Friday Focus
January 5, 2024
Mission: Educate, Engage, and Empower military-connected students to succeed in a dynamic world.
Vision: Excellence in Education for Every Student,
Every Day, Everywhere.
What's Happening at Sigonella ES
WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT STEM LAB NOT BEING USED AS REWARD BUT RATHER A LEARNING OPPORTUNITY.
Enjoy a well-deserved weekend, and let's embrace the opportunities that lie ahead!
Kindly,
Courtney ❤️
Important Dates
January 10 - SAC Meeting 1500
January 11 - End Quarter 2
January 12 -Teacher Workday (No School)
January 15 - MLK Day (No School)
January 16 - Semester 2 Begins
January 18 – 4th Grade Math Interim 2
January 19 – 3rd & 5th Grade Math Interim
January 22 - Teacher Training 1100 Early Release
January 29-February 2 - Courtney TDY
February 13 – 4th Grade Literacy Interim 2
February 15 - Stem Knight @1600
February 16 – 3rd & 5th Grade Literacy Interim 2
February 19 - Presidents’ Day (No School)
February 20 - Teacher Training Day (No School)
February 26 – Sure Start/PSCD Teacher Workday (No School for Sure Start/PSCD)
February 26 - Cognia Accreditation Visit
March 11 - Teacher Training 1100 Early Release
March 18 – 3rd & 5th Grade Math Interim 3
March 19 – 4th Grade Math Interim 3
March 21 - End Quarter 3
March 22 - Teacher Workday (No School)
March 25-29 - Spring Recess (No School)
Resources from our Team Meeting
Teacher Teamwork That Gets Results
In this article in The Learning Professional, retired superintendent/author Diane
Zimmerman and James Roussin (Generative Learning) say that all too often, teacher teams
have difficulty focusing on student work, learning from each other, and taking collective
responsibility for student learning. Zimmerman and Roussin’s research indicates that three key
elements in PLCs successfully boost student learning: psychological safety, constructive
conflict, and actionable learning.
• Psychological safety – Team members feel that they can take risks, make mistakes,
and ask for help. This operates at four levels:
- Trust in self – I feel safe speaking my personal truths.
- Trust in relationships – I feel listened to and respected by my teammates.
- Trust in process – There are norms for taking turns, listening to all voices, and more.
- Trust in collective learning – Cycles of inquiry explore student successes and
challenges and identify the most effective classroom practices.
“When any of these dimensions breaks down, teams tend to bog down,” say Zimmerman and
Roussin. “When teams regularly monitor the four dimensions of trust, they increase their
psychological safety, capacity to self-monitor, and self-regulate (and co-regulate) to maintain
and repair trust.”
One way to establish team norms up front is to ask team members what they don’t like
about meetings and flip those into agreements on what collaboration will look like. Going
forward, the norms should always be there, and any team member can speak up when there are
problems – for example, “Time out. We need to balance voices in the room” or “We seem
bogged down. Can someone give a summary of the key points on the floor?”
• Constructive conflict – Avoiding conflict and always striving for harmony can lead to
groupthink, say Zimmerman and Roussin, which won’t improve teaching and learning. There’s
going to be conflict; the trick “is staying open, neutral, curious, and interested… seeing
disagreements as opportunities to learn.” Key skills include:
- Summarizing a disagreement so it can be discussed with less passion;
- Getting more comfortable hearing other perspectives and points of view;
- Intentionally drawing out differences in how colleagues think and perceive.
Teammates need to learn to be aware of personal triggers that derail productive discourse.
reframing those emotions into a neutral or positive approach to the problem. “I’m feeling anxious,” one person might say, then listen to how others react, and work together to resolve the issue.
• Actionable learning – To get better results with students, teams need to dive into kids’
learning difficulties, identify skill and knowledge gaps, and collectively identify new teaching
strategies that produce better results. Key skills:
- Regularly assessing what’s working and not working with students;
- Challenging the status quo (for example, a mandated commercial program) and
examining assumptions about current practices;
- The team organizing around more-effective practices.
Team members need to ask probing questions: What do we know and what don’t we know?
Why is this important? What might we do next? If a teacher has learned a successful classroom
technique, it needs to be shared – perhaps in a workshop, perhaps by colleagues observing that
classroom.
“Teacher Teams That Lead to Student Learning” by Diane Zimmerman and James Roussin in
The Learning Professional, December 2023 (Vol. 44, #6, pp. 66-70); the authors can be
reached at dpzimmer@gmail.com and jim.roussin@gmail.com .