Western Professional Learning
Communicate, Collaborate, Creativity & Success - October
Gathering Strength!
My heads spins most days, so I know yours is too! This is tool to help guide you through the month. To do list, goals, and resources.
Work Day Friday and Holiday on Monday!
Report cards are coming up! Try to get as much done over the next four days, so we can spend Friday doing some really good planning. You will have some time for report cards on Friday but not all day.
APTT
Conferences for your focus students! Document! Preach the goal and remind them to practice, give your class motivators to practice at home.
Shout Out!
Mrs. Cline invited a professor from Auburn to Western last week. It was a huge success. Students had great responses to question, "Soil gives us life!" I really enjoyed seeing faces when we asked this question,"Does Dr. Kim look like a scientist?" Dr. Kim is Mrs. Cline's sister. Dr. Kim is going to continue working with Mrs. Cline's students through Google Hang outs so all of the great questions can be answered.
GMAS
The GaDOE is putting out a lot of great information to help us with rigor and understanding the test. Below is a link to another smore from my friend over at Evans. It contains rubrics for each grade showing why students scored at a certain level on the GMAS.
Professional Learning Google+
This is a perfect week to be thinking about your professional learning task. You can get together on Friday, but you can also be adding ideas and links to the Google + collection. I will work on a video to help with adding items.
Lesson planning
Weekly plans are just that weekly plans. They don't get you to your goals they are only stepping stones. If we just plan that way we have little time to think about big picture ideas, summative assessments, and analyzing data to make real change. Several of you are attempting to make the change and we really think it is in the best interest of our students for all us. We still suggest creating a weekly plan but that is for you. If you make a unit or monthly plan it saves time and allows you to analyze your instruction and data more often. One way to accomplish this is to leave the plan on your desk make notes as you go. You need time management, goal management, and adjustment management. You have to reflect daily on your practices. The wonderful thing about planning this way at the end of the week your aren't pressed to produce another plan for next week. You have that time to adjust, prepare, and reflect. Try it and tell us what you think.
RTI/ Focus/ Tutoring
Remember to document who you are tutoring and what you are doing. We may be able to use that data if needed as an intervention. Also, if the students you are tutoring are struggling we may need to go ahead and move them into tier 3. Don't wait on me to have a conference or start an intervention.
Book mark this link
We will add resources and ideas throughout the month, but the goals are the same.
Reminders
Please respond to the Article and we can have some discussions on Friday.
Make sure you are working on being an expert on your chapter of the book. How will you engage our faculty with your information? Not just deliver the information but engage us.
Assessments
Remember you should be making and analyzing assessments together. We need to make sure we have the same expectations, use state rubrics, and have questions with different depth of knowledge questions.