2009 - 2010

Professional Learning
October 14, 2009

We had an awesome turn out today for the professional learning discussion. Thank you so much for attending – it was a lot of fun sharing and hearing from everyone!

If you couldn’t make it, no big deal; maybe next time. I’ll send you the date for the next get together ASAP.

I wanted to review/summarize our discussion:

The “Talented and Gifted” Frankie Norris began the meeting by discussing her time at the WOW conference. She had a lot of wonderful things to say and I have summarized them below.

Students are our customers and they volunteer their time and attention to your class.
We are competing with their outside world and we really need to think about the lessons we design them.
We need to shift our culture and thought process in terms of creating more engaging activities for students.
Education is changing and we need to embrace this WOW philosophy. We don’t know if the traditional form of education will be around forever.
It is essential to think about the customer (students) when you begin designing your lessons.

**These are the things that stuck out for me. Frankie did an awesome job articulating her thoughts. Thanks Dr. Norris! J

I gave everyone a lesson plan cycle and a quick explanation of the ten design qualities. I pointed out the fact that most teachers already embed the four non-negotiable design qualities. (let me know if you want a copy of what I gave the teachers)

We discussed the word “engagement” and what we think it means. A few examples were:

Work that is connected to the real world.
Work that is meaningful to the student.
And a great example from Mrs. Pachiano…“the students are engaged when you try to take their work from them before they’re finished, and they get upset because they want to finish” I thought this was a perfect example!

Melissa and I discussed the Walkthroughs we are doing each day. We mentioned that teachers should not get upset if we rate the class “Well Managed”. We understand that classes will be “well managed” and this is not a “bad” thing.

We then discussed how often students should be engaged. I think we agreed that realistically our students are probably engaged 30% of the time. However, it might be wise to set a goal so that students are authentically engaged 50% of the time. Eventually this goal will increase over time.

Melissa and I are tracking this data and will give you the “engagement results” at the end of the month.

Next, we discussed Daily Five. Several people spoke highly of this program and gave many beneficial examples. I told everyone that we, as a school, are moving to this model and the district supports this initiative; however there is not enough money to train all the teachers. As a result, we are not going to wait to be trained – we will simply use our own talented teachers to train our campus.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress with regard to Daily Five. Thanks again for participating!! We really appreciate all you do!