"Critical Friend" Kevin

Before coming to Borgia, I had never experienced anything quite like our annual dinner auction. The thematic decorations alone are amazing! However, I think it is the collection of special people who come together to make this event happen, and the special people who attend that make the event truly amazing. This year, the coordinating committee continued a tradition of incorporating our Knight mascot into the theme by calling it a "Knight of Heroes." A year into our involvement in the area's new Navy ROTC program, we invited ROTC students to present the colors and senior Joe Schafer to play Reveille in an effort to pay tribute to the heroes who had served our country's branches of the military. Each wall of the gym featured a branch of the military in large, bubble letters, allowing the names of those who had served (or were serving) to be inscribed in the middle.  With that, the night began in a special way. However, we were just getting started! Each year, Borgia r...

Earlier this school year our students began taking a new test called the Aspire. This test was designed to give students, their parents, and the school an accurate prediction of the student's future ACT score. As should be expected, some students did very well. We should anticipate more high ACT averages in Borgia's future. But more importantly, some students did not do as well as they might have hoped. What should we do about that? While the ACT is NOT always a predictor of future success (I don't believe), it is a way for colleges to decide who to let in and who to give scholarships to. One of our goals should be to help students create as many post-high school options as possible, so that is one reason why the ACT is important to me...and that is why the Aspire is so important to me. If we can find a way to get ACT scores up, students will have more options after graduating from Borgia. However, the Aspire provides us with more than an opportunity to help ACT scores. As ...

This year at Borgia we have established a faculty committee called the Honors and Awards Committee. The group was designed to coordinate the selection of award recipients and to create communication to parents and students regarding awards that exist. Our goal also was to find new awards that our students may be eligible for. Last night, we made our initial selections for the "Glory of Missouri Awards." These awards are given to sophomore students who best embody the 14 virtues engraved in the House Chamber in Jefferson City. So, we had the chance to choose a student who represented the following: knowledge, law, temperance, fraternity, liberty, equality, justice, education, progress, honor, truth, virtue, enterprise, and charity.  We first had faculty nominate the students who they felt fell into these categories, and we had an overwhelming number of nominations. So, at last night's meeting, the debates began...and these debates were so much fun. Having the chance to dis...

This week's hot topic at Borgia is last week's eLearning Day. This day represented the first time in our history that students had academic responsibility on what would have been a stress-free snow day in the past. I have a lot of thoughts on how it turned out: 1. The day worked really well. Some snow days are easy to call; Thursday's snow day was not easy to call. However, student safety is always at the forefront of those decisions, so we felt really good about the fact that we could keep them off the roads and still have learning take place. 2. While some students were disappointed that we didn't just call a snow day because we have two built-in and haven't used either of them, I think the majority of them understood that we want to save those in-case of a larger storm and the potential to miss a string of days still this winter. I think some students recognized that we had this idea in place and wanted to try it, as well. 3. Reviews were admittedly mixed. Howeve...

One of the great things about going to high school is the opportunity to be part of a team. Whether a student chooses to play a sport or not, he or she has the opportunity to show up and root for the team. When Borgia wins "State," we all win State. Especially at Borgia, team spirit is plentiful.  Sometimes, we have the opportunity to rally around other causes much like we rally around our teams. And in the case of the Pro-Life trip, the team is much bigger than our students experience with the other teams they support. The Pro-Life Trip experience, however, begins with Borgia rallying together as a team. This past fall, our campus minister Andy Halaz put extra energy into helping students to recognize that the Pro-Life trip is an opportunity to come together spiritually. We wanted to fill a bus with Borgia students going to Washington D.C. to march for this worthy cause. We succeeded! This was our first victory as a team.  In doing so, we had to remind students that a trip t...

To best understand rubrics and how they are used in education, I encourage you to consider an activity that is routine, such as setting the table for dinner. Consider the different activity that goes into setting the table: placement of dishes, placement of utensils, and placement of napkins may be a few. Some of you might like to have a tablecloth down or candles lit, depending on the atmosphere you are trying to achieve. At my house, we all set the table on different days. Sometimes, my four year-old Cosette sets the table. On these nights, we sometimes have a legitimate amount of ice in our glasses, but other times we might just have a cube or two. Sometimes my fork is found next to somebody else's plate, but at least she gets it to the table. She also places napkins on the table, but those might seem to be thrown there, as opposed to how my wife might place them. When my wife sets the table, we obviously have all of our utensils in the right places, often our drinks are already...

In a traditional grading system, the "zero" grade can have some relatively extreme effects. At Borgia, we don't want the effect of the zero to change student grades so drastically that they no longer have the letter grade that represents one's knowledge and skills.  For instance, "Matt" may be a very talented student who thoroughly understands physics. However, if Matt fails to turn in a couple of assignments, his grade wouldn't indicate this. Let's assume that Matt earned the following grades: Quiz A: 36 out of 40 Test A: 100 out of 100 Lab A: 75 out of 80 Project: 0 out of 100 Quiz B: 40 out of 40 Test B: 98 out of 100 Lab B: 80 out of 80 Matt has an "A" or "B" on all six of the assignments he completed, but that one zero changes his overall grade to a 79%, "C." In fact, if we eliminate that missed assignment entirely, he has a 97.5%, A. If Matt had turned in that assignment and got the lowest of passing grades (70%), ...

The term "reassessment" is a relatively new word at Borgia, but its practice is anything but new. Good teachers recognize when something was amiss at test time, and that's what the reassessment part of our grading policy is meant to encourage. We want our teachers to recognize whether... a. the whole class struggled with an assessment and material may need to be retaught. b. individual students struggled with an assessment and may need extra support. Not to take the responsibility off of students, we want them to be able to recognize the need to "re-learn" and then reassess material, too! I have heard some concerns that life doesn't allow for second chances, so we should not be allowing for second chances in our schools. However, I have two problems with that position. 1. Life does allow for second chances, quite frequently.  If I fail my driver's test, I am not banned from hitting the roads forever. Instead, I get as many additional chances I need, so l...

Borgia's new gradebook policy states that our grades shall be composed of summative marks. Today, I would like to address what that means and why we have chosen to comprise our grades this way. In education, we have two different types of assignments: "formative" and "summative." In his book "Fair Isn't Always Equal," educational researcher Rick Wormeli best defines these terms with a medical metaphor. He writes that a formative assignment is an assignment "for learning," while a summative assignment is an assessment "of learning"...so a formative assignment is like going to the doctor for a physical, and a summative assignment is like an autopsy. Meaning, all of the formative assignments we give are meant to be opportunities to realize our current state of understanding (just as a physical allows us to know our current state of health), but the summative mark in the gradebook is the final mark: the learning is finished and it...