Principal's Corner
Volume VII - October 16, 2016
SPIRIT WEEK 2016
Monday: Hillbilly vs. Frats; Powderpuff Game - 5:30
Tuesday: Career Day / Senior Toga Tuesday
Wednesday: Character Day; Neanderthal Volleyball - 5:30
Thursday: Throwback Thursday
Friday: BLUE/GOLD Day; Pep Rally; Parade; Game - 7:00pm; HC Court
HOW ARE YOU FOCUSING ON THE WILDLY IMPORTANT?
Teacher of the Month
Teachers, please announce this to your students, and post the link in your classroom.
What do the students think? (Highlights from this week's Teacher of the Month responses)
- I never really liked English until I had Ms. Thompson this semester and now like I look forward to going to her class everyday. She just makes the class fun while you're learning. She is just crazy fun.
- i love how organized Ms. Spicher is. The way she teaches me has helped me be a better student in all my classes not just hers. The way i take notes now because of her has helped me have all 80's and 90's. She also always has a positive attitude which is helpful because it gives of good energy. She deserves to be the teacher of the month.
- Mr. Huegel helps all of his students have a better understanding of Mathematics. He also gives words of encouragement to all of his students. He is never too busy to help a student that is stuck on a particular math problem.
- Mr. Shreckengost puts in a lot of work for the band. He goes over the top to provide us with everything we need. He stays late, to create drill charts and arrange the music for marching band. He arranged the entire marching band show this year. Our show this year is Meatloaf: A Tribute. He should be acknowledged for all that he does throughout the year. And what he has done in the past. He has made the RHS Band a band that is always excepted to be good, a band to be feared by our competition.
- Awesome, caring teacher who truly tries to let every kid succeed (Ms. Hackett)
- She's nice, and lets us do test corrections and makes math fun. (Ms. Hartmann)
SHOUT OUTS!!!
Shout outs to:
- To Mr. Bost for hosting a FANTASTIC golf tournament with EDHS on Saturday.
- Mrs. Dransoff and her students for a marvelous concert this week. Very professional, and was enjoyed by a nearly packed house!
- Mrs. Stephanie Williams for covering an extra morning duty, helping with buses every day after school, and helping in the front office with parents/phones when Terry was out last week ... Stephanie is always helping out!! Thank you!!
- To Coaches Boley and Rowntree and their staff and players for earning VERY well deserved victories against Swansboro High School this past week. Great job!
Notes from the RHS Administrative Team
- There have been some questions from staff regarding the use of leave, and when to use sick/annual/personal leave. Please see the board policy on leave here: http://images.pcmac.org/Uploads/OnslowCounty/OnslowCounty/Departments/DocumentsSubCategories/Documents/7510.pdf
- Please no not send students directly to the office or ISS. Please contact the front office to remove a student. ISS is not used for a place for "chill-out" or to finish tests. Mr. Good has been asked to send students back if they do not arrive via administrator.
DATA SPOTLIGHT
Message from Mr. Gartner - OCS Student Services
From: Brendan Gartner
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2016 11:36 AM
Subject: Political Materials
Good Morning!
Due to the upcoming election, this is just to remind site administrators of the importance of handling all candidates justly. Campaign signs should not be placed on the school property. When a candidate brings literature to your school, please distribute those materials to your staff and in the same manner for each candidate. Placing materials in staff boxes is allowed. Political campaign materials may not be distributed to students. Please notify your office staff of our procedures regarding political materials. We will not send any political materials via courier service. You may also want to revisit policy #7720 Employee Political Activities.
Brendan Gartner
Director of Student Services
Onslow County Schools
200 Broadhurst Road
Jacksonville, NC 28540
Phone: (910) 455-2211 Ext. 20404
Fax: (910) 455-0459
Teacher Observation - Sample Evidence - Standards 1-5
These are examples of evidences created by principals across
the state during the 2013-2014 Principal READY meetings.
Although this is not an exhaustive list, it may be a place to begin
to create your own individual, prioritized evidence document.
Data Spotlight
PLC Spotlight
As we begin to refine PLCs on our campus, I will share some PLC fundamentals. This week's information is taken from DuFour's work with the PLC model.
