Secondary 7-12 Focus on Instruction
October 2019
Focus on the High School
The theme for instruction at the high school lately has been, "hands-on learning." We call it different things. Student engagement, student-centered, exploration, immersion, labs...bottom line, many amazing teachers at Westwood High School are getting teenagers up and moving around the classroom (and sometimes outside the classroom) and focusing on what students are doing to learn the content. When students make connections to the world around them, learning means a lot more. That's a given in our many CTE and elective courses, but core teachers are adopting this mantra as well. Almost 100 science students went to the Perot Museum in Dallas to extend their scientific understanding!
Students took the PSAT and SAT, and many students are attending college campus tours, all getting ready for their lives beyond high school. Teachers in all courses are supporting and encouraging the older students in these. The English EOC retest benchmark will happen October 29, and those results will drive instruction in the near future.
110 students met the requirement for Platinum Panther, meaning those students had an 85 or higher overall average, no absences, 2 or fewer tardies, and no discipline referrals. Great things are happening at the High School!
Focus on the Junior High
STAAR-tested subjects will be giving their first benchmark on October 29-31. Even those not tested but which feed into tested subjects are going out on a limb and benchmarking for skills that will come up later, so everyone is doing their best to play the long game of data-driven instruction.
IC Corner
- Those of you with TEKS Resources curriculum, please please please take a serious look at the Implementation Guide. Those pacing guides are the best thing I've seen in a long time! English folks, yes yours look weird, I can help you decipher them if you'd like. If anyone would like a quick tutorial on these, please reach out to me. If there's enough interest I'll do a lunch & learn on each campus.
- Eduphoria has an online test administration option, I urge you to branch out and play around with it. I am 90% sure I uploaded student passwords into the system, so their login should be their student id number, password should be WISD plus six digit birthday (for example, a student born on October 16, 2003 would have the password WISD101603). If this does not work or if you'd like me to be there when you try it out, don't hesitate to contact me for help! Here is the eGuide.
- Get in and play around with Kurzweil. If we use it, it will be an indispensable tool, especially for those of our students with accommodations for oral testing. I will be giving a training on it soon, so keep an eye out for that.
Keep collaborating with each other! Our strongest teachers and departments are those who work together every day, regardless of whether they teach the same class. There are hundreds of years of educational knowledge at our campuses, let's make sure we're using it.
Most of all, keep being awesome!
Haley Avery
Email: hbavery@westwoodisd.net
Website: www.westwoodisd.net
Location: HS RM 151, JH Rm 209
Phone: (903) 480-0336
Twitter: @haleybavery