Upcoming Events

May 15

•  School Budget Vote, BCHS, 7 a.m.-9 p.m.

May 17

•  BCMS Art Show, 5-7 p.m.

May 18

•  Grade 6 Early Dismissal, 10:20 a.m.

May 22

•  BCMS Interim Report Cards on BC@Home

May 25-28

•  Memorial Day Weekend, NO SCHOOL

May 30-31

•  Book Fair

May 30

•  Literary Fair

June 4

•  BCMS Grade 6 Concert, 7 p.m.

•  BCMS High Honors Reception

 

 

 

   COMPLETE CALENDAR

 

Principal's Corner

BCMS Writes

April 16, 2012

To all of our parents and students;

As you are hopefully aware we at BCMS have been in the midst of a building-wide writing initiative. This initiative arose as a result of our students’ performance on their NYS English Language Arts exams last year. Our results last year were lower than in years past with nearly 25% of our students scoring in levels 1 and 2. While the test last year was not substantially different than in years past, the way the tests were scored was dramatically different and made more difficult for students to score at their previous level.

Given this change to the exam we anticipated some change in the number of our students who scored at levels 1 and 2, but we did not expect the number to be as high as 25 percent.

What follows is a description of our process leading us into this year’s testing:

In August we were made aware of our students’ scores on their ELA state exams. Our performance left us with a source of frustration that we did not immediately attribute to the fault of our students. Upon deeper looks into our data we discovered that all of our students could improve with their “writing for response.” Our administrative team, which includes our building administration, our district administration, and all of our content area supervisors, unanimously agreed on the urgency of our goal to select students writing as a focus and that its impact would be universally felt across all of our content areas.

Many will note that our priorities for undertaking this initiative were simply a response to poor testing results, but that would only be partly true. What many fail to realize are the following goals that make this an even greater imperative:

(Our TOP Priority) We want our students to be better writers!

If you are like most adults (and you write well) you likely cannot point to any particular part of your K-12 experience that made you a better writer. In other words, writing is not easy. It can be tedious and disengaging. It is often a developmental hurdle of students in middle school that many never get over. It is our endeavor to not accept this as a reality for our students. It is our goal to give every student greater confidence in their writing by showing them quantified progress this year. See our results thus far here [PDF].

(Our 2nd Priority) The Transfer of Skills

Too often students do not recognize that writing is as important in science, or math, as it is in their ELA class. When students successfully transfer skills between content areas their overall understanding improves and their confidence in all areas soars.

(Our 3rd Priority) Teaching students how to engage when things aren’t exciting!

To be a strong student, any person needs to be able to engage and focus when the subject at hand is not an immediate personal interest. Becoming a strong writer requires patience, resilience and the ability to work through challenges.

(Lastly) We DO want our students to perform better on their assessments!

We prioritize this last because we want to emphasize a curriculum that is not test-driven! We want our community to see that our curriculum is driven by inquiry and by messages of character and of building well-rounded students. We want a curriculum that emphasizes what students will need for their future and not necessarily for a test. We do however want to see our students succeed in everything they do. We therefore take great pride in how our students do on their exams and we certainly want to see them excel!

Our Initiative to date:

So far this year we have had three building-wide assessments of students’ writing. Our first was in September and served as our baseline. Our goal was to see if students’ writing echoed the results we saw on the NYS exams (which they did for the most part).

We have just finished collecting data from our third round of assessments. See our results thus far here [PDF]. Our second and third assessments occurred in all of our content areas and were supported by every teacher in our building.

Our training of non-English Language Arts (ELA) staff

Most, if not all, of our content area teachers (Math, Science, Social Studies, Health, Art, Music, Family and Consumer Science, Physical Education, Technology, World Languages) are not trained nor accustomed to assessing students’ writing. We have supported these staff with multiple in-service training opportunities throughout the year led by our ELA staff and administration. We worked on the design of assessments, the implementation of these, and trained all staff on how to score students’ papers using the NYS writing rubric (see description below).

Our Response to Students’ Needs:

As we process the results of our writing exercises we are sharing the results with our students. We are providing students with feedback about their progress in four writing areas:
• Meaning – the extent to which a student’s response demonstrates solid understanding, interpretation, and analysis of the task and / or text
• Organization – the extent to which a student’s response is focused, clear, and logical in its direction
• Development – the extent to which a student’s ideas are elaborated and explained using specific and relevant evidence from the task and / or text
• Language – the extent to which the response shows an awareness of audience through effective use of words, sentence structure / variety, and conventions

The above four criterion parallel the New York State Department of Education’s writing standards and we score on a four point rubric, which we then present to students.

We need our parents as partners!

We remain driven by the knowledge that becoming an effective writer opens up opportunities to students that in many cases they cannot yet see. We know that students struggle with writing. Many would rather never write.
• We hope that you, in your role as parent, will collaborate with us to explain and share why this initiative is so impacting and so important. (We will be continuing it next year as a permanent part of our curriculum in all subject areas.)
• We need our students to come to becoming a better writer with acceptance, and to the extent that they do they will become more strongly in control of their engagement with the tasks we ask them to complete. When students grudgingly come to a task we know their performance suffers. We also know that our parents support us having high expectations of students even when some (perhaps all) students would rather we diminish these.
• We encourage parents to share with your son / daughter how much writing is a part of your adult life.
• Lastly, we hope that you will share this letter with your son / daughter and particularly that you will discuss how powerful a skill writing is by sharing the quote below.

The following quote was shared with our staff because I think it speaks to the power that writing has in our culture and because it does so at a level that our middle school students can intuitively understand:

“Throughout history, reading and writing have been regarded as politically dangerous. Why else have slaves, prisoners and other minorities and majorities been denied the opportunity to read as well as write? But writing stays the far more worrisome and incendiary process. A reading citizen can come to comprehend and criticize societal mores as well as governmental acts and decisions. But only a citizen who elects to write can cause genuine trouble, can become the radical, the revolutionary. A reading citizen stays a client, a consumer of a culture; a writing citizen becomes its creator or destroyer.”
-From Brian Cambourne’s "The Whole Story"

In closing, when one comes to love writing it is typically when one’s writing convention and mechanic are strong enough to stay out of the way and the writer is allowed a degree of freedom to create flow. Our ultimate goal, as alluded to in the quote above, is not to have students prepare for tests, but to have them be in control of their lives when they are adults. This means being able to be more than a ‘client’ or ‘consumer’ of culture. What we want for our students is for them to have the skill, knowledge and character to be the positive shapers of our culture.

Thank you for your continued support and for your partnership in helping us maintain high expectations that meet our students potential!

Thank you,
Mike Klugman
Principal