Friday, November 11, 2016

'Learn With Passion

Act with Courage

Change the World'

Could you live with the mission statement above as a condensed version of our more complex mission statement?

Perhaps this condensed version might be more accessible to students and easier for all of us to quickly quote and remember?

Not suggesting that we abandoned the mission statement we spent so much time on and invested so much ownership creating. We'll keep it. It will be our formal school mission. It will remain in our lobby and on our website. We will continue to use our formal mission statement to guide our Showcases of Learning (I think of them as nested targets) -  as it goes deeper into what this condensed version means.

Think about it and we will make a unified decision the next time we are all together.

Building Leadership Team Meeting

Writing and the EPR:

It was decided that we will hold off a year, possibly even two years, before we use any of our common resources with writing to report grade level achievement to parents. We discussed that teachers need more collaborative time together using these tools - more time for sense making and shared understandings - with the tools.

So, for now, teachers can use the tools they are using individually to report student achievement. You will best be able to talk with students and parents about the achievement and growth of your writers with the tools that have the most meaning for you at this time.

Our goal is to have a tool we can use school wide to determine grade level achievement and can also be a learning continuum to monitoring growth - but we aren't there YET.

The Team also identified that we need to carve out more time in our professional development to focus on our work in writing. We will continue to balance our focus on building school wide practices in writing and our work around differentiation.

Our next meeting will be focused on crafting plans for our Professional Development from January until Spring Break. We will also identify some key things we want to collect data on at a building wide level to monitor our work.

Calendar

November 14 - 18th:

Tuesday:
* MTSS meeting 7:30 a.m.
* REA/SAC meeting beginning 4:30 p.m.

Wednesday:
* PD - Student Led Conferences

Thursday:
* Danelle, School Director, visits Renaissance for Classroom Walkthroughs
1:30 - 3:30 p.m.


November 21 - 25th:

Tuesday:
* MTSS meeting 7:30 a.m.

Wednesday - Friday: No School
Thanksgiving Holiday

Have a wonderful weekend!

Deborah