HUMS staff week of March 11, 2019

ITEMS:

Please note the Duane will be out of the building this coming Thursday, 8:30 to the end of the day.

1.  Meetings this month:  

March

March 12 - Shared Staff Meeting

March 19 - TA Meeting (middle school meeting)

March 21 - LT/DH Meeting

March 26 - Faculty Writing Workshop Part I2

2.  March 22, 2019.  This will be an inservice day.  The day will be utilized for work on PBL, ELOx's etc.  More regarding an agenda will be sent out at a later date.  

3. YRBS - March 29th -- 40-minute survey will be distributed to complete during TA & ELO 1.  Only option for ELO would be ELO 2 that day.

4. SBAC - Just to get us started..  

A friendly reminder and some preliminary details about getting ready for SBAC. 

• The portal for everything SBAC is https://vt.portal.airast.org/users/smarter-balanced-assessments.stml
• ALL SBAC user accounts this year will remain @wwsu.org (we will change to @huusd.org for next year).
• The first time you log in every year you will need to change your password.
• All teachers/staff administering tests will need to take the Test Administration Certification
• While it's not testing time yet, the central office is working on updating student lists.

5. I know I sent an summary of feedback to everyone in the fall. Here is another summary about formative feedback that has practical applications to your work within your classes. Take a look at the example feedback phrases...

Three Ways Feedback Can Be Ineffective – and How to Do Better

            In this Harvard Business Reviewarticle, Marcus Buckingham (ADP Research Institute) and Ashley Goodall (Cisco Systems) take a close look at how employees are supervised and evaluated. The underlying question: “How can we help each person thrive and excel?” Sometimes simple, technical information is needed for a person to perform well – for example, in an operating room, there is a correct way to give an injection, and a nurse who misses a step needs to be told. 

            But with higher-level performance, many managers’ well-intentioned approach to giving feedback is ineffective. “On that,” say Buckingham and Goodall, “the research is clear: Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinderslearning.” Why? Because feedback is often based on three fallacies:

            •Fallacy #1: The source of truth– “Our evaluations are deeply colored by our own understanding of what we’re rating others on,” say Buckingham and Goodall, “our own sense of what good looks like for a particular competency, our harshness or leniency as raters, and our own inherent and unconscious biases… Recipients have to struggle through this forest of distortion in search of something that they recognize as themselves.” And the errors supervisors make in giving feedback to employees are systematic and can’t be corrected by averaging multiple ratings, any more than a color-blind person’s perception of the redness of a rose can be corrected by looking at the flower several times, or by averaging the ratings of a number of other color-blind people.

            The solution: Ask for the other person’s perception of the situation. In a hospital room, this means the doctor asking the patient, “On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being high, how would you rate your pain?” What matters is the patient’s subjective assessment, and the doctor can’t second-guess that. “Just as your doctor doesn’t know the truth of your pain, we don’t know the truth about our colleagues, at least not in any objective way,” say Buckingham and Goodall. “All we can do – and it’s not nothing – is share our own feelings and experiences, our own reactions. Thus we can tell someone whether his voice grates on us; whether he’s persuasiveto us; whether his presentation is boring to us.We may not be able to tell him where he stands, but we can tell him where he stands with us. Those are our truths, not his. This is a humbler claim, but at least it’s accurate.” 

            •Fallacy #2: The theory of learning – We believe that our feedback is “the magic ingredient that will accelerate someone’s learning,” say the authors. “Again, the research points in the opposite direction. Learning is less a function of adding something that isn’t there than it is of recognizing, reinforcing, and refining what already is… According to brain science, people grow far more neurons and synaptic connections where they already have the most neurons and synaptic connections. In other words, each brain grows most where it’s already strongest… Focusing people on their shortcomings or gaps doesn’t enable learning. It impairs it… Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly… [W]e learn most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate it intelligently.” 

