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ITEMS:1. Meetings
April
April 9 - (orig Shared Staff, now is…) All HUHS staff ELO planning (Data Dilemma protocol)
Please note that HUMS staff will attend the full faculty meeting in the library. Given our connected work 7-12, this makes sense. The focus of the work will be on upper-grade ELO planning - but this will effect us with both scheduling and our own practice.
April 23 - Learning Community Meetings Dept Mtng - Recovery Session Planning Part I
April 25 - LT/DH Meeting
April 30 - Full Faculty (Part II of Recovery Session Planning)
2. REMINDER: Middle School Family Conferences
May 1 and May 9. I believe Liz is in the process of setting up Canyon Creek
for parents to schedule time to meet We will use the fall protocol for
our spring conferences as well. Conference times are from 3:00 - 6:30.
We will use the additional in-service time for planning purposes.
for parents to schedule time to meet We will use the fall protocol for
our spring conferences as well. Conference times are from 3:00 - 6:30.
We will use the additional in-service time for planning purposes.
3. In-Service Schedule:
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3. Responsive Classroom website link: Take a moment to two over the next few weeks to review the responsive classroom website. It hosts a variety of articles,
ideas, connections and opportunities to familiarize yourself with this whole school approach to climate. |
4. I find Mike Schmoker's writings/texts on ed leadership to be exceptional. Although the following article is based on an Elementary School's experience, the thoughts/ideas also have implications for our work, where deeper may be better than too broad and too much..
“Do Less, Then Obsess”
(Originally titled “Embracing the Power of LESS”)
In this article in Educational Leadership, author/consultant Mike Schmoker describes the experience of an Arizona elementary school that got the green light from its central office to concentrate on one initiative: increasing the percent of students who wrote effectively about fiction and nonfiction texts. “By focusing on this single goal,” says Schmoker, “the principal, teacher leaders, and grade-level teams were able to devote their time, energy, and data collection to this priority at everyfaculty meeting – thus fostering all-important continuity, enthusiasm, and momentum. And they had time to address the resistance, confusion, and small setbacks that inevitably beset any new initiative.” The result: rapid, significant improvements in students’ reading, writing, and thinking achievement.
Schmoker embraces author Morton Hansen’s maxim – “Do less, then obsess” – as the key to school improvement and educator job satisfaction, even joy. But of course schoolwide focus initiatives must be chosen wisely. Schmoker believes that in most schools, an honest self-assessment will lead to choosing one of these:
•Creating a clear, coherent, content-rich curriculum– In all too many schools, the “curriculum” is a catalog of state standards or a thick document that isn’t a helpful grade-by-grade pathway for teachers, students, and parents. The resulting gaps and inconsistencies mean that what students learn depends on which teachers they get. The solution, says Schmoker, is to work backwards from state standards and map out clear, detailed statements of the most essential content and skills students need to master by the end of each grade level, then spell out what will be taught quarter by quarter. “And we must never forget,” he says, “that any curriculum worthy of the name must include generous amounts of substantive reading, discussion, and writing.”
•Promoting authentic literacy– Effective reading, writing, and speaking have never been more important to school and career success, says Schmoker, and yet students spend very little time on those in classrooms. He tells the story of Brockton High School in Massachusetts, which focused instruction on content-based reading and writing assignments and then (in the words of principal Sue Szachowicz) “monitored like crazy.” Over the next six years, this low-SES school, which had scored poorly on rigorous Massachusetts tests, made rapid progress to the top 10 percent of the state’s schools.
•Delivering soundly structured instruction– Schmoker believes every lesson should have these elements: (a) a clear statement of what will be learned, why it’s important, and how it will be assessed; (b) the teacher checking on all students’ understanding for each chunk of instruction; and (c) if some students haven’t reached mastery, the teacher following up to deal with misconceptions and error patterns and get the highest possible level of student success. This structure (embroidered, of course, with each teacher’s individual style and voice) should be a look-for in administrators’ classroom observations.
click here for an blog prize: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wX-3UbXOPbzd2vLyHpalqwWDcZqbDqlqNCKBmafeHC0/edit
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