I listened to the school committee meeting tonight and there was lots of information related to the work that I do as an elementary school teacher, information that will inform my goals for the year ahead. Specifically the following information was most pertinent:
- Engage every student everyday is a theme
- Synthesize social emotional learning with academic rigor and high expectations with successful strategies.
- Integrate more writing into the science program
- Foster deep learning and students' ability to truly invest in a topic that interests them, a topic for which they can present an evidence-based written and/or oral argument/presentation
- Work for quality, interdisciplinary study
- Teach all students
These are all good rich themes and practices. I will be interested in the way this evolves in the months ahead. In the meantime, I'll embed the themes above by doing the following:
- Looking for more ways to teach math in meaningful, interdisciplinary ways
- Melding math and science exploration and projects as much as possible
- Reviewing, updating, and integrating the social emotional efforts and materials into the curriculum.
- Focus on rich relationship building because that's the foundation you need to build a deeper, richer, and more meaningful program.
- Continuing to develop our science teaching/learning efforts, rich math teaching, and effective STEAM teaching/learning.
