Continued dialogue with students as we co-construct the classroom. Infusing this language into the daily teaching/learning efforts.
Curriculum Focus:
- Reading and talking/writing about reading daily.
- Math everyday utilizing the math practices effectively and deeply
- Blended learning and focus on how to maximize the use of "intelligent assistants."
- Critical and creative learning projects, activities
- SEL focus throughout the curriculum that emphasizes respect, ethics, character, metacognition, and more.
Equity Efforts
- Team emphasis
- How can we provide opportunity to students?
- When and how do we listen?
- Differentiation
- Informal/formal data analysis to lead learning/teaching
- Everyone belongs focus
- Effectively embed equity efforts.
- Revisit the "No Prejudice Here" theme/discussion regularly.
Starting with Emdin's research, I have the following to do:
- Institute call and response routines
- Create expression/question bulletin boards
- Foster positive team competition (we'll do that with upcoming STEAM activities)
- Continued teaching with the arts
- The hello project - multiple greetings. We'll focus on this in Open Circle too.
- Continue to co-construct class protocols.
- Open-ended math teaching project. We'll do this at the end of the place value unit.
- I've used recess as a time to have open ended, friendly conversations with students regularly.
Darling-Hammond and others' research about future-ready teachers and students.
- We started showcase portfolios earlier, and have slowed down the classroom to include more reflection, analysis, and reasoning.
- I've advocated to include lots of tech into teaching, and have received some refusals here, but I am including what tech I can, and will continue to advocate for more and better as I research.
- We've done initial assessments, and as new data comes in, we'll continue to analyze.
- As I get to know students more and have more analyses, we'll begin to differentiate more. At this point, we've begun to differentiate in small ways with teaching assistants' support.
- We've been focusing a lot on vocabulary across the curriculum, and looking at curriculum through multiple lenses.
- Teamwork has been a strong initial focus and will continue throughout the year.
- Our initial STEAM explorations have fostered creativity as did our initial selfie project--we have many more projects planned that will include lots of creativity.
- We began with a deep look at cross-cultural issues with a historic lens and will keep that focus going with projects, discussions, current events, reading, and more.
- We've emphasized that students need to lead their own learning in brain-friendly ways. We also discussed that the sum of passion plus knowledge equals success. We'll continue to focus on growth mindset and brain/cognitive knowledge.
