Reflection
I begin the day reading emails, social media posts, and reflecting on the long term efforts and day's efforts.
Student Meeting
At 7:30 I'll meet with a service team to discuss one students' needs and how to proceed to best support that child.
STEAM Lessons
From 8 - 10 a.m. I will lead two STEAM lessons with colleagues. During the lessons we'll review the elements of optimal teamwork and work together to practice planning for the creation of an imaginary summer play space. During these lessons we'll review strategies for good project planning including identifying and focusing on the overarching goal, research, planning with big ideas first, and creating a plan with images and labels.
Biography Research Team
From 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. I'll work with my small biography research team to film each member of the team reading their poster or presenting the global changemaker they studied as the person or as a reporter. To get good videos virtually takes time so I've scheduled a couple of hours. While I'm working with one student the others will help and/or work on their other study efforts. After I film each child, I'll edit the films and place those films on the project slideshow.
IEP Meeting
At 1 p.m. I'll attend an IEP meeting
Week's End Planning and Review
After the IEP meeting, I'll review the week's efforts and student work. Then I'll update my part of the grade-level teaching/learning menu with next week's assignments, meetings, and announcements. I'll update the planning/review list for next week too, and then begin the weekend as I usually would during the late Friday afternoon.
Remote teaching/learning has morphed into a full day of professional efforts to support student learning. So far, the results of this work have been good. Students' recent math assessment demonstrates good growth for the group as a whole and almost every student. Students' biography reports are terrific. Students' learning in other areas as evidenced by project share is good too. For the few students who have not made as much progress as we would like, we are looking deeply at these cases to see what we have learned about how to change the work we do to better teach children like this. These children represent a mix of the following elements:
- Less family support due to a myriad of situations.
- Less at-home materials and spaces for optimal learning.
- Less ability to use the tools and attend meetings due to organizational issues, ability to understand/use the online tools.
- Less ability to meet curriculum standards due, in part, for some to curriculum standards that are not a right match for the child
- Less student will to be involved for a myriad of other reasons we need to explore more
How do we best offer counseling and support to students and families who are having difficulty staying involved with school during remote teaching and learning. In some cases, I believe that these families should have the opportunity to use the state's emergency child care and, in other cases, I believe that we need to enlist the support of social workers and psychologists to help the children and families. At school we have good services to help out in cases like these, but with remote learning and teaching, we have to rethink how these supports work.
We won't give up, however, we want every child to succeed and will continue to work for that result.
