For good reasons schools are moving towards greater student response and stronger collaboration.
As we travel this path, and as I've mentioned before, this new process demands continual goal setting, reflection, assessment, and revision, and these efforts demand time and problem analysis. Good work is rarely a quick fix or sudden decision.
Hence, as we move into the final weeks of school, many meetings are taking place and many new State- and System-wide initiatives are gaining traction that inform both individual and collaborative goals and direction.
What does this mean for one classroom teacher's efforts?
Communication
Changing schools and structure require revised communication streams and protocols. What is the best way to communicate need, new ideas, and debate? Is transparency welcome? When one communicates a new initiative, idea, or effort, who should receive that communication? Are regular meetings for some groups important? How will varying teams communicate so that they teach children well?
Structure
The classroom set-up and materials should reflect the current goals and efforts. Hence as we work together to determine "loose-tight" scope and sequences that reflect our community, current standards, and student needs, interests, and passions, we'll cull current materials and keep the best, order new materials, and rearrange furniture and supplies to best meet our present goals.
Professional Learning
Once we understand renewed initiatives and curriculum outlines, we'll work alone and together to boost our skill with professional learning through multiple venues online and off.
Schedule
A team has been developed to create the master schedule to meet the main system-wide goals, and then individual teachers and teams will create a schedule on top of that to meet individual students' and class's holistic goals.
I look forward to the efforts planned as I know those efforts have the potential to grow our team and effect. I will be listening closely and thinking carefully about the following points when we meet.
- How are we growing our curriculum in ways that are making the learning brain-friendly and responsive to students' interests, passions, and need?
- How can we embed standards into effective, multimodal, learning endeavor?
- In what ways can we work efficiently and effectively to optimize our collaboration so that all children are getting a meaningful and responsive program?
- In what ways can we use honest, respectful dialogue, debate, and disagreement to refine programs?
- How can we clearly understand each other's roles and intersect those roles for students' advantage?
- In what ways can the effective use of online communication serve to target and optimize our face-to-face communication?
School can take over one's life as it is a limitless proposition--there is always more you can do for a student, a class, a school and a system. Targeting efforts and energy is the way to make school both realistic and effective, hence my targets at this time include the following:
- Year's end focus on PBL with many curriculum standards embedded in student exploration, investigation, creation, and presentation.
- Collaborative work to identify curriculum scope and sequence.
- Individual focus to understand all new standards with breadth and depth. Creation of documents that make the standards' connections and details clear and easy to share with the learning community unit by unit.
- NBPTS renewal completed and embedded into other professional goals.
- Strengthening teaching units: digital story/narrative and digital tools to develop students' use and understanding of the standards of mathematical practice (SMP's) throughout the math curriculum.
Goal setting, reflection, assessment, and revision with student engagement, empowerment and learning success as the goal is the ongoing step-by-step movement in schools today. Establishing optimal communication, structure, schedule and professional learning will lead us in that direction with care.
