District 15 makes several significant facility upgrades over the course of a busy summer break.

Over the summer, District 15 completed approximately $4.8 million of summer maintenance projects, most of which were life safety remediation projects.

Among the projects tackled this summer were approximately $1.1 million of plumbing repairs made at Gray M. Sanborn and Marion Jordan Schools, Walter R. Sundling Junior High, and Winston Campus. With their restroom facilities out of order, these buildings were closed for much of the summer, and their staffs were temporarily relocated to neighboring schools.

Plumbing repairs weren't the only projects undertaken at Winston Campus this summer. The District also replaced the building's chiller at a cost $730,000. The massive piece of equipment located atop the center of the large school building had to be carefully lowered into place by a towering yellow crane, and its successful installation provided Winston Campus with air conditioning when the school year began.

All of the District's summer maintenance projects -- the aforementioned plumbing and chiller projects, as well as a main water line replacement at Paddock, a running track replacement at Sundling, and asbestos abatements at Winston, Sanborn, and Marion Jordan -- were completed prior to the beginning of the school year.

Testing to Teach

District 15's weekly professional development sessions this year have aimed to help teachers create assessments that inform their instruction while measuring their students' learning.

Last year, most of the District's weekly professional development sessions aimed to help teachers adjust to some of the key instructional shifts they must make as they integrate the new Common Core State Standards into their English and language arts instruction.

This fall, the District has shifted its focus, and is providing its teachers the training and time they need to create high-quality formative assessments.

Formative Assessments?

Formative assessments aren't so much the big tests that students study hard to ace at the end of a unit, nor are they high-profile achievement and placement tests that they must take from time to time throughout the school year. Those are summative assessments, which are administered after students have been taught something, and are intended to document their understanding of a subject or their mastery of a skill. Those tests certify a student's competence.

Formative assessments are an assortment of smaller, more regularly administered tests that help students and their teachers reach their learning targets. They can take many different shapes, but they are all important parts of the learning process because they systematically check what students know and are able to do. They support ongoing student growth and improvement by helping teachers learn about their students' understanding of certain subjects and their progress toward developing specific skills at different points in the instructional cycle. They help teachers diagnose and respond to their students' needs, and they help students self assess and keep track of their progress.

Examples of formative assessments could range from a simple pretest or mid-unit pop quiz, to a math homework assignment that breaks down a concept in a way that allows a teacher to pinpoint a student's understanding, or a classroom activity in which students determine the theme of a text by highlighting, comparing, and discussing different details contained within it. When designed right, teachers use these approaches to assess their students' understanding, analyze their students' errors, and adapt their future instruction to assure students acquire the necessary concepts or skills.

Hallmarks of High Quality

The District's professional development sessions this fall have helped teachers design their own, high-quality formative assessments that directly align with their students' learning targets. These targets are outlined in District 15's "Student Can ... " statements related to the new Common Core State Standards in English, language arts, and math.

Teachers must develop their own formative assessments because these tests must match their lesson plans. Teachers know their students better than anyone, which means they know how to plan lessons in ways their specific students can understand. Similarly, they must design formative assessments that reflect what they're teaching in their classrooms, and specifically account for the many different ways they teach certain concepts and skills to their students.

Training also helped teachers identify when and how to use various forms of formative assessments throughout the instructional cycle. Such training is important because high-quality formative assessments provide results in time to take action with the students who generate them. They provide information of sufficient detail to identify specific problems that specific students are having with specific tasks. That kind of information helps teachers plan their instruction and target their reteaching to ensure that their students can demonstrate mastery of certain concepts and skills on their summative assessments.

Time and Training

In response to feedback received from teachers last spring, the District decided to reduce the number of topics it will address during its weekly professional development sessions this year. This will provide more time for teachers to work together to implement what they learn.

So far, that decision has provided teachers three weeks to review their use of formative assessments in their classrooms, meet with their grade-level teams, share what assessments have worked for them, and collaborate in creating new and improved assessments that better inform their instruction.

Darlene von Behren, assistant superintendent for Personnel & Human Services, leads a discussion on cultural competency during the District's New Teacher Orientation program.

District 15's Induction/Mentoring program helps new teachers successfully transition into their careers as educators.

Once again this year, District 15 offered its Summer Early Literacy Academies (SELA) and Summer Blast! programs as a way to continue helping students over the break.

Using the District's new fleet of iPads and the many engaging educational apps available on them, many of the students and teachers who participated in these important programs documented the many different lessons they learned.

SELA

SELA is a four-week summer program for students who have just completed kindergarten and first grade and need continued support over the summer months in order to maintain and even build upon the literacy skills they developed during the school year. Taught by reading specialists, reading intervention program assistants, and teachers with strong backgrounds in reading instruction, the low student-to-teacher ratios ensures that each of the students invited to attend SELA receives plenty of individual attention throughout the day.

Instruction at the academies focused on the continued development of the students' oral language and basic literacy skills, such as identification of letters and sounds, sight words, and expansion of vocabulary.

At Willow Bend, Culleen Siebert's SELA students worked on these skills by researching insects and then writing and illustrating their own stories. They photographed their own hand-written research and recorded their stories in their own voices to make their own books using the Book Creator app on their iPads. Once completed, their stories were shared with classmates via the iPads. All students could then hear or read each other's books. Hear All Sorts of Bugs! narrated by the author.

