Instructional Rounds Team Alpha!

Today is the 2nd time this year that Team Alpha has participated in our internal instructional rounds and our 4th day of rounds this year! I appreciate this groups efforts and dialogue around our problem of practice! Continuous improvement around the following areas is our goal:

• Strategic Questioning
• Challenging TASKS
• Discourse
• Student Engagement

We are fostering a culture where classroom instruction drives dialogue and serves as a catalyst for improvement and increasing student achievement! - Mr. LaPuma

TMEA -Creekview's A Cappella Choir Performs!!

Good afternoon and I hope everyone had a great weekend! Please indulge me while I share a bit about my weekend in San Antonio at this year's Texas Music Educators Association Clinic/Convention. What a treat it was to be a part of our A Cappella Choir as they performed at TMEA on Friday. I could not be more proud of a group of students and teachers. Not only were our students focused and prepared, but they also behaved so very well! A few of our students even wrote and left thank you notes for the housekeepers who cleaned their hotel rooms!! The Creekview Choral department has a rich tradition of high achievement and added to that tradition and reputation with their performance this past Friday at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. In front of a large crowd of educators, parents, and other students from across the United States, the A Cappella delivered with six beautiful pieces. I would like to thank Tara Sikon, our choral director, and Brian Murray our associate director, for the efforts and commitment that each of you have made while working with our outstanding students! I would also like to thank our talented students for their efforts. Hard work and commitment (and of course talent) can sound so amazingly beautiful!

Our A Cappella Choir is a shining star in our district and a great example of the outstanding opportunities that are provided to the students in C-FB ISD and at Creekview High School!

Excellent read from Grant Wiggins

Good vs. great teachers: how do you wish to be remembered?

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by grantwiggins in School Reform, Teaching

≈ 22 Comments

There are endless articles, blogs, essays on the difference between good and bad teachers. All the frameworks for teacher evaluation highlight the shades of difference. But to my eye there are far too few adequate analyses of the difference between good and great teachers.
I actually find that latter distinction more interesting, in a similar vein to the Jim Collins inquiry on businesses: how does one go from good to great? And like Collins, I think the difference is qualitative – The actions, behavior, and attitudes of great teachers differ considerably from those of good teachers; it’s not just a matter of degree. (That’s why I find almost all the well-known evaluation systems humdrum – they focus on mere goodness instead of being designed backward from greatness. That’s for another blog).
Let me propose a set of distinctions – admittedly a bit glib – that may have value for sharpening our sense of what greatness is in teaching:

• Great teachers are in the talent-finding and talent-development business.
• Merely good teachers think they are mostly in the business of teaching stuff and helping students so that it gets learned.

• Great teachers are aiming for the future: are these students better able to succeed on their own after me and without me?
• Merely good teachers look mostly to the past: did they learn what I taught and did they do what I asked of them?

• Great teachers decide what not to teach to ensure lasting emphases and memories
• Good teachers cover a lot of ground while making the content as interesting as possible.

• Great teachers delight in smart-alecks and skeptics who clearly have raw but undirected talent.
• Good teachers are often threatened or bothered by smart alecks and skeptics.

• Great teachers know us better than we know ourselves, especially in terms of intellectual character.
• Good teachers merely know us as students of the subject.

• Great teachers get more from us than we thought possible to give
• Good teachers have high expectations and passions, and think that the rest is up to us.

• Great teachers sometimes bend the rules and fudge the grades on behalf of raw student talent.
• Good teachers uphold standards and grade according to the scores students earned.

