Week of December 1st

UAI High School Staff News

Volume II

Issue 16

Week of December 1st  2014

Announcements

 It's December already!  Unbelievably, we are already starting our 4th month of school, which means we have already completed 1/3 of the school year.   For December, we have 17 uninterrupted instructional days, which is a great opportunity to get some traction under your new classroom initiatives (work out plans are mandatory for all and responsibility teams are optional, but highly recommended!).  I'm going to be working closely with a couple of people on each grade team to refine responsibility team practice this month.   If you are interested in joining the work, just let me know!

Grades are Due.  Benchmark grades are due to be uploaded into THIS DOCUMENT.  Last week Colleen emailed out instructions for uploading your Marking Period 2 grades.

Click HERE to see that email.

Both Benchmark grades and MP2 grades are due on Wednesday, 03DEC14 at 3PM.

Quality Review Prep.  Last week I wrote about next steps needed to prepare us for a strong review.  During our full staff monthly PD, you'll have time to attend to these next steps.  In addition, I will be making rounds of Informal evaluative visits.  My goal is to do same day feedback and to try to get to as many people as possible.  I'm also using this opportunity to norm with the lead coaches on feedback and next steps, so please expect them to join me on these visits.  They are there for training only, I'll be doing the evaluations.

As a reminder, there were 4 next steps:

• Teach into the breach.  We need to elevate the rigor of student thinking.  The optimal method is to explicitly teach students how to make higher quality breaches in all formats.
• Launch Work Out Plans.  We need to be more attentive to providing all students with access to our content.  Work Out plans is the optimal strategy to address this.
• Keep up with the Formats.  From speaking with students, formats are consistently occurring throughout classrooms.  Keep this up. It demonstrates strong coherence in our school.
• Turn in your Current Unit Arcs. Another example of strong coherence and also a prime tool we use to align our curriculum to standards are our unit arcs.  To be able to present these to our reviewer, please upload them to this folder by the end of the day on Monday, 01DEC14.

Agenda for Monthly Full Staff PD. 

• 2:50-3:10: Review Old/Add New Ideas for PODS.  Our first round of PODs is ending.  It's time to start our next round, select new topics and do some final reflections.  
• 3:10-3:20: SQR Next Steps and Round II of Observations.  Kiri will review expectations for Observations and Next steps and review tentative schedule of review and bio of the reviewer.
• 3:20-4:10: No grade team meetings this week.  Teachers will have time to beautify and put student work up!  Click HERE to look at last week's post to get ideas of some strong classroom environments and student work posts.

Quality Review Info.  Our quality review is one week from Monday.  It is an important day for our school.  Coming together to put our best foot forward will shine the best and brightest light on everything we have done as a community to bring our high school where it is!  The Urban Assembly put together a wonderful data dashboard which highlights some of our chief accomplishments.  Additionally, the new High School Quality guide has some really pretty graphics that illustrate our growth!  Here are some pretty amazing highlights:

• Last year's graduation rate was 91%!
  (Brooklyn and City rates were 68% & UA Network rate was 74%)

• Our college persistence rates are amazing.  88% of our first class was enrolled in college 6 months after they graduated with 92% of them were enrolled 1 year after.  
  (UA network rates were 70% and 77%, respectively.  6 month city & Brooklyn rates were 50% and 51%, respectively.  Data for city and Brooklyn rates one year out are not readily available.)

• Click here to see more of the amazing growth stats we had last year!
  (the data and goals I shared at the beginning of this year.)

Important Dates

• Monday, 01DEC14. Full Staff PD and Unit Arcs Due
• Tuesday, 02DEC14. Kiri out of the building at Superintendent's meeting.
• Wednesday 03DEC14. Grades for MP2 and Benchmarks are Due
• Friday 05DEC14.  2nd MP Progress Reports distributed 8th period.
• Monday 08DEC14.  School Quality Review
• Friday 12DEC14. Full UAI Staff Winter Party.  More details to follow.
• Thursday 18DEC14. Winterfest Talent Show
• Tuesday 24DEC14.  Last School Day of 2014
• Monday 05JAN14. First School Day of 2015

Per Session Posting

No new postings this week.