Monthly Happenings
August 2017
New Teacher Academy Week
We are excited to welcome to our new staff members this year!
Teacher Institute Day
As a Hawthorne staff, we reflected on our "Directionality" to help us gain a better understanding of each other's working styles. This knowledge will help us strengthen our Professional Learning Communities as we focus on our Culture of Collaboration School Improvement Goal.
NORTH-Action
SOUTH-Empathy
EAST-Vision
WEST-Analytical
Classroom Set up
Leading up to the first day of school, teachers have been busy creating their classroom environments and establishing their classroom routines and procedures. Teachers then had the opportunity to share this information and meet parents at our Curriculum Night.
August Late Start
Our Late Start learning target was for teachers to obtain clarity on the administration, purpose, and data collection pieces of the Foutnas & Pinnell benchmark system. This reading test will be administered three times and year and it will allow teachers to:
- use data to drive instruction and get the gains without guessing while teaching.
- obtain detailed knowledge of each reader’s processing system to drive instruction.
September 2017
Data Review Meetings, Standards Based Reporting, Acceleration planning, oh my!
September has proved to be a busy month and classroom structures and routines are falling into place, our focus in the classroom has shifted to planning for targeted, differentiated instructional to accelerate the learning for all our students. Teachers partook in Data Review Meetings in which we looked through student data in conjunction with our observations to make instructional decisions.
Teachers were also given the opportunity to work with the instructional coach for a half day, to look through the standards based report card and begin to identify pieces of evidence that will be used to gather information for the reporting standards. We worked through the ELA Schoolwide resource units as well as other resources that we use to teach the standards.
Finally, teachers were given a half day release time to work with the assistant principal and the coach to begin forming groups and planning for the acceleration block time. The acceleration block time is scheduled to begin mid-October. While this meeting was to put the initial steps in order, we'll be meeting weekly at team meetings and as necessary to reflect and make adjustments to our planning, as necessary.
September Late Start
During the month of September we finished the first benchmark assessment our students with the Fountas & Pinnell benchmark system, but then it became time to make instructional decisions based on the data. Our main goal is to provide targeted literacy instructional to accelerate the learning for all of our students. Teachers were provided differentiated sessions to attend based on their learning needs.
Our learning targets of our professional learning included:
- To articulate the teaching expectations during the literacy block and apply them in my classroom
- To implement guided reading through using the resources provided
- To create an action plan to begin differentiating my instruction during independent reading/practice
These are the main resources we'll use to guide our instructional approaches in literacy.
October 2017
Standards Based Reporting Follow-up
Teachers received continued professional learning on standards based reporting. Hawthorne and Field K-5 teachers attended a training day from Marzano's Lab in which they were able to learn, ask questions, and problem solve with other professionals in the field.
October Late Start was a continuation of this working and teachers working within their grade level teams to look at student work and help implement instructional strategies that will help move students forward.
November 2017-December 2017
I will be on Maternity Leave-stay tuned for more information in January!