November 12, 2012

Monday's Faculty Meeting

We will meet in the cafeteria Monday afternoon to continue our series on developing accommodations for students who come to us with a variety of labels and challenges.  I hope that many of these strategies are generalizable over more of our student population than just those with specific diagnoses. 

Monday's faculty meeting will focus accommodations for students with social/emotional issues. 

Conference Statistics

The month of October is a busy one with conferences and other parent contacts.  This year, as a building, we conducted conferences with the families of 632 students.  That's 96% of our October student population. This is fantastic. Thank you.

Focus Groups

On Monday, department chairs surfaced some highlights from the report generated from the focus groups conducted a couple weeks ago.  I will be sharing them over next three weeks.  Here are some highlights from the two teacher focus groups:

• Teachers recognize that their colleagues are committed to providing a quality education and have the autonomy at the building level to do so.
• Teachers are concerned about the stress of implementing edline.net, learning Marzano, and implementing department, team, and Discovery expectations.

If you are interested in reading the entire report, click here.

The first bullet stands alone as a point of pride.  We have a great deal of talent and good intellect in our building.  This is to our benefit and the benefit of our students.

The second bullet is a point of concern, and I know all of us are working very hard. On Monday, department chairs and I decided on a revision that reduces departmental expectations.  And remember to please let me, or any colleague, be helpful when it comes to understanding and meeting expectations for departments, Discovery, and teaming.  It is challenging to learn by doing, and it is our progress toward these expectations, not our perfect implementation, that is important.

I would like to share the following as it relates to edline.net:

• Unforutnately, many of the frustrations with edline and its implementation are beyond the scope of the building. 
• However, in the meantime, if you want or need support, you should schedule a time with Jason Heisel as a group or as an individual so that you can receive support that you need. 
• Jason formed an LMT sub-committee dedicated to edline and supporting you with it.You'll hear more from them in time.

Our work with The Art and Science of Teaching is valuable, and although we are ahead of the district in many ways with our learning around certain aspects of the framework, it is something additional to what we were already working on as a building.  I know that this sense of "one more thing" alone can be stressful, and I hope we are able to take these things one step at a time over time.