Sioux Center Middle School Hosts Visiting Educators from Ogilvie MN—Guest Submission by Fred Nolan, AIW Coach

Can teachers from two states and over 300 miles apart score and learn from one another? Judging by the recent visit of Ogilvie MN High School teachers to Sioux Center IA Middle School, the answer is a resounding, “YES!” Principal Julie Schley, AIW Coach Katy Evenson, and seven Sioux Center teachers hosted Principal Jake Nelson, Superintendent Kathy Belsheim, three Ogilvie teachers, and AIW Coaches Fred Nolan and Jehanne Beaton Zirps. For Jehanne, it was a homecoming of sorts, as she was the original AIW Coach for Sioux Center’s Middle School. Now Sioux Center has gone district-wide with AIW.

Since Ogilvie went full school with AIW last year, Jehanne was instrumental in linking Ogilvie with Sioux Center (SC) to see what is possible multiple years into AIW in students’ engagement, HOT, Deep Conceptual Understanding, and Value Beyond School. 

SC rolled out the red carpet. Principal Schley began by providing background information on how SC uses AIW standards in unit planning, in curriculum mapping, in sharing with school board and parents through “fish-bowl” scoring, in raising expectations for students through rubrics, and through professional development for students. In their first PD for students, Principal Schley and Coach Evenson taught students HOT/LOT, explained what teachers are asking for from students and why, and discussed student responsibilities. Their next session will be on assessments and substantive conversations.

Five SC teachers from 5^th-8^th grade welcomed the MN visitors into their classrooms to see parts of lessons that were developed with AIW standards in mind. 

• Students in 6^th grade science were gaining deep understanding of the earth-moon system by preparing to study the phases of the moon with flashlights, blue balls and golf balls. (Jill Hulshof)
• 7^th grade students were using elaborated communications to debate the ethics of President Truman’s decision to use the atom bomb to end WWII. (Bruce Anliker)
• 6^th grade band members were constructing their knowledge of the E flat scale (which was new to them) in what can only be described as a game show with the “contestants” getting help from the audience. The band members then reflected on what they heard themselves play and evaluated whether the scales were played correctly. (Monica Boogerd)
• 5^th grade students were using three equations to solve story problems explaining why a particular formula fit a story problem. (Michael DeSmit)
• 8^th grade students in Humanities (English and History) were engaged in an entire class symposium (all desks in one circle) with student leaders, recorders, and observers. Among other questions posed by the leaders, the 8^th graders engaged in a spirited discussion of the relative merits of learning history from primary or secondary sources. (Joe’l VanderWaal)

In addition to AIW, other examples of high quality PD and pedagogy were present in the lessons including focusing on the big ideas such as the one posted in the social studies class: “Does nationalism cause conflicts?”; the use of KWL in science with posters of questions about astronomy and with post-its when learning had occurred; the multiple use of TAG, which is an SC rubric for students’ writing answers to questions; multiple uses of differentiation in the written assignments; and school-wide respect and responsibility posters. SC Middle School takes their responsibility to provide high quality instruction seriously, and it shows.

After a great lunch, the visit culminated with two scoring sessions with three groups of professionals with Ogilvie and SC intermixed. The first session was an assessment being designed by Jill H. for the astronomy unit she was currently teaching. All three groups’ scores were posted for all to see. The discussions revealed a remarkable similarity—whether participants were from SC or MN—on which portions of the standards were easier to score and the standards for which the assessment task was more difficult to score. And the full mixed group gave Jill a number of suggestions to consider.

The second scoring session was on instruction, and the video-taped lesson was a demonstration lesson from another PD initiative on essential and guiding questions. The overriding conclusion of the AIW scorers was that the lesson could have had much higher scores on HOT and substantive conversation had the teacher allowed students to articulate fully the conclusions they were reaching, instead of cutting the kids off and doing the summarizing himself. As one SC teacher put it, “It makes me so angry to see teachers do that and rob kids of the achievement of deep understanding themselves.”

For me, this highlights just how much farther AIW takes us as professionals in understanding that it is all about student learning. AIW provides us the language and processes of scoring together to continually improve our teaching skills, in order  to truly bring about student learning at a deeper level. 

Many thanks to Sioux Center Middle School for being such great hosts, and to Ogilvie for being such intrepid travelers. And apologies for having digital technology and not taking one picture the entire day. You do see the red spot on my forehead where I have hit my head one more time.