Here is a report from a student’s science teacher – from the elite British school of Eton, no less – who in a final report makes clear his stance as a “good” teacher:

Alas for this teacher, the student in question grew up to be a Nobel prize winner who cheekily displays this report on his web site and has it framed in his office.
Such stories are not amusing outliers. I have personally witnessed many such reports and attitudes as a student, teacher, parent, and colleague.
I have often in workshops told the story of a former student of mine, Chris, who was mostly successful but viewed as a big pain-in-the-you-know-what by many of his teachers. I saw Chris up close not only as his teacher but as the advisor to the school paper where he was editor. He once got us all in trouble by writing an expose of the work and living conditions of the school’s cafeteria and building and grounds workers – published on parents’ day, no less. The Dean confiscated all the copies. I admired him and fought on his behalf a few times.
Chris grew up to be Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-winning report for the New York Times.
Many talented people in the arts are famously hard to deal with; John Lennon and James Brown are familiar examples. And speaking of talent recognition, Lennon and the Beatles notoriously FAILED their audition at Decca Records in 1962. (I have a high-quality bootleg of the tape: you can hear a song on my band’s site here.) Jaime Escalante, one of the most well-known great teachers, was extremely difficult to work with (as reported in the wonderful Jay Mathews account of Escalante’s work at Garfield HS). Had it not been for his Principal and some other knowing supervisors, Escalante would likely have never accomplished what he did. I saw a teacher in Portland HS in Maine years ago who was the greatest teacher I ever saw – Leon Berkowitz. He refused to join with his colleagues on school reform projects and was notoriously cranky.
There are numerous such stories about Albert Einstein, as readers no doubt know. (Alas, many of them are untrue, such as the story that he did poorly all through school.) But Einstein clearly bristled under the kind of good teachers I am describing (as recounted in Isaacson’s biography of Einstein):

He would later be able to pull off his contrariness with a grace that was generally endearing, once he was accepted as a genius. But it did not play so well when he was merely a sassy student at the Munich Gymnasium. “He was very uncomfortable in school,” according to his sister. “He found the style of teaching – rote drills, impatience with questioning – to be repugnant…the systematic training in the worship of authority was particularly unpleasant.”

Skepticism and a resistance to received wisdom became a hallmark of his life. As he proclaimed in a letter to a fatherly friend in 1901, “a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”

I once led a workshop on critical thinking and asked teachers to fill out a T-chart with critical on one side and uncritical on the other. Curiously, many teachers proposed such indicators as attentive, disciplined, and follows directions and procedures carefully as indicative of critical thinkers. When I suggested that those sounded to me like indicators of compliance a teacher noted that, indeed, when she had proposed “skeptical” at her table they had rejected it as the hallmark of uncritical thinkers!
This is all very personal for me, as you might guess. I was a smart aleck; I was not a successful student for many years. It wasn’t until one high school teacher and one college teacher saw some talent in me to nourish that I turned the corner and began to believe in my worth as a thinker. I still seethe with dislike for a teacher who never once praised me for anything I did all year (though he was a very good teacher and highly respected by others). I almost dropped out of both college and grad school in the face of teachers who didn’t know me, didn’t care to know me, and only cared to give me low grades to teach me a lesson about hard work and scholarship. When I decided to be a teacher – in part, motivated to right the wrongs inflicted on me – I vowed to find and reward learners who showed potential, whether as thinkers, soccer players, teachers, trainers or unit writers. And I can honestly say that of all I have accomplished as an educator (and as a parent) I am most proud of what I have accomplished as a talent scout.
So, ask yourself, honestly: do your behaviors and attitudes suggest that you are sufficiently in the scouting and talent-development business? Or do they suggest that you are too much in the content-mastery business? (Notice I am not saying that it is impossible to be both; I am talking about the good teacher as being too focused on one and not the other).
Yes, yes, I know the pressures on you; I know the schedules, the syllabi, the standards, the evaluation system, the pressures of 700-page textbooks. Please, consider, however: do you think greatness comes without challenge and sacrifice, in teaching or anything else? More pointedly: do you really believe in the long run that it is mastery of your content that determines a student’s long-term fate? Can’t you think of teachers whose greatness lay in their ability to see and promote – sometimes at the expense of time, rules or policies – what others ignored in you? How, then, do you wish to be remembered as a teacher: merely good? Or great?

PS: For a nice story on teachers who were in the business of talent development and not content mastery, listen to Terry Gross’ re-played interview of Dave Brubeck on his death where Brubeck describes the ‘crisis’ at the end of his conservatory studies. http://www.npr.org/2012/12/07/166724259/celebrating-the-life-of-jazz-pianist-dave-brubeck

Crisis Drill Notification

Dear Creekview Community,

This notice is to inform you in advance that during the week of December 10-14, Creekview High School will be participating in a practice Crisis Drill. This drill will involve the Creekview faculty and students, Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD security personnel, and Carrollton Police and Fire departments.

