Focus on the Fabulous
For our Wednesday PLC our teachers took the lead with our professional development and presented on various areas of expertise. Dennis Sparks, the executive director of the National Staff Development Council urges schools to see that professional learning communities are indeed the best form of staff development (Sparks, 1998). Our teachers are the experts. They know better than anyone else what is going on in the classrooms and the best ways to approach the daily challenges that teaching and learning present. PLCs are meant to encourage teachers to recognize and share the best of what they already know. We are using our internal expertise to improve instruction and learning with our team-based learning communities. It was exciting to see this taking place during our middle/high PLC. Teachers rotated through their choice of three different sessions. During each session, teachers had three choices of teacher presentations/workshops to choose from. Teachers had the opportunity to share their knowledge and learn from each other. The first session had Ms. Donaldson and Mr. Poole presenting on different Kagan strategies and Mrs. Martinez and Miss Hays presenting on the Socratic Seminar. Session two gave teachers the option of different ways to use technology effectively in the classroom with Becky Reed presenting on TumbleBook Cloud database and Mrs. Ruggles presenting on Moodle. Mr. Newmyer presented on ways to engage students across the curriculum with space science. In the last session teachers had the chance to learn about integrating RWC standards across content areas from Mr. Hagan, integrating aesthetic experiences in the classroom from Mrs. Newmyer, and using checklists in the classroom from Mr. Martinez. I heard a number of positive comments about the different presentations. We are using the strengths of our teachers to build the effectiveness of our staff as a whole and reinforce our core belief that we are all committed to excellence in all we do every day.
Rewind
I was able to review lesson plans and get into quite a few classrooms on Monday. Gail Martinez also accompanied me on several instructional walks during the week. Tuesday evening we had our monthly Accountability and BOE meetings. Wednesday morning our kids participated in ICAP activities. Carly Meminger had arranged to have different community members come and present to Career Cluster groups and give students a practical understanding of preparation and expectations for careers in specific fields. That afternoon teachers participated in our PLC. Lori Cooper provided a training session for teachers that will be administering CMAS on the 17th. I met with other administrators Wednesday evening at BOCES to provide the Legacy Foundation with input on how we established a secondary administrators’ PLC in the valley this year. We hosted our first baseball game on Thursday night against Sangre de Cristo. Our track team traveled to Primero for a meet that same day. That evening I presented to the Ed. Psych. Class at Adams State. Friday was College Day. Thanks to Courtney, Raffi and Arabia for promoting post secondary options for our kids by providing them with some fun prizes from universities and colleges across the state!
Ms. Dolan is doing a great job this year having the kids learn about science doing hands on experiments. Kids were investigating waves and how they transport energy using springs!
Forward Focus
Monday morning I will be checking lesson plans and scheduling walk throughs for the week. I will be meeting with the DLT in the afternoon. Tuesday I have a couple of IEPs to attend. Our baseball team will travel to Centauri for a game at 4:00 pm. Wednesday our band students will be participating in the Solo and Ensemble Festival in Alamosa. We will have another Bully Training session from 3:30- 5:30 pm that afternoon. Thursday our 7th and 8th grade students will embark on our first adventure with CMAS. Our 7th grade students will be taking three sessions of the social studies test and our 8th grade students will take three sessions of science. Students will be finished with testing and released for the day at 2:30 pm. Our 6th grade students will celebrate their Merit win on Thursday. The schedule for their day will be sent out on Monday.