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In This Issue:
  • This Is Your Brain On...ON!
  • Reflecting and Growing Our Practice: Teacher Evaluation Rubrics and Professional Development
  • This Week's Events
  • On the Horizon
  • ISS Corner
  • Vanguardians Rising

This Week:
Mon Nov 14:
Young Women's Empowerment Group: During Advisory in the Library w/Leylah (see Leylah's email for list of students who attend)
School Leadership Team, 3:15, Room 412
Tues Nov 15:
Open House Tours 9-10am
Vanguard Student Government @ Lunch
Weds Nov 16:
Vertical Team Meetings: Morning
Radio Rookies: WNYC Radio Program for Students! @ 2:00pm, Rm 306
Afternoon PD:Whole Staff Comprehensive Education Plan Initiatives
Thurs Nov 17:
Recruitment Tours: 9:00-10:30
College Prep Meeting: Room 402 @ Lunch, all are welcome!
Friday Nov 18:
College Day Visits
ISS CORNER
This new section will present helpful tips for teachers from the ISS team.
  • Pace instruction carefully to ensure clarity.
  • Present new and or technical vocabulary on the board or chart paper.
  • Provide and teach memory associations (mnemonic strategies).
--Jo-Ann,
Email us if you have used any of these tips and let us know how it went!
Vanguardians Rising
  • Hersy Contreras has made it to the final interview for the Posse Foundation Scholarship -- which pays for four years of tuition at Lafayette College! Please congratulate her!
  • Vanguard Stars are up! Please acknowledge the students for their accomplishments!
Anything we missed? Let us know and we'll include it!
/ Vanguard High School Newsletter
Monday November 14, 2011
Vol. 1, No. 10
This Is Your Brain On...ON!

Ninth Grade Humanities students use their brains' executive function as they read and annotate
Over at the Edutopia blog, Dr Judy Willis, an authority on brain research as it relates to learning, writes: "For young brains to retain information, they need to apply it. Information learned by rote memorization will not enter the sturdy long-term neural networks in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) unless students have the opportunity to actively recognize relationships to their prior knowledge and/or apply new learning to new situations."
Dr. Willis gives some tips on engaging executive brain function in the classroom:
  1. Provide opportunities to apply learning through authentic, personally meaningful activities, thereby consolidating learning into networks that can be activated for new activities or problems.
  2. Introduce activities to support developing executive brain function. "Activities that can support executive function network development include comparing and contrasting, giving new examples of a concept, spiraled curriculum, group collaboration, open-ended discussions."
  3. Model higher order thinking skills, such as judgment; prioritizing; setting goals, providing feedback and self-monitoring; prior knowledge activation and transfer opportunities; and metacognition.
Be sure to check out the entire four part series -- and the website itself for more interesting topics in education and "Schools that Work" including one of our sister schools in the consortium, School of the Future.
Reflecting and Growing in Our Own Practice: Teacher Evaluation Rubrics and Professional Development
How are we creating rich instructional experiences for students? How can we support each other as we grow in our practice? If we have been teaching for a long time, how do we keep developing and learning?
These are just some of the questions we will be looking at during the year, as we think about how to best support student progress. Two teams have already started practicing peer observation, using low inference notetaking. And guess what? There's an app for that! In the app store, under eCove, there is a free observation tool that allows you to time teacher/student talk ratio and even levels of questioning according to Bloom's.
Two rubrics that are most popular for thinking about teaching are the Danielson Rubric and the Marshall Rubric. They are quite detailed, and the Danielson in particular is based on a constructivist model of learning, which is well suited for our work at Vanguard. We'll be talking more about these and other tools on November 16th.
Please take a look at these tools before Wednesday's meeting.
Math Study Center Full Steam Ahead!

Melissa helps Tiffany with Math Analysis as Jose works on Algebra
Please keep encouraging students to use this important resource!
Vanguard High School, 317 East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065 212-517-5175 vanguardnyc.net

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