As we move along to the last day of school, we're on the home stretch. And as I keep telling myself what's more important now than anything else is the relationships you maintain and nurture with students and colleagues. Relationships that can be challenged by exhaustion, multiple special events, and students' and educators' readiness, excitement, and sensitivity related to the upcoming vacation.
Also as I continue to think deeply about service delivery, I realize that our service delivery model hasn't kept up with our move to greater project-based learning and special events at the end of the year. The service delivery schedule meets a more traditional model of teaching and learning, but not the project based learning which includes long periods of time-on-task with projects, field studies, and special events. This leaves classroom teachers mostly in charge of all services that students receive during these last days which increases our responsibility significantly. One way to remedy this is to discuss this leg of the year at the start of the year and think about what the needs are and how services might be provided for this more holistic teaching/learning time. One possible solution is to schedule service delivery for longer blocks less times each week and then match those times with project based learning endeavor at the end of the year.
There's always room to make better, but as I mentioned earlier the end of the year is not the best time to do this. So instead it's a good time to write down the notes about betterment and work on those ideas later in the summer and early in the fall.
In the meantime, the focus for the rest of this week is Field Day, The Global Cardboard Challenge, Changing Bodies introduction, independent reading and math tech practice. Onward.