At Lincoln School, the theme was butterflies for the SELA students in Katie Klinger and Lisa Heyden's classes. For one project, students read butterfly books and poetry, explored butterflies outside, and created their own beautiful butterfly artwork. They then incorporated their artwork and poetry readings into the Butterfly Puppet Pals movie that their parents watched at an open house.

Summer Blast!

Like SELA, Summer Blast! is also a four-week summer program. However, it aims to provide continued instructional support to students in the District's population of bilingual students.

The additional support that Summer Blast! students receive through the program has tremendous long-term effects on their academic futures. For instance, research indicates that summer reading loss is greatest among students who've struggled to develop their literacy skills. They can sometimes lose as much as a quarter of a year of instruction over the break. Cumulatively, these summer reading losses can put struggling readers a full year or more behind their peers by the time they reach the upper grades.

The District's hope is that continuing to provide Summer Blast! students with instruction over the break will, instead, help them excel academically. And a variety of tech-driven projects that they completed over the summer indicate they are doing just that.

At Virginia Lake School, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students in Kyle Peceny and Colleen Seick's Summer Blast! class used iPads to research and collect information on a topic of interest to them, and then used several apps, including Pic Collage and Book Creator, to type, add pictures, and record their stories. Research topics chosen by the students included space, cool cars, earthquakes, weather, soccer, and shapes. Check out My Forest Animal Book.

At Kimball Hill School, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students in Amanda Berkes' Summer Blast! class undertook a similar project by researching a sport that was new to them, and sharing what they learned using iMovie. For this project, the students acted as researchers, information collectors, analyzers, script writers, movie producers, videographers, casting managers, directors, and -- finally -- editors and publishers. This movie, Track and Field, is a winner!

And, at the end of this successful summer session, their teacher did the same by creating a movie to share how she and her students spent their four weeks of summer school. Summer Blast! with Mrs. Berkes provides a detailed answer to the question everyone's asked each fall: What did you do this summer? 

Check out more examples of District 15 students and teachers using iPads to enhance learning by visiting the Latest and Greatest~Blog and Gallery of Student Work found on the Department of Instructional Technology webpage.      

In our first alumni profile, Jonathan Love shares how his experiences in District 15 helped prepare him to attend and now work at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Name: Jonathan Love

District 15 History: Jonathan was a District 15 student from 1989 to 1998. He attended kindergarten through sixth grade at Lake Louise School, and seventh and eighth grade at Winston Park Junior High (now Winston Campus Junior High). He was a student council member at both schools, and he participated in Creative Learning Room activities at Lake Louise and the Special Opportunities Program at Winston. (Those programs were the equivalent of today's gifted programs.)

Further Education: After graduating from Palatine High School in 2002, Jonathan went on to attend Northwestern University, where he earned a bachelor's degree from the Medill School of Journalism, with a second major in political science and a minor in history.

Current Occupation: Since graduating from Northwestern in 2006, Jonathan has served as the Teaching Technologies Specialist at Medill. He researches, designs, installs, and maintains the presentation hardware for Medill's classrooms and conference rooms, assists with the operation of its television studio and special event spaces, and trains faculty, staff, and students in the use of technology for news reporting.

In His Own Words: Much like an Oscar speech, there are far too many people and stories to note in this small space, but here are two quick stories that fit with my current career, along with three observations:

• First, a big word of thanks to Ms. Wolosick (the late Cindy Wolosick, formerly a speech-language pathologist with the District) and the rest of the non-classroom staff in the District, as well. From the principals to the speech and language pathologists to the custodial staff and beyond, there are a lot of people beyond the teaching staff making memorable impacts on us as students. Thank you for all that you did and continue to do.
• Mr. Buening (Steve Buening, a retired fifth-grade teacher at Lake Louise) recorded many of our fifth-grade class' experiences on video, and splitting time with him behind the camera -- I think we each ran it about 45 percent of the time, with the rest of the students doing it the remaining 10 percent -- that is where I first realized that writer, director, producer, or editor are also among the scores of jobs I should consider for an adult career. There's more to communications than being a performer.
• In sixth grade, Ms. White (the late Doreen White, a longtime sixth-grade teacher at Lake Louise) arranged for me and a classmate to help out with Mrs. Stokes' (Marilyn Stokes, a retired second-grade teacher at Lake Louise) class once or twice per week, mostly with reading and math assignments if I remember correctly. In eighth grade, someone at Winston Park came up with a similar arrangement, where a classmate and I spent our afternoon elective period during the third quarter helping a third- or fourth-grade class with a construction project related to its entry in the Odyssey of the Mind academic competition. While I had many chances to lecture or perform growing up, those were my first opportunities to work with younger students one-on-one or as a group, and they helped me realize that hands-on training or consulting could be interesting and fun career opportunities.
• The daily exposure to modern communications technology throughout the school building -- not just the classroom -- over the years in District 15 helped prepare all of us tremendously for college and careers. Even at Northwestern, my peers from this area and I were more comfortable with and accustomed to the campus' technologies than many students who came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.
• When the time comes to change career fields or industries, there are other experiences that will help me in those new adventures, too. It has to be said: those nine years from kindergarten to eighth grade gave me plenty of practical lessons to apply to my life.

The District is proud to call Jonathan one of our own!