April 8

April 8, 2008
Dear Parents:
I hope everyone had a restful spring break and is ready to have a ROARing stretch run for the 2007-2008 school year. I also hope that everyone enjoyed the March Reading Madness event and dressing as their favorite story character before Spring Break.
Those of you that have been reading my messages for the past three years (by the way – I just had my three year anniversary as Principal of Swift Creek!) realize that I love analogies, metaphors, historical references and comparisons, etc… Anything that helps me tell a story a little better. Instinctively, I knew that drawing similarities and differences would help to weave a good tale and get my point across to others. It also creates an image that helps cement the thought in people’s memories. Well, I definitely had a small smile and moment of satisfaction when I was recently reading an educational research text by Dr. Robert Marzano entitled Classroom Instruction the Works. The book describes nine categories of instructional strategies that have the strongest effect on student achievement. Dr. Marzano has found that the top instructional strategy to improve student achievement is to identify similarities and differences by comparing, classifying, creating metaphors and analogies, and using graphic organizers for comparisons. I was pretty happy that I had been effectively using a research based strategy that truly impacts achievement. SO, the next time you are trying to get your child to understand a difficult concept or if you want them to understand something even deeper – it will be extremely effective to provide the opportunity to identify similarities and differences.
Now for business. This first week back from spring break, you may hear your child talking about Town Meetings at Swift Creek. Administration, teachers, and support staff will sit down with the students and facilitate town meetings with every grade level this week to refocus the students on our ROAR expectations. Our data trends show that discipline referrals spike when spring fever hits. We will be working hard to reinforce our expectations and reteaching them explicitly to our students. It would be great if parents helped reinforce the ROAR expectations at home. You can find ROAR posters for every area of the school under the academic link of our website. Also, if you are really interested, we certainly would not mind for you to pop in and see one of the town meetings!
Until next time – keep on ROARing!
Jim