 I'm Grady Edwards with Beau Gorszewski. Welcome to DISCAST, a podcast from the Ori County School's digital integration team. We believe that educational technology can be used to transform teaching and learning in the classroom. We strive to spotlight the good work our teachers are doing across our county and hope our discussions will inspire possibilities for your classroom. Your journey into the world of edtech starts right now. Welcome to the DISCAST! Thank you for taking the time to listen in on today's episode and boy do we have a treat for you today. Just a reminder, if you enjoy the DISCAST, please spread the word and let others know where we can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and more. You can also find DISCAST on our Dear Dis YouTube page, which has a link in the description. Feel free to give us a rating and provide some feedback. Alright Beau, let's get to it. Well, speaking of feedback, some of our listeners have suggested that we make some adjustments to our audio recording. We are now utilizing a Pile Sound Recording Booth Box, which should help out with our dialogue. Some of these booth boxes are already out in our district, and if you like to use one in your classroom, just contact your DISC. Thanks Beau. Let's start as we always do by congratulating our tech innovators of the month for March. Now we know we're a little behind, but we want to make sure to give a huge shout out to Mallory Davis of Sacastee Elementary, Jennifer Niefsey of Loris Middle and Jeffrey Layton of Carolina Forest High School. Great job, March Tech Innovators. Well, you know Grady. It has been great getting to hear from our various teachers and leaders throughout the district. Just in case our listeners missed it, check out Episode 4, where we interview Burgess Elementary teacher Bianca Basher and her principal, Samantha Coy, on how they are putting robots in the hands of primary students and their building capacity with computational thinking throughout the building. Just so engaging Grady. Have you heard from anyone doing something engaging or collaborative lately? Well, now that you mention it, Beau, you made me instantly think about my folks at Loris Middle School. I'd like to take a minute, if we could, Beau, to focus on the collaborative and engagement strategies happening across our district. All across Ori County Schools, you'll see engaging lessons and collaborative opportunities for students. For this specific episode of the DISCASS, we'd like to highlight the fantastic work taking place at Loris Middle when it comes to collaboration and engagement. I had the opportunity to sit down with the principal of Loris Middle School, Ms. Shelley Todd, and the school's instructional coach, Ms. Amber LaSalle, about ways they've incorporated engagement and collaboration into their school. Ms. Todd also shared some of the great work that her and her team are doing to build relationships. Let's listen in. Okay, hello, everybody. I am here at Loris Middle School with Ms. Shelley Todd, the principal here at the school, and I'm also with the instructional coach, Ms. Amber LaSalle. Ms. Todd, if you would for me, first of all, thank you for answering or taking the time to answer a couple questions. I know you're very busy here at the school, so we'll get right into it. First question. Classroom engagement has really grown this year across the classes that I visited. Has this been a point of emphasis in the planning that you've done this year? Absolutely. We're excited that our teachers have the opportunity to be Kagan trained by the district, and they have really embraced embedded engagement structures within their lessons. Each week when we meet with the collaborative planning sessions, we talk about what are you doing, when are you doing it, how are you doing it, and we intentionally plan for some Kagan structures. We've also encouraged not only our academic engagement structures, but we've also included team building and class building, and you said the silly sports and games because the kids respond really well when you're working with those type of structures. Very cool. Yeah, certainly the sense of community, teacher to student and teacher to teacher is really strong here at the school, so that's great. One of the strengths of this staff is, in my opinion, is the use of Kagan strategies. How have you increased teacher buy-in and promoted best practices with Kagan here at the school? One of the ways that we promote Kagan and have increased the buy-in is to reward teachers that have embedded the structures successfully by including shout-outs and recognition, and we as a leadership team also plan each month when we're doing faculty meetings to embed Kagan structures into our meetings so that we can showcase the value of the structures, how to do them, and that gives the teachers the opportunity to experience them as a student, so they see both sides of the structure. And we also had a Kagan visit recently by a consultant and anytime that we have those, we try to give another shout-out to our teachers for participating, so we hosted an ice cream social for the teachers that let us come into their rooms and provide coaching feedback in reference to the Kagan structure that they selected. Awesome, very cool. Yeah, I think I was actually here one of those days and it was really cool to see the number of teachers that you had actually participate. Something that I like to do in my sessions as well, something I'm trying to model is something you said about modeling the structure of the practice you're trying to do. I'm trying to, as I preach differentiation, I'm trying to differentiate my professional development sessions, so it's really cool that you're doing that for your