Summer Edition 2021
Preparation for 2021 - 2022
New Staff Roles
Ashley Miller - Instructional Coach
Thomasine Oglesby Keaton-El - Counselor
Ericka Tanner - Data Manager
New Staff
Amber Gilmore - Intervention Specialist
Zach Tatarka - AD/PE Teacher/Head Baseball Coach
Samuel Howard - OCS Job Coach
Christal McRae - Parent Liasion
Michelle McKay - 10th Grade Science Teacher
Jonathan Clark - Principal NRMS
SUMMER ACTIVITIES
- Review the staff handbook.
- Take time to review the summative comments (found here) and assure you are comfortable with the expectations for instruction next year.
- Read the books you ordered. We'll ask you to share about them throughout next year!
- Save the date for our retreat August 2nd and 3rd 8 - 4 at St. John's Lutheran Church in Salisbury. We will have a staff dinner at Walnut Hill Monday evening as well, to which your family is invited.
INSTRUCTION
Competency Based Education
The following teachers and teacher teams will serve as demonstration classrooms for our competency based education prototype work in 21-22. These classrooms will work with proficiency scales and flexible time to fine-tune the details on how everyone else can implement CBE in 22-23.
9th and 10th grade design
Caroll/Melton
Freeman/File
Miller/Martin
Coleman
Standards-Based For EVERYONE
Whether you are a demonstration classroom or not, our focus on alignment to standards will be implemented in all classrooms. In PLCs we will be looking at the standards you teach and their alignment with your lesson's learning objectives, teacher input, student work output, feedback, and assessment. We will ask questions like “what exactly does this standard expect students to know?” and “how can students best demonstrate that they have mastered this standard?”.
Blended Honors Classes
Our blended honors classes allow all students to have access to the honors curriculum. Students can "declare honors" and we can move them into the honors sections at anytime. However, with this design comes the responsibility of the teacher to ensure the higher level of rigor is in place for honors students.
Expectations
Spend time this summer making sure you can clearly articulate the ways students must engage with your content and show mastery to earn the honors credit. You should be able to share this with students on the first day of school. It may be that you choose for them to complete a single, large-scale project that spans across multiple parts of your curriculum or is a deep-dive into a single part of the curriculum. Likewise, you may choose for students to complete smaller, additional assignments with each unit throughout the entire year. These assignments may move students to the higher levels of Bloom's, past the intended level of mastery.
We plan to have time to "calibrate" our expectations at the retreat in August so come prepared with your ideas!
True North Time
During the remote learning of 20-21, we saw how little agency students had over their own learning. We saw students struggle with pacing their work, meeting deadlines, and prioritizing their assignments. It became evident that this life skill of agency is one we must directly teach to students.
At the same time, we saw how letting go of the fully teacher-driven, lecture-based class time can allow students to work at their own pace. As we transitioned back to more face-to-face instruction we saw how maintaining that flexibility allowed for more personalized, small group instruction during class time.
When we couple these observations with our study of CBE and its required time flexibility, our rigid 90 minute period bell schedule becomes a limitation to our success.
Gradual Implementation
The TLDT acknowledged that we needed to make space in our week for students to spend more time on the subjects they struggle most in and less time in the subjects they are ahead in. This is not an advisory, power hour, or club time. Rather, this is flexible CLASS TIME. It is time when everyone is working on mastering standards.
With our 20-21 bell schedule, we provided 25 extra minutes a week to each class period. If we allowed one day a week to be flexible the last 30 minutes of each period, we can begin providing students opportunities to practice agency and teachers time to address the needs of those who need it most.
This would be an extremely gradual implementation that our TLDT would go into much more detail about at our retreat. But basically imagine this:
It's Monday, when the last 30 minutes of each block is flexible to students' needs. In first period John's teacher teaches and makes clear what independent work students are to work on the last 30 minutes of class. Notice that students have work to do during the last 30 minutes - it is not free time! John, who is quickly done with that work, shows his Powerschool grade book to the teacher and explains he needs more help in science. Because school-wide all students are working independently the last 30 minutes, the teacher can let John go to science class, knowing the science teacher will be able to work with him. There are no bells only clocks that signify when the mastery time begins. At the end of the period, the bell rings and everyone transitions to second block.
Teacher Benchmarks
Our schedule allows us to implement True North Time in lots of small prototype ways (like just in 9th grade or just in upper school). But believe it or not, it is the TEACHER behaviors not the student behaviors that will tell us if we are ready for implementation.
We will be looking for teachers to become highly consistent in these behaviors in the first 4 weeks of school before we would implement True North Time:
- Grades are up-to-date every Monday or even more consistently in Powerschool so all teachers can see a student's current grades in quick look up.
- Teachers allow for independent student work during the last 30 minutes of each period on Monday.
- Teachers align their work with standards and utilize small group instruction during individual work time to remediation or push students.
LOGISTICS
Logistics of Next Year
List of all room assignments as of 7.13.21
Bell Schedule including lunches - There was some discussion about our start time changing due to the buses, but no change will occur. We will still be 8 - 4 for teachers in 21-22.