More Photos Were Taken in the Last 2 Minutes than in the Entire 19th Century
Mankind Put a Man on the Moon Before We Put Wheels on Suitcases
France Was Still Using the Guillotine for Executions When Star Wars Hit Theaters
Bananas Are Actually Berries but Strawberries Are Not
The Current U.S. Flag Was Designed by a 17-Year-Old for a School Project. He Got a B-
Coming up...
August 28 - SPED process meetings
August 28 - Boy Scout visit during lunch
August 28 - Leadership team to Cape
August 30 - Specials Schedule Switch
August 31 - Fund Raiser Kick off @ 8:00 in the gym
September 1 - Collaboration Day - MMD
September 4 - No School
September 6 - School Pictures
September 6 - Specials Schedule Switch
September 13 - Specials Schedule Switch
September 14 - Faculty Meeting
September 18 - SE Explorer (Details to come)
September 20 - Specials Schedule Switch
September 21 - Board Meeting @ 7:00
September 29 - Collaboration Day - CKH
Special Ed Process Review
Everyone is scheduled to meet with the Special Ed department on Monday for a review of the process for special education. This includes the referral process as well as procedures for current students. It is vital that everyone learn and follow the correct process for referring a student for special services. It is also vital that everyone provide the appropriate modifications and accommodations for their current special ed students. Any failure to do so could result in legal issues and job targets. Know your responsibilities.
PLC Meetings
Since we will be meeting during your plan time on Monday and we have Collaboration Day on Friday, you will not be required to meet during your plan time on Wednesday. However, we will still do the special schedule switch to maintain that routine.
When we have PLC meetings on Wednesdays (or any other day), you need to be sure that an agenda is either shared with the Angies and myself or placed in the folder that we all have access to (I shared folders with each group). Some of you have created your own in a team drive which is fine as long as that folder is shared with us as well.
A template for the agenda was shared out during our collaboration time at the beginning of school. Be sure to use it. We sat through meetings last Wednesday without agendas which made it hard to follow along with what was being talked about. The content of the agenda is up to you, but remember that you only have 50 minutes. Make the most of that time. PLC meetings should be spent talking about student data, creating or grading student work together, or discussing instructional strategies. It is not a time to talk about non-instructional issues. Stay focused.
Intervention Time
The discussions during PLC meetings should also develop our interventions. Last year, we jumped in to this idea of intervention. Teams approached it from different directions and did it in many different ways. This year, I would like to add a few more parameters.
Here is how I envision this process working. We develop a list of our ELO's for each subject and grade level. Done! There are a few groups who are tweaking their lists, but for the most part, we can check this off the list. Do you know what your ELO's are? You should. Attach them to your PLC meeting agenda so you can start learning them.
We develop CFA's to assess whether or not our students know the ELO's. Done! We do have a few groups still working on some CFA's, but we have also done much of this work through the CW project. We have a new resource for this process called USA Test Prep. You can create tests on USA Test Prep and use it for your CFA. It should provide data so that students can be sorted in to groups for intervention. If you are unfamiliar with USA Test Prep, you can watch this webinar about setting up classes or this webinar about creating tests.
Then comes the question of what subject do we focus on and for how long. Pick a subject and work on it for two weeks. Any longer is too long to spend for one ELO and any shorter isn't enough time to cover it. Your entire team should be doing the same subject. So, it makes sense to do math first because ELA is currently working through running records and SRI. This means everyone teaches math during the intervention block for these two weeks. I often hear the comment, "but I don't know how to teach math/reading". This is a ridiculous statement. We all have elementary certificates. We all know what good instruction looks like. Any one of us can teach either of these subjects. In fact, different approaches are what we are going for here.
You should be able to work with another pair of teachers (probably the pod you were with last year) and sort your students into four groups: high, medium high, medium low, and low. Of course the high group is going to be the largest and the low group should be the smallest. You can even pull out a student or two to send with your interventionist for a low-low group (their groups should be no larger than 10). At the end of two weeks, the other subject needs to be ready to roll with their ELO and students sorted.
One of the reasons for doing this is to get past the notion that these are my students and those are your students. Everyone has to take ownership in this for it to work.
I know that there will be issues that come up that will make this hard. Time, communication between groups, special ed minutes, etc., but everyone of you is a professional and a darn good one. Solve the problems. Work together. Move forward.
Vision
We had a great discussion about mission and vision as we kicked off the school year. I think the thing that stood out to me the most was the phrase "all students will learn" versus the phrase "all students will have the opportunity to learn".
When I was a teacher, I lived by the motto, "It's my job to teach, it's their job to learn". I thought that if they chose not to learn, I would fail them and they would miraculously see the error in their ways and this would cause them to try harder in the future.
From this perspective, students who choose to live in conditions that are not conducive to learning - high poverty, families that are unable (or unwilling) to support their learning, no positive role models - should suffer the consequences of their circumstances and that would make them more responsible.
Of course that was a while back and things were different then. I was different then. Since that time, I've had children of my own and my opinions have changed.
Do you remember that video Mr. Dill showed at convocation? It was called Time Bomb. It was loud and had lots of statistics flashing across the screen. Here are a few of the statistics:
- Drop outs earn $.31 for every $1.00 that a college graduate earns and $.61 for every $1.00 that a high school graduate earns.
- They will live 10-13 years less than a college graduate.
- The unemployment rate for drop outs is 5 times higher than that of college graduates.
- They will live in poverty.
- There is a one in seventeen chance that the child of a drop out will attend college.
- Every high school drop out costs society over $250,000 in lost taxes.
- They are involved in higher rates of criminal activity.
- They have a higher reliance on Medicaid and welfare.
I don't want any of this for my kids and I don't want them to have to support the kids that I let choose to fail. The consequences of failure have never been more serious. We as educators have a moral imperative to do everything we can to ensure high levels of learning for all students.
A few years ago, we had a building wide CKH training. I told you then that I believed that we are all put on this earth to be life changers. I still believe that.
All means all.
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