1.  At the annual National Quality in Education Conference (NQEC) keynote speaker, Elaine Dundon, spoke on Innovation.  She described several types of innovation including simple improvements to existing products.  One example was adding wheels to suitcases.  The LtoJ process is merely adding wheels to curriculum and instruction.  Educators already have one suitcase full of curriculum and another suitcase full of instructional strategies.  Readers of this newsletter know the power of adding "LtoJ wheels" to their curriculum and instruction suitcases.

2.  Kirby Lehman, superintendent of Jenks, OK school district, presented twice at NQEC.  In one of his presentations he shared a use of LtoJ that was new to me.  Each year there are five springtime finance committee meetings.  The purpose of the meetings is to receive recommendations to forward onto the school board and to have employees and citizens who are more knowledgeable of school finance laws.  Each night the members of the committee have an LtoJ quiz on school finance laws.  What a unique way for citizens to understand the process being used in the Jenks schools!

3.  The two major aspects of LtoJ are (1) alignment and (2) continuous improvement.  One way to simply implement the LtoJ process district-wide that would affect all schools and all grades is with editing practice (often called daily oral language).  First there has to be an agreement on the errors students are to find for each grade level, grades 1-12.  What errors are first graders expected to find, second graders up through high school seniors?  Second comes an agreement on how many errors are to be included in the weekly editing practice.  How many are to come from the current grade level and how many come from prior grade levels?  (For example, a school district staff could agree that students are to be given passages or sentences with eight errors each week with 5 selected from the new grade level errors and 3 from prior grade level errors).

Next is the LtoJ graphing process with total number of errors found being graphed by student, classroom, grade level and school.  If a particular school, for example, has 500 first to fifth grade students, then the students are working toward finding 4000 errors each week.  The progress is posted in the foyer of the school each week.  (Remember it is students who do the work of adding and graphing).

4.Math Vocabulary:  http://www.mathresources.com/products/insidemath/index.html is an interesting commercial on-line program available for helping students with math vocabulary. 

5. An interesting e-mail came this week: "I teach General Chemistry, and my students really look forward to the quizzes.  Each week they get excited about knowing more.  ALL of my students are getting excited about concepts we haven't even learned about yet.  When they see a question on a concept that hasn't been covered, they ask questions and want to know more.  It is a phenomenal experience.  These are the kids that tend to start off the year with 'I hate science, and I KNOW I will hate Chemistry.'  NOW they are having fun and looking forward to learning."  

 This is the essence of LtoJ in one paragraph. 

6.  Very often Power Point is used for LtoJ quizzes.  Attached below is a one slide Power Point presentation from Woody Wilson, history/social science teacher in Parkersburg, West Virginia.  I am sharing this as an example of using Power Point for LtoJ quizzes. The process is:

         a.  Determine the concepts to be learned by the end of the school year.   In this instance Woody has selected international locations. 

         b.  Create one slide per location.  The slides are animated.  When the slide is shown on the screen, only the map is visible.  A click on the space bar brings up the arrow pointing to a specific country.  Another click on the space bar brings up the answer:  (Colombia in this instance.)

         c.  During the LtoJ weekly quiz a random location number is chosen and the precise map is shown on the classroom TV with Power Point.  The precise location is selected in Power Point by typing in the number of the slide and then "enter."  This causes Power Point to move directly to the specific slide.

         d.  When correcting the quiz, the same process is repeated, except this time the space bar is clicked twice to bring the answer up on the screen.

(Let students create the Power Point quizzes; this need not be yet another chore for the teacher.)

7.  All prior newsletters and attachments are now posted on the LtoJ Consulting web site, 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