to use their best thinking and writing skills to explain the mistakes I had made, even thought I justified the same answer twice.

The pictures that follow are a just a handful of examples of the exceptional descriptions that our students created.  They did awesome, considering it was one of the first times that we really forced them to think and write.

**This is definitely a skill we plan on integrating into future assessments and problems as we work towards finishing off the school year.**