1. First of all, click below to see the
real picture of Lloyd Roettger, Professor at
University of Toledo and LtoJ Associate.
http://app.quicksizzle.com//images/gallery/16389/thumbnails/Lloyd.jpg (Last
month's photo was one of my favorite pictures
from a recent vacation in Scotland. These cows
are unique to the Highlands.)
2. I worked two delightful days at
Rochester, MN's John Marshall High School in
December. When I asked students how to
improve LtoJ quizzes, one student said to add
sound and another said to add graphics.
The quizzes in this particular biology class
were given using Power Point. The
suggestion was to add the sound and graphics to
the answer slides. And you know whose job
it is to add these graphics and sounds -- it is
the students' job.
3. I encourage readers of this
newsletter to consider using the cloze technique
with LtoJ. Cloze is a long used strategy
for assessing reading comprehension. An
appropriate passage is given to students with
every 5th or every 7th word eliminated.
Reading comprehension is assessed by the ability
of students to fill in the missing words.
If a school prepares cloze passages with the
exact same number of blanks each week, teachers
will have an easy way to see if their
instruction in reading comprehension is
working. See http://humanities.byu.edu/elc/Teacher/appendix/ClozeSample.html
for more information on cloze.
4. My article on the cost of
"Permission to Forget" can be accessed by
clicking on http://www.aasa.org/publications/saarticledetail.cfm?ItemNumber=5457.
5. Applications are now available to
present at the National Quality in Education
conference held in St. Louis, November
10-13. See http://nqec.asq.org/call-for-papers/index.html for
details.
6. Teachers who already are having
students graph one or more aspects of learning
can easily add a monthly enthusiasm chart.
Students merely place one dot per month on a
line indicating how happy they were with the
classroom. The dots are joined so
that students and teachers can more
easily observe the trend. The goal is
to make continual adjustments so all of the
students really do love the classroom. At
the very bottom of this newsletter is an
Enthusiasm Chart that can be downloaded and
copied. In the legend box different colors
can be designated for different aspects of the
classroom, either by subject or strands of
a subject. Credit for this graph goes to
Shelly Carson and Jeff Burgard who described
their process for improving classroom attitudes
while they were teaching middle school in
Redding, California. Their books can be
accessed at http://qualitypress.asq.org/perl/catalog.cgi?item=H0997.
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
