News from the Nest
Week of September 18, 2017 Related Arts "D" Week
Vision
"Wendell Phillips 63 will establish a positive, engaging, and rigorous learning environment that allows each child to “SOAR to Excellence” as a member of the Cardinal Family."
Places to be!!!
Sept 18- Lesson Plans Due in Google Drive (9:00 am)
Sept. 19- K-7 ELA PLC's
Sept. 19- Grade 3-7 PIVOT Benchmark Testing
Sept. 20- Staff Meeting (7:30 am in Media Center)
Sept 20- K-7 Math PLC's
Sept 20- Grade 3-7 PIVOT Benchmark Testing
Sept 21- Hispanic Heritage Night
Sept 22- VIMME Math Common Assessments
Sept. 22- Cardinal T-Shirt Day/Jeans Day
General Need to Knows
Check In/Check Out will continue this week for our first wave of students. Thank you for your flexibility as we get the system up and running for our select students. We will be reviewing student progress prior to Fall Break and make adjustments as needed to the program.
In order to support your work with our students, we will be conducting Classroom Management audits the next two weeks. MCL's and Admin will be conducting paired walkthroughs to see the strengths of your classroom management systems and provide concrete support strategies for you to support your students. These are NOT "gotchas", but rather an opportunity to make sure we provide you with the support needed to support your students. These next two weeks are times to reflect upon what is working and what isn't...for when we return from Fall Break, we will be reteaching rules, procedures, and expectations for our students. Now is the time to make those adjustments!
PIT (Parents in Touch Day) is coming on Wednesday, September 27th. The workday will run from 12-7. We will be preparing letters to go home on Monday to begin scheduling the conferences. This day will be devoted to meeting with parents to discuss student's academic and social/emotional progress. Ms. Delbridge, our scheduling guru, will be coordinating this for ESL translation support and siblings. Thanks Ms. Delbridge and the ESL team!!
Friday, September 22nd, is our first "check in" for students that need to be in the MTSS process. You should be looking at academic and behavioral data to make these determinations. The MTSS Google folder is here. If you have a student that you want to refer to the team, you will need to follow the instructions on slide 9, which to complete Form A on the student and submit into your respective grade level folder. We will review this on Wednesday morning.
Grade 3-7 Teachers- We will be giving PIVOT Benchmarks this coming week. Respective MCL's have shared the schedule for testing, so please plan instruction accordingly.
Vision Aligned Thought Provokers
Positive classrooms: Ch. 2 of Eric Jensen's book focuses on how poverty affects behavior and academic performance. It talks about how growing up in poverty affects student's brains, starting in the womb. A sneak preview is below:
Socioeconomic status forms a huge part of this equation. Children raised in poverty rarely choose to behave differently, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront, and their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions in ways that undermine good school performance. Let's revisit the most significant risk factors affecting children raised in poverty, which I discussed in Chapter 1 (the word EACH is a handy mnemonic):
- Emotional and Social Challenges.
- Acute and Chronic Stressors.
- Cognitive Lags.
- Health and Safety Issues.
This isn't an excuse for our students behaviors, lets be clear. However, it begins to shed light on our students and how we need to look at the "why" of their behaviors a little differently. Let's dive deeper on Wednesday at our staff meeting.
Engaging instruction: This month's KAGAN strategy will be the "Round and Rally Robin" strategy. You may be familiar with this strategy, as well as others we share throughout the year. However, the goal is for us to keep these in mind as we plan our instruction. Students like to socialize....so let's give them a framework we approve of to do so AND tie instruction into it as well. As mentioned last week, engagement is not just sitting in the seat, paying attention. Learning happens when our students can verbalize the application of the content you are teaching. I like nothing more than to walk into your classroom and hear academic conversations happening. That's when I know you got them engaged!!!! I am including a sneak preview of this month's strategy below in the Resources and Tools section.
RIGOROUS Instruction: Our definition of RIGOR has several components, all of which are important in our implementation of stations in guided reading and math workshop. Stations need to be rigorous, as this an opportunity for students to practice the skills that are relevant to them, aligned to assessments they have completed, and have a desired outcome of improving mastery. When we return from fall break, we will begin to focus on our station work. I am including some links below about setting up stations aligned with our work.