A report from Dana who is working with the very same 8th grade students who as 6th graders two years ago are the very students who invented the Invsibles concept:
Hi Ben,
I just have to share with you. Even though we lost a lot of your original Invisibles students, this group is lots of fun. Last week we created the characters Quad Cakes. I’ve attached the description below. Today, Beatrice brought in 24 chocolate and vanilla cupcakes filled with caramel and topped with rainbow coloured icing, just like our characters! I was so pumped and so was she. Her dad helped her bring them in and told me that she had to have them just like the story. Then he said she wasn’t too sure about the method for the first week but she’s now a believer. He was beaming and she’s so happy in class too.
An absolute success story!
Thank you,
Dana
4 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Dana Miller-Kitch”
Great! I hope Dana doesn’t have to face the struggle you did with the assessment criticisms from your administration there.
You remembered! Yeah, I think they are gone. It was so weird to be thus attacked, and I wasn’t eloquent enough to argue them down, nor did I care to since it was so silly ( a lot of attacks on what we do with CI are so silly!), since the evaluative model they were using was garbage. But yeah thanks for the thought Sean. I’d forgotten that dark day. If anyone wants to read it from two years ago, search “Authentic Assessment” in the search bar:
Sorry I had to bring up that dark day LOL. But happy news for Dana that she doesn’t have to go through that.
Speaking of which, we had a new instructional coach at the beginning of this year. That is, for a hot minute. He resigned. Phew! Because he was telling me he wanted to see more student talk, more practice. “I wish I had more practice with Spanish in my Spanish classes when I was a kid. I would have easily become fluent then. You know, my grandfather was Panamanian.”
I had to mull over this mandate of his for a good 24 hours before hearing the news that he had resigned. In my head, I was thinking, “Crap. It’s like I have a whole other class to prep for in this work I’m going to have to do to educate this admin!”
Hee hee!