eNotes

December 16, 2019

Semester's End

Congratulations to each of you on making it to the end of the semester! You are all on the verge of a well-deserved break. Thanks for all your hard work on behalf of the students in GISD. I appreciate you all and all that you do. I hope your plans for the next two weeks involve some family time and some YOU time! You definitely deserve it!

"Win small, win early, win often." ~Gary Hamel

Celebrating Small Wins

With WDMs, IPCs, balanced literacy, sheltered instruction, walkthroughs, coaching, there is a lot of work we are doing, and it is hard work to do it well. A key to success with all these initiatives is to remember that managing them is a process. Rather than focusing on the end goals, it is important to focus on the small and significant steps we take to get us to that goal. Recognizing progress is a cornerstone of any effective initiative and a vital part of human motivation, but it can be difficult to know how to leverage progress in order to increase motivation.

When we return from break, we have significant stretches between extended breaks, and the STAAR test looms, leading to increased emotions, possible anxiety, and concerns about achieving goals. It’s a good time for us to remember the power of small wins, not only for ourselves, but also for our teachers and students. The linked article reminds us to acknowledge and celebrate each step forward. How are you planning to celebrate small wins?

Sharpening Your Lens & Maintaining High Expectations

Sheltered walks and AggMo walks provided opportunities for us to sharpen our skills by observing instruction and discussing practices. Teachers have varying abilities, so it is a good practice to identify specific look-fors and clearly define instructional expectations. Collaborative walks allow us to hone our own skills, but maybe even more importantly, they provide context and help us recalibrate what quality instruction should look like. As you continue to walk classrooms and provide feedback to your teachers, I challenge each of you to clearly define what quality instruction should look like on your campuses.

Sometimes it can become a matter of relativity, where we define quality instruction in terms of degrees. For example, the instruction in one classroom looks so much better than the teacher next door, it must be quality Or, students are attentive with minimal off-task behavior, so the quality of the instruction must be proficient. Without going to other campuses to see what instruction looks like, it can be hard to effectively evaluate the quality of instruction happening on your campus. Watch one of these brief videos from Bambrick's Get Better Faster and calibrate with your team using your campus walkthrough instrument: modeling a think-aloud or guided discourse. How is this similar or different from what you are regularly seeing in classrooms?

Mid-Year Reviews

It is time to start reviewing the progress you are making toward your T-PESS goals. The window for your mid-year review opens in January, so you will begin receiving a calendar appointment for your mid-year evaluation soon. In preparation for our meetings, be sure to review your goals, bring any evidence you have that shows the progress you are making, and be ready to respond to the mid-year guiding questions. Please don’t create extra work for yourself; just bring what you already have that shows where you are at with each goal. Let me know if you have any questions or need further clarification.

January 7 Campus PD

Our upcoming January 7 professional development day is a campus-directed day, unless your campus is attending the required ethics training. Please submit an agenda for the day (include times and locations) to this folder by Friday, December 20. Keep in mind that this is your only full day with your staff. As you develop and review your agenda, vet your ideas through the filter of “is this the most high-leverage, high-impact way I can spend time with my teachers?”

Sheltered Instruction Follow Up

Thank you, Salina, for hosting the Sheltered walks this week. You and your team did a great job of modeling practices and setting the stage for a strong debrief. I really appreciated the ensuing discussions around pedagogical practices and your willingness to push each other for clarity on what was observed. As we closed out, you had an opportunity to determine your next steps with moving this work forward on your campuses. We will discuss this more in upcoming coaching sessions. In the meantime, here are the resources from the walks which can be used to to help support the implementation of sheltered strategies on your campuses:

TIPS and 7 Steps

Waterfall and SI Alignment

Sheltered Instruction Walkthrough Form

7 Steps Implementation Rubric

Teachers Who Have Been SI Trained

ELL Department Support

LPAC Teacher CIP Plan Support

AggMo Walks

Thank you again to Michael and his team for leading AggMo walks and the collaborative sessions over the last two weeks. We are all doing this work, so it is very impactful to share and exchange practices as we move this work forward. The teachers we observed were exemplar teachers and have been implementing AggMo in their classrooms since last year. Please remember that it has been a process, and Michael and his team did not get there overnight. We are all at different places in this work. As you plan your next steps, think about which teachers are ready to take on AggMo and plan for small wins. Here are a few more videos from Get Better Faster that show AggMo in action and the pre-work to get there. This would be a good resource to watch with your admin team and teachers that are ready to tackle this work.

Creating the exemplar

AggMo (marking up student work)
AggMo (naming look-fors & making up student work)

Planning to monitor (creating a pathway and collecting data)

Upcoming Coaching Topics

This month's coaching topics focused on the progress we are making with your walkthrough/coaching model and with weekly data meetings. We will follow up in January to revisit the goals you set for each, but our focus for January will be refining data practices and monitoring teacher-level and individual student-level data. Here is a tentative preview of upcoming coaching conversations:

Review CBA data and conduct walks
Progress toward campus and principal goals
Celebrating small wins
Discipline reports (exclusionary data and disproportionality)
Failure prevention reports
Comparative attendance data

You will receive more detailed information in the January calendar appointments, which will be sent out this week.

Accountability and Domain 2B

I know we are all developing and refining our systems to track individual progress, but I also wanted to share this information Dr. Caddell provided about the School Progress Domain Part B Relative Performance (D2B) component of the accountability system. She created this attached report which shows you what your targets are for each letter grade based on your overall percentages of economically disadvantaged students. As a reminder, D2B for elementary schools and middle schools is based on STAAR outcome from Domain 1.

As an FYI, 49% of GISD campuses earned their highest D1/D2 score through D2B. The highest outcome is 70% of their overall domain score! These differentiated cut scores based on % ECDIS enrollment in D2B are definitely beneficial to our campuses! Keep this in mind as you evaluate CBA data with your teams.

Click here for a refresher on the school progress (3:00-21:00) and relative performance (21:00- 31:00) under Domain B.

IDF Assignments

There has been a realignment of IDF support, and IDFs are now assigned by area. Although they may have already been working with your campus, the new assignments will begin after break. Here are the assignments for our area:

Elementary

Math-Lametha Williams

ELAR-Kristina Reyna

Science-Shauna Pierce

Middle (shared with Mrs. Perales' area)

Math-Liz Johnson

ELAR-Inez Hayes

Science-Ashley Shine

Social Studies-Isis Tosado