teachers as well. Last question for you before we get you out of here. I noticed the bingo board in your mailroom and I thought it was really cool when you explained it to me, so for our listeners, can you explain what that is and how that's being used in the school? The bingo board in the mailroom was an idea to help boost staff from around and give them recognition for the things they're already doing in the classroom. Some of them are unique things to ask them to do and some of them are everyday occurrences. Some of the teachers have even earned bingo multiple times, which is allow for them to wear, for example, they can choose their reward. Some chose to wear free jeans for a day. Some chose to leave a few minutes early or come in a few minutes late and we've even had the opportunity for administration to cover their classes. I've even had the joy of teaching some math and science classes and I even planned Kagan structures when I'm teaching the lesson. For example, I did the human knot with 6th grade math and 8th grade science last week. Some of the bingo board activities include visiting our alternative schools so they have an opportunity to touch base with the kids that have left us and gone there and still continue to build their relationships with them. Another example is they get to shadow an administrator during their playing a period. If they embed Kagan structures into the lessons, they document that or if they attend some student events, we even have encouraged them to attend an MDR hearing with their students so they understand not only that they're there to support our school and our students, but they obviously experience what that's like to be with a hearing officer and see what some of the questions are that they ask our students and understand how that impacts their next steps with disciplinary action. We also encourage teachers to write encouraging letters or notes not just the students but to staff and again as they earn those they take the opportunity to write their name on a piece of paper and hook it to the bulletin board and then we go from there to acknowledge them. One of the other neat resources or excuse me activities they did was riding a bus. So actually Mrs. Sauer Creekland coach rode one afternoon and she's had a lot of really encouraging things to tell our staff about how that few minutes on that bus help her build relationships with a couple of our very challenging students and again I like to ride the buses every week so I try to put that up there to showcase some of our teachers that sometimes our bus rides are an hour long sometimes our bus rides are 20 minutes but just taking those few minutes to be with the kids can be really impactful on building relationships. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, certainly the another strength, the many strengths you have here, but one of the strengths is certainly other relationship you and your staff have built with students. It's fantastic to see so thank you so much for spending some time with me and I like I said I know you have a busy day so but thank you the discast. We thank you very much for your time. Absolutely. Okay, we're here again at Loris Middle School with the instructional coach here Miss Amber LaSalle who does a fantastic job here offering PD sessions for the teachers and working with our students. Amber I'd like you if you would just talk a little bit about how it has Kagan increase engagement in the classrooms because of the observations I've done here as of late I've seen some fantastic Kagan strategies some best practices with Kagan and I think it's really up the engagement which which is certainly help student retention I believe. I think one of the main things that we've tried to push here at Loris Middle is it doesn't have to be a Kagan structure to be able to engage our students. So I've tried to rephrase the way that I present engagement in the classroom to teachers by just calling them engagement strategies and the things don't necessarily have to be a Kagan structure that comes out of the Kagan book but as long as you're engaging the students in the classroom that's been the way that I've been able to get the most buy-in from teachers because they see it not as something else to do but something creative that they can create in their classroom for the kids. I know one thing that we've tried to do in our classrooms with teachers is work with them and co-teach with them to model and show them how much Kagan can increase engagement in our classrooms and that doesn't necessarily like I said have to be a Kagan structure it just has to be something engaging and hands-on because the kids do like to move around they like to talk to each other. So if they like to do those things then we need to just provide them with the structured opportunity to do those things. Sure. So you spoke a little bit about teacher buy-in with Kagan and I think for some people just getting started with with Kagan is often the challenge or the obstacle and once they do they really take off with it but it seems like there's a high percentage of your teachers who are who are using Kagan pretty regularly. So what have you done to again can you speak to how you've encouraged teachers to buy-in with some Kagan engagement and collaborative strategies? One thing that we've done starting at the beginning of this year was we as a school purchase digital versions of some of the Kagan materials and the Kagan structure books that they have instead of just buying the physical hard copy and only having one copy in the school and the two that I have found that have been most beneficial to our teachers has been the 60 engagement structures and the silly sports and goofy games books. So we have them as a digital