            •Fallacy #3: The theory of excellence –Good performance is highly personal and idiosyncratic, say Buckingham and Goodall; there isn’t a single prefabricated description, whether for basketball, stand-up comedy, or teaching: “Show a new teacher when her students lost interest and tell her what to do to fix this,” say the authors, “and while you may now have a teacher whose students don’t fall asleep in class, you won’t have one whose students necessarily learn any more.” Another thing: excellence isn’t the mirror image of failure, so we don’t get insights on success by looking at poor performance or doing exit interviews.

But for an individual, moving toward excellence is relatively straightforward: appreciate what’s good and cultivate it through specific guidance tuned to that person’s unique experiences and style, with the end in sight. This is how coach Tom Landry turned around the Dallas Cowboys: rather than focusing on missed tackles and bungled plays, he combed through films of previous games and compiled for each player a highlight reel of effective performance. “His instincts told him that each person would improve his performance most if he could see, in slow motion, what his own personal version of excellence looked like,” say Buckingham and Goodall. “You can do the same. Whenever you see one of your people do something that worked for you, that rocked your world just a little, stop for a minute and highlight it… ‘That! Yes, that!... Did you see what you did there?’” and describe why it worked. This helps the person anchor it, be better able to recreate it, and subsequently refine it.

The authors share some additional pointers on how to give feedback in a way that fosters excellence:

-  Instead of, “Can I give you some feedback?” say “Here’s my reaction.”

-  Instead of, “Good job!” say “Here are three things that really worked for me. What was going through your mind when you did them?”

-  Instead of, “Here’s what you should do,” say “Here’s what I would do.” 

-  Instead of, “Here’s what you need to improve,” say “Here’s what worked best for me, and here’s why.”

-  Instead of, “That didn’t really work,” say “When you did x, I felt y or I didn’t get that.” 

-  Instead of, “You need to improve your communication skills,” say “Here’s exactly where you started to lose me.”

-  Instead of, “You need to be more responsive,” say “When I don’t hear from you, I worry that we’re not on the same page.” 

-  Instead of, “You lack strategic thinking,” say “I’m struggling to understand your plan.”

-  Instead of, “You should do x [in response to a request for advice],” say “What do you feel you’re struggling with, and what have you done in the past that’s worked in a similar situation?”

“The Feedback Fallacy” by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in Harvard Business Review, March-April 2019 (Vol. 97, #2, p. 92-101), https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy

6. Perhaps we can use some humor as winter may be with us for quite some time... A Serious Look At Humor in Schools

            In this article in Independent School, California school leaders Duncan Lyon and Olaf Jorgenson report on their exploration of the role of humor in school leadership. They quote Alison Beard from a 2014 Harvard Business Reviewarticle: “Laughter relieves stress and boredom, boosts engagement and well-being, and spurs not only creativity and collaboration, but also analytic precision and productivity.” Humor can also be a memory aid because funny moments are emotionally charged, and can help de-escalate conflicts, making people less argumentative and defensive. 

            But research shows that after the age of 23, Americans laugh less than when they were younger; their self-perception turns toward seriousness. Lyon and Jorgenson offer these suggestions to ramp up people’s “humor IQ”:

            • Laugh at yourself. Self-deprecation paradoxically signals self-confidence, humanizes a leader, balances positional authority, creates connections with others, and implicitly gives permission for others to be funny. 

            • Be authentic, using the kind of humor that works for you. “It’s not whether you’re funny,” say the authors, “it’s what kind of funny you are.”

            • Being clever is often enough. “If you can’t be ‘ha-ha’ funny, at least be ‘a-ha!’” say Lyon and Jorgenson. 

            • Create an in-group. Humor can be like a conspiracy, especially if it’s about things everyone is worried about. 

            • Occasionally be goofy. One school leader covered everything in a colleague’s office with aluminum foil.

            • Avoid aggressive humor. This includes roasts, teasing, sarcasm, mocking, and punching down to lower-status colleagues. 

            Everyone surveyed for this article, conclude Lyon and Jorgenson, “agreed that the most successful school leaders have an evolved sense of humor – whether by default or practiced design – and that humor is an inextricable trait of a healthy school culture.”