At the urging of colleagues who saw the light in children's eyes as we navigated a number of worthy environmental education efforts in the past few years, we sent off a grant proposal today to fund further environmental study. The one big change in the grant was notice that we would do the advocacy work needed to make these efforts a mainstay of the fifth grade curriculum program--there are countless reasons why this is a good idea, reasons well summarized in the quote to the right.
Cultural Proficiency
There are countless ways to develop programs of study that are more culturally proficient. Our team continues to explore this and we are writing another grant to fund a number of diverse and inspiring expert visitors to make our program more culturally proficient by way of mentors, knowledge, inspiration, and vision. There's still work to do on this grant, but I hope the result will be further development of this important goal.
Student Self Assessment, Goal Setting, and Reflection
Soon students will spend time updating their showcase portfolios with reflections, assessments, photos, and valued projects/study. As part of this we may include an SEL reflection and goal. A draft of the assessment piece is included below. We'll discuss this draft and how we might utilize this to grow our efforts and conversation related to social emotional learning (SEL).
Sometimes an assessment can also serve as a learning venue too. That's how I designed the physical science assessment using a Google Form and current systemwide, curriculum, and state test questions. The form focuses on the physical science standards that students need to master prior to the STE MCAS tests in the spring. Take a look if you're interested and please know that I welcome your corrections and improvement ideas. What I like about the Google form quizzes is that they provide instant feedback about a students' performance and you can let a student take the test as many times as they like to achieve mastery. In today's world, memorization and one-time tests take a far back seat to processes that lead to mastery--processes such as assessments designed as teaching tools and the ability for a child to assess himself/herself until they reach mastery.
Scheduling
The team has the opportunity to re-look at scheduling and make some recommendations as to what will better our service to students with regard to the schedule. That's due soon so we have some work to do. In general, I feel we have a super schedule, yet we need to think about how we will fit in the new social studies standards' teaching since that will require some good energy and depth. We will likely talk about this at our meetings this week.
Though it's tempting to stay the course of doing the same thing year after year, that path is not as worthy a path as one that continually reflects, revises, and redirects the program in ways that matter. The world is always changing and so should our curriculum efforts and programs. Though we have to be mindful about how that change occurs including the frequency, process, and voices involved.
How will you add capacity to your teaching/learning programs in the year ahead? What will you and your colleagues do to improve what you can do and make it more modern? In today's world sometimes the greatest stumbling blocks to this work is the fact that knowledge is everywhere and potential for change is great yet our systems, structures, processes and roles haven't kept up with this potential thus we're often mired in old think and old ways which confounds good transformation and growth. Do you agree? If so, how are we going to reimagine in order to make good growth and optimal change?