copy and every time we're in collaborative planning we're always going back to them to see what examples are in the book how can we take them and use them in our classroom and what things really fit best with the activities that we're working with for the upcoming week and I think that's been a really good starting place for us and I also think that just using that silly sport and goofy games book the sometimes as teachers we forget that the kids are really just kids and they do like to do fun things and sometimes our content doesn't necessarily always allow for those things to happen but if we make time for things like the activities in the silly sport and goofy games that really gets the relationship building with the teacher and the student in the classroom to that next level so that they can do those academic structures in the classroom to learn the content. I've seen a lot of our teachers not even in the core content areas but also in our connections or our specials classes using engagement structures and engagement activities in the classroom our PE department for example has a strong focus on team building and class building and what they had their students do at the beginning of the semester was they put the kids in different groups and they're in those groups for the entire semester but the kids got to name their group they got to have kind of group norms of who's the leader who's going to be in charge of the materials of each group and then every time the class does an activity if the students are successful then their group gets points and then at the end of the year or end of the semester the teacher awards the teams that have the highest points with some type of prize and just even doing those simple things in the non-academic classrooms I think are it's a really good way to build those relationships with our kids and another thing that I know Miss Todd had already mentioned is we try to do a lot of modeling and praising teachers and even members of the leadership team praising them for utilizing the engagement structures in the classroom and I think even as adults we like to be rewarded for things and be thanked for doing just simple things like engaging kids in the classroom and we've done some ice cream sundae parties for teachers and Mr. Edwards and I have actually went in and co-taught some lessons in classrooms and most recently we co-taught a lesson in a seventh grade math classroom using bow jangles as kind of our engagement piece and it had nothing to do with Kagan but because we related it back to our kids we knew what these students liked and use bow jangles as our centerpiece for the activity we really got the student buy-in from them. Awesome thank you so much and I don't mean to put you on the spot here but you said something really profound that I'd like to kind of highlight and elaborate on is the idea and this is something that Miss Todd said as well that you guys and by you guys I mean your admin team and you as an instructional coach and even some of the learning specialists who serve here are willing to actually get into classrooms and teach what is that what has that been like for your school and and how have teachers responded to that? I think that coming from this role as a former teacher I think sometimes teachers forget that members of the leadership team that myself that learning specialists that we were all teachers at one time and we are asking teachers to do lots of different things in their classroom but I think by co-teaching and modeling with them in the trenches and really showing them like we get where you're coming from but look how awesome things can go if you incorporate these engagement structures in the classroom or just finding something engaging I think that's been really powerful for the teacher to see you know what like these people are asking us to do a lot of these things but they are possible we just have to try and I think that's been one of the things that our teachers have really taken off with because they've seen Miss Todd do a silly sport and goofy games they've seen myself and learning specialists model things in their classroom and we've shown them that it works so it's just them having the relationship with us and trusting us like hey these things do work you just got to give it a try awesome thank you so much I was fantastic I appreciate it before we close today we'd also like to congratulate all of the HCS Tech Fair participants students teachers administrators and district staff all came together and put on a fantastic show highlighting the tremendous work of our HCS students this was the 10th anniversary of the Tech Fair and it continues to get better and better each year I was really impressed with all I saw from students just simply amazing work everyone especially the overall amount of coding projects that were submitted right you are Bo well unfortunately my friends that's all the time we have for today again a huge thank you to Miss Todd and Miss LaSalle as well as the entire Loris Middle School team for taking some time with us earlier in the week if you have an idea for a future podcast or would like to be on the podcast yourself reach out via email or leave a comment on our dear dis YouTube channel we'd love to hear all the great things happening in your classroom and school see you next time to continue to follow our story please subscribe to the dis cast thank you for joining us today and always remember in the words of George Kuros technology will never replace great teachers but technology in the hands of great teachers can be transformational see you next time thank you for watching this tutorial be sure to subscribe like comment and follow us by clicking on the links below in the description