Lovett Notes
A Newsletter for Lovett Staff
Finish Strong!
We are quickly, I mean very quickly approaching the close of the first semester. It's honestly really hard to believe we have 14 instructional days before wrapping up the first part of this year. In these last few weeks, this is the time to solidify what students should have learned for the semester. While students will be anxious for winter break, keep focused and structured to ensure that you maximize everyday. A few reminders as it relates tot he winter holidays:
- Instruction should be happening everyday. Every lesson should be objective focused and I am expecting that all classrooms will begin to incorporate the language objectives. I realize that we are all in the learning phase as it relates to the language objective, but please use your learning from your PD to help guide you. As I visit classrooms over the next weeks, I will look specifically for your objective and as needed provide feedback to help fine tune both your objective and language objective.
- Remember not every family celebrates the holidays in the same way. We have a very diverse campus so holiday celebrations could be Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, to not celebrating any of these. Be careful in selection activities themed around any one particular holiday.
- As in above, be sensitive that your classroom décor is not suggestive of one holiday over the other. Keep holiday theme items geared toward the winter holiday to keep things general
- As we approach the close of the year and planning for holiday parties, be mindful of any student in your class that has food allergies. Every teacher should be aware of food allergies and nurse is here to help with any specific questions.
Learning Objectives Refresher
Coming up this week!
Tuesday December 3
5th Grade Planning Day;Data Room
8:00 am Class Group Pictures;MPR
Wednesday December 4
4th Grade Planning Day;Data Room
Progress reports go home
3rd Grade Reading DLA Testing
Thursday December 5
3rd Grade Planning Day; Data Room
5th Grade Reading DLA Testing
9:00 am Magnet Tour
3:15 pm Faculty Meeting;lounge
Chorus goes to Bellaire’s Holiday in the Park
Friday December 6
8:00 am Kinder Program
4th Grade Reading DLA Testing
PLC Reboot! Do you have norms?
Establishing norms for your PLC guides how you will work together and provides an agreement that all PLC members are expected to adhere to. Whatever your norms are it's important that once established you are always self-reflecting on whether you are following the norms. It is also important that you find time at the beginning of your PLC to review norms and that you keep the norms on your agenda. The hardest thing about norms is to address someone on the team that is not following the norms. The PLC should be a safe environment where norms can be addressed. If you are unable to get to this place of comfort in your PLC you will not b as effective as you can be. If you are having difficulty setting or addressing norms on your team, please feel free to consult with me and I will visit your PLC to guide the team through this.
PLC REBOOT What do we focus on during our PLC?
PLC time is strictly focused on student learning! While discussions about teaching, assessments and monitoring are a part of this, you are focused on students learning and systems that you need to have in place if they are not learning. PLC time can be tricky particularly in the upper grades where you are departmentalized. Regardless, your discussions are still the same in that you are focused on student learning. Below are pointers to help guide your PLC discussion. I would like each PLC to take time during their next meeting to reboot and discuss the true purpose for meeting:
- You must know what goals are established for students in your grade level and content. For example, if DRA is a measure, a part of your PLC discussion should be focused on how you move students toward achieving the DRA goal for your grade level. This discussion does not have to happen at every PLC, but it should be a constant since this measure is used 3x/year and guided reading instruction highly influences how students will progress as readers.
- Review data from any common assessments. Discuss questions, choices, needs of students for further instruction and share ideas of how to accomplish this. If you are in grades 3-5, each content and grade level have goals for STAAR that you can use as a guide and focus. I would recommend in each PLC you decide what data you are reviewing based on what common assessments have been given. If a reading assessment for example, ELA teachers would discuss their data and really dig into why kids did or didn't learn something. Teachers not teaching that content, are there as thought partners to help problem solve an area. Regardless of your subject, we are all teachers and know instruction. Discuss who needs re-teach, how that can happen. Discuss if there are roles that other teachers can play with supporting students.
- Discuss your grade level assessment calendar. In graded 3-5, we discussed using the highly tested student expectations and mapping this out on your pacing calendar. Each grade level needs to consistently revisit this to look at any changes based on how kids are learning. You must do this together, so you do not overlap and have too many common assessments at one time.
- Within your grade level make a list of the important assessments/monitoring: DRA, Ren 360, Running records, writing samples, common assessments, etc. Keep these on your PLC discussion agenda and schedule to discuss results and learning needs based on the results
- Student progress as it relates to grades is a topic all can discuss. We want to ensure that students are learning throughout the school year and avoid the need for summer instruction. Remember, there is a difference in summer instruction as a supplement rather than as a need to catch up on what they didn't learn during the year. Discussing what you are grading, how, ideas for motivating learners that seem unmotivated. Also, if there are other factors why a child might be failing or having low grades. Ongoing problem solving with your team will us to ensure that no students are missed.
- Discuss school-based focus area. We all know that two big areas for us this year is differentiation for our high performing learning and strategies to work with our EL learners. Your PLC is a great time to bring a strategy to share, practice writing your language objectives, discuss results that you are seeing by implementing some strategy for differentiation
- Focus on curriculum and how best to teach a concept. Even though you are not producing team lesson plans, planning together to unpack the TEKS and discuss strategies and resources is very powerful. This is always a focus of your PLC. Make sure however you are really focusing on what the TEKS says students should learn. Remember when you plan focus on 1) Curriculum (The What they are learning), 2. Determine how well students must know it (Assessment), 3. Determine how you will teach the content (resources, strategies, activities, etc.)
I hope the above gives you more focus during your PLC time. I will be visiting each PLC next Tuesday and helping you to reboot and refocus. Please have the information above read by that time and be prepared to discuss the direction of your PLC. Remember the list above is not exhaustive, but hopefully gives you a pretty good start.
Staying Strong-Keeping Your PLCs true to the Work
Collaboration is key in how we do what we do at Lovett. There is individual accountability for all of us, including me, our work starts with ongoing collaboration. While we use the term PLC(Professional Learning Community), it serves us all well to be reminded of why we meet in PLCs and what our work should focus on. Below at the questions you should constantly focus on when meeting in PLC. The PLC is not for grade level business, field trip planning, general reminder, etc. The PLC is to focus on student learning and addressing the questions:
1. What do we want students to know and be able to do?
2. How will we know they are learning?
3. How will we respond when they are not learning?
4. How will we respond if they already know it?
If your PLC is focused on something else, then it's not as focused as it needs to be on learning. I know time is an issue, but regardless of how much time you have in PLC use it wisely and stay focused on the work on student learning.
Language Objectives
In our last staff meeting, you learned about language objectives and how to better support our language learners. To create language objectives remember to follow these 4 steps:
1. Identify the content objective aligned to the TEKS
2. Determine what type of language skills students will use to participate in the lesson and process in the learning objective
3. Choose the appropriate language objective form the ELPS
4. Craft a language objective using specific vocabulary sentence stems and/or paragraph frames to help scaffold language necessary to complete or explain the activity of your discipline.
On Monday, I will begin to look for language objectives along with your content objectives. Remember, this will take practice and I will do my best to provide feedback that will help you to strengthen them over time. The most important thing beyond to the objective is to have the language strategies present in your lesson. This will help our language learner and all learners.