First thanks again for letting us visit your classrooms today. Kelly & I worked with Emily, Tara, and Kerry to take a schoolwide snapshot of where we are in the school. Many of you have made large strides in getting their Classroom Environment, Independent Work Time, Conferencing, and Unison Reading formats up and running. All of us are still working on refining and improving our practice. We have done so much is such a little amount of time.
We have come far
- All classrooms have roughed out the formats (all mandated formats of conferencing, independent work time and unison reading (in LC classes) are up and running)
- All teachers have established resources and taught into their classroom environments so that students are beginning to understand how to find and use them
- All teachers have established unit arcs that include student choice and are aligned to state standards
- All teachers have moved to making the standards transparent on JumpRope
- All teachers have completed standards aligned mastery grading for the first Marking Period
Give yourselves a woot woot!
Now back to it, because we still do have a long way to go...
Initial analysis of grades and student opportunities (for conferencing and unison reading (in LC classes)) shows that many of you are struggling to meet mandates.
- Some of you have met or are exceeding mandates (all students in the lowest third (L3) students have >2 conferences and they have participated in > 4 unison reading groups, and everyone else has had at least 1 conference and 4 UR groups)
- Many of you are approaching mandates (e.g. the majority of students in the L3 had 2 conferences and 3 UR groups, and everyone had at least 1 conference with at least 3 UR groups).
- Many of you are below mandates (e.g. the majority of students in the L3 and the rest of the class have 1 or fewer conferences and 2 or fewer UR groups)
I'm still gathering and analyzing JumpRope grade data and your tally data. I'm aiming to complete this analysis by Friday. I'll share this complete data set with you guys starting in our conferences and in PD next week. As you move forward this marking period, please reach out to your peers who have strong tallies in yours or in other grade teams.
If you are struggling to figure out how to schedule your time to meet your aims and required mandates, please reach out to me, your team, another team, teachers in the middle school, and/or Tara/Emily/Nicia. There are also many PD opportunities to help you better develop capacity in unison reading, conferencing, and independent work time. I strongly, strongly encourage you to visit your peers and engage with them to find ideas of what to do to shift practice and meet your goals.
Keep checking the PD calendar and reach out to Colleen, our high school PD rep to request specific PD opportunities so that we can work together to meet our goals!