Some of those patterns include the following:
Curriculum Mapping and Program Design Yearly Meeting(s)
Our grade level team reviews the year's curriculum program and maps special events and weekly teaching routines during a day in the summer. This sets the stage for a successful year ahead.
Scheduling
A school-wide schedule is created during the summer and shared before the school year starts to make sure that weekly routines include adequate time for all teaching/learning priorities.
Student Service Meetings
The greater grade-level team including classroom teachers, special educators, guidance, therapists, assistants, and others meet to discuss student services once a week. This meeting helps us to make sure that we are meeting the social emotional and academic needs of all students.
Professional Learning Community (PLC) Meetings
Grade-level educators meet once a week to discuss matters mainly related to the academic program once a week.
Weekly Crowd-Share Memo
The school's principal sends out a weekly memo that lists important dates, events, initiatives, and expectations. Educators are welcome to add related information, important dates, and feedback on the memo. This helps to keep everyone in the building on the same page with regard to teaching well.
Weekly Family, Student, Colleague Newsletter and TeamWebsite
The grade-level website and weekly memo ensures that all members of the learning/teaching team have access to and are up to date with regard to important dates, information, and opportunities related to the grade level teaching/learning standards, program, and expectations.
Team Communication Document
Our team keeps a communication document with important dates, questions, and needed efforts. We use that list to forward our teamwork in order to continually roll-out and develop the teaching/learning program. We meet about once a week as classroom teachers to review the document and complete the efforts listed.
Extra Help Sessions
These drop-in sessions provide time for me to help individual students. I wonder if times like these should become a regular part of the school day since teachers like me who usually teach large groups of students profit from having time to teach small groups and individuals from time to time in a quiet, open time.
These patterns and products ensure a positive program.
There are other patterns and products that continue to evolve, patterns and products that are essential to our positive performance and patterns and products that can still profit from new research and think as we move our efforts forward.
Faculty Meeting
What was once an intimate gathering of staff to discuss school-wide issues has morphed into more of a professional learning event. One reason for the change has been the increase of staff numbers. We have a lot more staff now than in the days of past. Today our numbers of teaching assistants, interventionists, coaches, and therapists have increased. This increase is due to a response to research and in many ways have resulted in better performance. For example the addition of reading interventionists has resulted in greater success with reading for all students--this has been a wonderful, positive change. Faculty meeting is a short amount of time with a lot of people. I think it's important to have time for an entire staff to get together, but I'm not sure about the best ways to move a faculty meeting ahead in ways that matter. Some reading I've done point to the following points that may help:
- If it can be shared electronically, do that rather than make it a focus of a faculty meeting.
- Determine what the objective of a faculty meeting is? Is it for professional learning or is it a time to develop a greater sense of team amongst staff or is it a bit of both?
Professional Learning/Professional Development
There is time set aside for this, and I'm wondering what models work best in this regard. For me, I like choice to determine the type of professional learning I need and I like support in obtaining that professional learning. For example, our last professional learning event gave us the choice about how we wanted to spend time related to the science curriculum. That gave me needed time to organize the countless science materials in ways that have already helped me to teach the science better. I think professional learning time should be aimed at teacher's choice about what they need to learn to teach better. I also believe that our early-year conversations with team members and administrators about our learning/teaching goals is an integral part of this overall effort. I believe that every educator's professional learning should both meet their individual teaching/learning needs as well identified system-wide mission, goals, and efforts.
Attendance at Professional Learning Events
I believe that these efforts are integral to moving teaching/learning systems ahead. When educators have the opportunity to attend worthy professional learning events for a day or days, they bring back good ideas that evolve their own teaching as well as the learning in the entire organization. I think that the way that money is spent on these events as well as the expectations for sharing what you learn are important considerations in this regard. I also think it's important to analyze who has the opportunity to go to these events, and how that attendance affects our overall system-wide development.
Purchasing
I continue to believe that we can organize this area of school life more to make sure that we are ordering quality materials that matter in cost-effective, thoughtful, student-centered ways. Sometimes due to timing and process, purchasing is too rushed.
Purchasing
I continue to believe that we can organize this area of school life more to make sure that we are ordering quality materials that matter in cost-effective, thoughtful, student-centered ways. Sometimes due to timing and process, purchasing is too rushed.
I am fortunate to work in a successful teaching/learning community. I enjoy the analysis involved in looking at my role as well as systemwide efforts to teach children well. I will consider the analysis above as I move forward in the days ahead.
