New Teacher Support & Development
Empowering and Motivating Every Student, Every Day!
What's Our Role?
During the January 6 Professional Development morning address, Mr. Vanoli presented SUSD's Strategic Design for Educational Excellence and Innovation including an impressive video presenting the new Vision and Mission, Cores Values, and the Portrait of a Soledad Graduate. Peter DeWitt, when meeting with us Directors and Coordinators, asked, "So how do you in your roles work toward these outcomes?" To which, no length of time transpired before my response!
Unlocking the Future Today!, my professional principle, aligns with these goals and the work that John and I pursue with new teachers. During the one-day induction with SUSD's two newest teachers (pictured lower right) and the during the monthly seminar, both Thursday, January 9, teachers experienced instructional practices and metacognitive processes that have the potential of confirming and/or transforming teachers' mindsets to promote all students' communicative skills, self-confidence/goal-directedness, collaborative skills, and their becoming global citizens, innovative and digitally literates, and resilient and adaptable, the six characteristics of the SUSD graduate.
During the induction, Mr. Nathaniel Kirk, math at Main Street, and Ms. Taylor Townsend, 6th at Rose Ferrero engaged in tasks necessitating all 5 Cs (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creating/innovating, and character-building) while metacognizing, writing, paraphrasing, sorting, manipulating a concrete object to symbolize and explicate thought, to name a few, as means for discussing district initiatives for instruction and management.
During the seminar, teachers encountered challenging (collegiate-level) text and problems with the focus of being aware of their emotional levels, thought processes, and changes that transpired in each with the purpose of analyzing their various modes for making sense, comprehending, and working through the task.
Highlights derived from teachers . . .
Induction
- Include various instructional practices
- Structure communication with clear instruction and roles
- Teach variations, such as 4 x 7 = ____ ____ = 4 x 7 (4) (7) = ____ 4 ⋄ 7 = ____
- Mr. Kirk and Ms. Townsend were surprised by how their personal principles aligned. Mr. Kirk: What does not kill you will make you stronger. Ms. Townsend: Failure is not the end; it is a chance to grow!
Thinking Practices for comprehending challenging text
- Rereading
- Looking for common themes, patterns
- Breaking the text into parts
- Talking with a partner
- Following an idea until it proves correct or not
- Using what I already know
- Writing while thinking
So . . .
If I have to manipulate my thinking processes so that I understand challenging text, how much more deliberately I must ensure to teach students that thinking is a process with a plethora of practices . . . and to teach the processes. In both sessions, teachers spent time perusing practice CAASSP assessments for their grades to see not only the questions but, more importantly, to glean from them the assessments' academic language, the level of rigor, and the requisite thinking so that daily instruction includes them.
Why? "To empower and motivate every student, every day!"
Unlocking the Future, Today!
John Ekelund
Unlocking the Future Today!