The final bell of 16-17 rang and five days later, we were collectively and purposely planning for the 17-18 school year. You read that correctly. It's June 4, 2017, we've been out of school for exactly one week, and some of my colleagues and I just wrapped up two days of amazing professional development with other leadership teams from our school district. As our superintendent told us yesterday, "Please know I did not pick the dates for this; I asked the organizer if he'd lost his mind!" BUT, this PD came at a good time. We leave tomorrow for our School Leadership Team's Retreat where we will develop our School Improvement Plan & lay out our goals for the upcoming school year (the first bell of 17-18 rings in just 66 days. Let that marinate.) Our school district made a very intentional goal last year of having all schools & all teachers study & work to implement the Four Cornerstones of Effective Teaching in our Professional Learning Communities. The Four Cornerstones are: 1) Organization, Rules, & Procedures 2) Positive Relationships 3) Engagement & Enjoyment 4) A Culture of Thinking and Learning At Chestatee, we really felt we had a handle on Cornerstones 1 and 2, so we covered them initially and then moved on to focus on Cornerstones 3 and 4 for the majority of the school year. This year, we're looking at how we can implement the Tools for Classroom Instruction That Works. This is a reorganized framework of Marzano's Classroom Instruction that Works where the nine standards are presented in a flowchart/framework (see below). The top three should occur every day, in every lesson, with every student. The other standards or initiatives occur based on the instructional needs of the students and the standards they're learning. Dr. Silver and his associates will publish a new book this year titled Tools for Classroom Instruction That Works. We were able to preview and practice with many of those tools during the professional development workshop and I found myself frantically taking notes and making mental notes about what strategies would benefit different content areas and skill sets. To make the tools easily accessible for our faculty, I'm going to create templates that we'll make available through out faculty course in Canvas, our district's LMS. This will allow our staff members to easily download and modify the tools for their particular classroom needs. At our school leadership retreat tomorrow and Tuesday, we'll take a look at how we want to Professional Learning Communities to develop over the course of the 17-18 school year. We've had some great experiences with Lesson Studies and Ed Camp, but we hope to make the PLCs next year even more meaningful for the faculty. If you have any great PLC ideas or arrangements that have worked for you our your school, PLEASE send them my way via email ([email protected]) or in the comments below. Finally, I want to leave you with the quote that stuck with me on day 2 of the PD conference that I cannot shake. Dr. Tom Dewing was talking about best practices with our small group and he mentioned that when he and his wife first married, they bought a cheap kitchen table to get them by. He said the only problem is that they "were not rich enough to buy that cheap." The table was messed up in less than six months and they had to buy another one; in other words, they "bought it twice." He then turned that same quote on us at teachers: "We're not rich enough to teach cheap." Truth. We don't have the luxuries that afford us the opportunity to teach cheap. Instead, we have to treat every experience and resource as a precious gift that we cannot lose. Best wishes my friends. Gibson Special shout out the to dream team and best conference roommates ever! Mrs. Grace and I had a great time showing Mrs. Conley around our old stomping grounds at UGA.
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Author: Jenn Gibson
Teacher. Librarian. Technology Guru. Barista. Archives
May 2019
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