News from the Nest
Week of November 6, 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!!!
Nov. 6- Lesson Plans Due in Google Drive (9:00 am)
Nov. 6- Student Picture Day (See schedule)
Nov. 7- K-7 ELA PLC's
Nov. 8- K-7 Math PLC's
Nov. 8- Mandatory Staff Meeting (4:15 pm)
Nov. 9- PIVOT ELA Testing, Grades 3-7
Nov. 10- VIMME Testing
Nov. 10- Jeans Day
General Need to Knows
Continue to push your behavioral expectations daily and reinforce students with Dojo points! We need to continue to show our students that we are recognizing the positive choices they are making daily. Follow the behavioral violations process and major/definitions closely to drive your responses. Some of calls have not been major in nature and should be addressed in the classroom. Please keep in mind that during "busy" times, behavior support staff may be involved in responding to students and we will get to your call as soon as possible.
The district is finalizing evaluations from the 2016-17 school year. You will begin seeing emails coming from SFS alerting you to this. New teachers- you will not be getting these, as you weren't here!
Picture Day will be on Monday, Nov. 6th. A schedule for the day is attached to the email I am sending with the "Nest". All students will take a picture and be in their uniforms for their pictures. Thanks for the flexibility as we had to make the scheduling changes.
On Wednesday, Nov. 8th, we will have a mandatory staff (all staff) meeting after school to discuss the next steps for our school based on the meeting we had with Dr. Pratt. Please be there by 4:15 pm. Walking clubs and other activities will be cancelled this day so all can be there on time.
Finally, we are in the season of mini observations! Between now and winter break, your evaluator will be completing two mini observations. These are 5-8 minutes in length. While this is not a long time in the room, we will be providing constructive feedback on your practices. We will be scoring Domain 3C for everyone, as well if you chose a specific domain and indicator for your personal goal.
Vision Aligned Thought Provokers
Positive classrooms: Connections are key to positive learning environments. The image below in the "Thought Leadership" section says it all. It is HARD to maintain this understanding with some of the students we work with. Take a look at the article below about these connections. Reminder- getting loud, yelling at students, and airing their laundry in front of others only damages this relationship. It also leads to distrust and increased misbehavior.
Engaging instruction: I am coming back to an article I shared in the News from the Nest a few weeks back regarding instruction. It can be found here. I want us to think about engagement strategy #3- Pick up the pace. Think about your classroom and how you pace out instruction to engage in your learners. How much time do you model for students, then release them to do the work? How long do you allow for them to engage in this before you check for understanding? Is your timing conducive to keeping students engaged?
RIGOROUS Instruction: Our definition of RIGOR includes instruction that is goal oriented. Taking data and using it to create instructional opportunities that meet our student's needs. We know, based on our data, that the majority of our students are not meeting mastery of grade level standards and skills. Therefore, we need to focus on the foundational skills needed to fill these gaps. We will begin talking about how this will look in our classrooms, grade level by grade level, next week. This may mean support schedules changing, instructional schedule changes, etc.....WHATEVER it takes to see student growth!