1.  In a mid-June seminar Barbara Friesth, Staff Development Director for Education Service Unit #7 in Columbus, Nebraska, had 15 teachers share their LtoJ stories, charts, and student documents. The teachers were from  Columbus and the surrounding school districts.  Attached is a PDF showing seven of the documents that should be of interest to readers.

      A.  A middle school graph showing the students competing with last years students.  The students were not competing with each other, which creates loser and winner classes, but competing with students in the same period a year ago.

      B.  A high school teacher's bucket of math concepts from grade 7 math to geometry.  (In this school the sequence is algebra I and II before geometry.)  The weekly LtoJ quiz in geometry is 6 geometry questions, 1 algebra II, 1 algebra I, 1 pre-algebra and 1 grade seven question.

      C.  A colorful run chart from St. Anthony's Catholic School.  Each student had a turn coloring in the column.  As you can see the columns start out bland and gradually become creative with each student adding their own flair.  (Also note the stickers for all-time-bests.)

      D.  A church behavior graph from the same school.  Each child's interruption of the priest, or other mis-behavior, was recorded. 

      E.  The quizzes for a country school with multiple grades.  All students, regardless of grade level take the LtoJ quiz at the same time.

      F.  A  list of concepts highlighted by a student as questions were answered correctly on the weekly quiz.  Item analysis is not only for the whole class (tally marks or Pareto chart), but is also for each student to track their own learning.

      G.  A scatter diagram with students adding their own dots each week. 

If you want to contact any of these particular teachers, write to Barb Friesth, bfriest@esu7.org.

2.  When teachers share their LtoJ stories, a consistent theme that emerges is the whole class cheering the success of a student who is struggling.  If you have particular stories of a classroom of students cheering on a lower performing student, please share with me at Lee@LtoJConsulting.com. 

 3.   Attached is a PDF of the directions for creating a Pareto Chart in Excel.

4.  Recently I came across an Indiana University document entitled "Voices of Students on Engagement."  You can access it at http://ceep.indiana.edu/hssse/. It reports the results of surveys given to students in 110 high schools from all regions of the US.  Some of the results are: 

       "Why do you go to school?"  34% "Because I enjoy being in school." 

      "Have you ever been bored in school?"  50% "Every day"

      "The school rules are fair."  47% disagree.  (I share at every LtoJ seminar the story of Darren Overton, principal, making school-wide changes based upon the advice of students with multiple discipline referrals.)

 5.  All prior newsletters and attachments are posted on the LtoJ Consulting web site, http://www.ltojconsulting.com/.  If you change e-mail addresses, please go the web site and sign up as if a new recipient of the newsletter.  Please include name, e-mail address and state, if USA, and country if outside of the US. 

Lee Jenkins, Lee@LtoJConsulting.com