Big Idea #3: A Focus on Results
Professional learning communities judge their effectiveness on the basis of results. Working together to improve student achievement becomes the routine work of everyone in the school. Every teacher team participates in an ongoing process of identifying the current level of student achievement, establishing a goal to improve the current level, working together to achieve that goal, and providing periodic evidence of progress. The focus of team goals shifts. Such goals as “We will adopt the Junior Great Books program” or “We will create three new labs for our science course” give way to “We will increase the percentage of students who meet the state standard in language arts from 83 percent to 90 percent” or “We will reduce the failure rate in our course by 50 percent.”
Schools and teachers typically suffer from the DRIP syndrome—Data Rich/Information Poor. The results-oriented professional learning community not only welcomes data but also turns data into useful and relevant information for staff. Teachers have never suffered from a lack of data. Even a teacher who works in isolation can easily establish the mean, mode, median, standard deviation, and percentage of students who demonstrated proficiency every time he or she administers a test. However, data will become a catalyst for improved teacher practice only if the teacher has a basis of comparison.
When teacher teams develop common formative assessments throughout the school year, each teacher can identify how his or her students performed on each skill compared with other students. Individual teachers can call on their team colleagues to help them reflect on areas of concern. Each teacher has access to the ideas, materials, strategies, and talents of the entire team.
Freeport Intermediate School, located 50 miles south of Houston, Texas, attributes its success to an unrelenting focus on results. Teachers work in collaborative teams for 90 minutes daily to clarify the essential outcomes of their grade levels and courses and to align those outcomes with state standards. They develop consistent instructional calendars and administer the same brief assessment to all students at the same grade level at the conclusion of each instructional unit, roughly once a week.
Each quarter, the teams administer a common cumulative exam. Each spring, the teams develop and administer practice tests for the state exam. Each year, the teams pore over the results of the state test, which are broken down to show every teacher how his or her students performed on every skill and on every test item. The teachers share their results from all of these assessments with their colleagues, and they quickly learn when a teammate has been particularly effective in teaching a certain skill. Team members consciously look for successful practice and attempt to replicate it in their own practice; they also identify areas of the curriculum that need more attention.
Freeport Intermediate has been transformed from one of the lowest-performing schools in the state to a national model for academic achievement. Principal Clara Sale-Davis believes that the crucial first step in that transformation came when the staff began to honestly confront data on student achievement and to work together to improve results rather than make excuses for them.
Of course, this focus on continual improvement and results requires educators to change traditional practices and revise prevalent assumptions. Educators must begin to embrace data as a useful indicator of progress. They must stop disregarding or excusing unfavorable data and honestly confront the sometimes-brutal facts. They must stop using averages to analyze student performance and begin to focus on the success of each student.
Educators who focus on results must also stop limiting improvement goals to factors outside the classroom, such as student discipline and staff morale, and shift their attention to goals that focus on student learning. They must stop assessing their own effectiveness on the basis of how busy they are or how many new initiatives they have launched and begin instead to ask, “Have we made progress on the goals that are most important to us?” Educators must stop working in isolation and hoarding their ideas, materials, and strategies and begin to work together to meet the needs of all students.
Hard Work and Commitment
Even the grandest design eventually translates into hard work. The professional learning community model is a grand design—a powerful new way of working together that profoundly affects the practices of schooling. But initiating and sustaining the concept requires hard work. It requires the school staff to focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively on matters related to learning, and hold itself accountable for the kind of results that fuel continual improvement.
When educators do the hard work necessary to implement these principles, their collective ability to help all students learn will rise. If they fail to demonstrate the discipline to initiate and sustain this work, then their school is unlikely to become more effective, even if those within it claim to be a professional learning community. The rise or fall of the professional learning community concept depends not on the merits of the concept itself, but on the most important element in the improvement of any school—the commitment and persistence of the educators within it.
AVID Strategy of the week
This activity is the oral equivalent of the quickwrite. A student draws a topic from a stack of index cards, thinks about it for five seconds, and then speaks before the class for a predetermined time. The topics are based on prior reading assignments.
MTSS Tidbit: Critical Components, Part 5
Given the importance of data-based problem-solving within an MTSS model, the need for data and evaluation system is clear. In order to do data-based problemsolving, school staff need to understand and have access to data sources that address the purposes of assessment. Procedures and protocols for administering assessments and data use allow school staff to use student data to make educational decisions. In addition to student data, data on the fidelity of MTSS implementation allow school leadership to examine the current practices and make changes for improving MTSS implementation.