The crisis drill will involve the entire school from the perspective that we will be implementing and practicing our lockdown codes.

This rehearsed drill will impact our students and staff for approximately 45 minutes.

Sincerely,

Joe LaPuma

Principal

Creekview HS

Creekview High School’s Safe Driving Campaign Earns Top 10 Spot for 2012-2013

Check Presentation at Halftime of Varsity Boys Home Basketball Game on Nov. 27

Carrollton,TX, Nov.26, 2012 – Students at Creekview High School in Carrollton are working to reduce risky driving behaviors that lead to motor vehicle crashes, the number one killer of teens. Creekview High was selected through a competitive process as one of this year’s Top 10 Project Ignition campaigns from across the United States and Canada. Project Ignition is a service-learning program sponsored by State Farm® and coordinated by the National Youth Leadership Council®.
Creekview’s Project Ignition team will receive $5,000 to support their participation in the National Service-Learning Conference® in the spring of 2013 in Denver, CO. In addition, they will receive a $2,500 grant to implement their yearlong project during the school year. Earlier this year, Creekview was awarded a $2,000 Project Ignition grant to implement their “Good Habits + Careful Driving= Arriving Alive” campaign.
Creekview High School will also be awarded a $2,500 grant for their participation in State Farm’s inaugural Celebrate My Drive® program, which has been billed as the largest one day gathering of new teen drivers ever. The Celebrate My Drive event was on Sept 15 and involved schools in 400 cities across the US and Canada. The local event was at the Stone Briar Mall in Frisco.
To celebrate Creekview’s achievements and dedication to teen driver safety, State Farm will present a check in the school’s gym at halftime of Creekview’s varsity boys home basketball game,  Nov. 27. Tipoff is at 7:30pm as the Mustangs take on R.L.Turner. Media is invited to attend.
“Congratulations to Creekview High for this wonderful accomplishment,” said Mark Cockerham, State Farm’s Vice President of Agency for the DFW area. “We are grateful for students like these who, through Project Ignition and Celebrate My Drive, join us in promoting teen driver safety.”

Superintendent Dr. Burns Visits Creekview

I would like to thank C-FB ISD Superintendent Dr. Burns who visited Creekview today and attended our after school faculty meeting. It is great to work in a district where the superintendent knows so many faculty memebers by name and comes out to visit with our awesome staff! I appreciate it and I know the staff does as well. Thank you Dr. Burns!

Mock Trial & Hurricane Sandy

What an honor it was last week to be able to travel to Brooklyn, New York with the Mock Trial Team as they competed in the Empire City 6th Annual Mock Trial Invitational. The students from our Mock Trial team are a remarkable group of young men and women who have demonstrated an extraordinary amount of dedication and initiative as they prepared, planned and saved money for this academic competition! Mr Myers our Mock Trial Teacher as well as Amy Toy, Creekview's Law Academy Director have given many hours to get our students prepared for the Invitational!
The competition traveled to New York from schools in Ireland, South Korea, United Kingdom, Canada, California, Washington, Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, California, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, and Connecticut! Yes, this is big time and the second year in a row that the Creekview team was invited! Thirty six schools from around the world were prepared to do battle in the case of Happy Land Toy Company!
The good news is that we all arrived safely and were able to participate for part of the tournament. The bad news was that Hurricane Sandy had some bad intentions that caused us to change our flight plans and Escape from New York two days early! What a great decision that was- the hurricane was heading our way and we held a meeting with the Mock Trials captains to determine the best course of action.....and yes, they delivered. The plan to leave early was not an easy decision to make...well for some it was....I must say it was not easy to leave New York but knowing the the so called FrankenStorm was bearing down on us made it a bit easier.....In spite of our early departure, it was a trip worth remembering and worth attending in the future if the opportunity arises. It was also great to see the Creekview students practicing, preparing, and delivering on the case. I could not be more proud of a group of students and I look forward to our state competition in early 2013!