Principal's Message 5/25/2009

OBSERVATIONS CAN BE FUN?

I hope everyone enjoyed their Memorial Day Weekend. To me, this weekend is the last sprint of the race, or for my track experts, the last curve. The end of the year is very visible and we are gaining momentum to win the race. We have to be disciplined and focused on the finish line. We do both of those while we close out this month, we will put the icing on our cake, the cherry on top, the something else that indicates the last touch up of a product that represents focused and hard work….I’m not the best with sayings, quotes, or music lyrics…some of you have discovered this flaw about me.

If you felt my excitement about the end of the year last week then you are going to feel even more this week. I just got done typing all of my observations this week. I had a great time visiting classrooms and partaking in discussions with several of you. There is only one word that summarizes how I feel after engaging in the exploration of instruction. That word is “Wow.” I felt like I was side-by-side with you and taking a magnified glass to see how we can create the best instructional setting for our students. I asked a couple of you to take some risks and you did it! If you did not trust the process of working with administration in observations, it would never have happened. ..but you did trust the process.

The results were remarkable. The main focus of administration with all of you has been the preparation of expanding our student success plans to all of our students. We have been assessing how the data has been coming along. Again, that was why it was important for you all to begin the process so we could have real experiential feedback. Anticipatory feedback would not have been enough. In a couple of my pre-observations, we were able to identify a targeted group of students that would have benefitted from some direct instruction strengthening a skill related to the content being shared with the entire class. The results, every time, were improved ability within the skill. In one classroom, I witnessed the students gaining so much momentum that they finished the skill-based questions they were given and then quickly stepped into the content questions the rest of the class was working on. I had a student who came to me because she felt the skills she was assessed on needing support were not the ones she wanted to concentrate on. She offered to study and take the diagnostic again. This is one pure example of how the students can really own the learning with a skill-based approach to teaching our content areas. The risk was in trying something that had not been done in their classroom before. The conversations with these teachers contained excitement about how well it went and how much they could do with targeted instruction next time.

During these discussions, several miscommunications about the student success plans surfaced. One I want to mention for now is the conclusion that teachers would have to drop the content and standards and strictly concentrate on skills. This was quickly identified as false and impossible. We have an obligation to cover the content and standards of our subject areas. We CANNOT depart that. We are strictly developing skills we believe will help our students expand their content knowledge. In summary, we are giving our students the tools to gather as much information in our subject area as possible. If we identify the skill that most pertains to the content/strategy being shared with the class on a particular day, then we can provide targeted instruction to students who are not proficient within that skill. We can use the independent/group work to assist these students in reaching proficiency within the skill. So the mini-lesson still moves along the content and strategies, the independent/group work gives us the forum to enhance the skills we believe will help our students to gather the information in our subject area.

So if you are dropping “everything” to teach these skills, then you are not clear in what we are doing with skill-based instruction. You should not be “dropping” anything. If anything, you have “dropped” the purpose of student success plans. If that is the case, please reach out to me so we can open up a dialogue with the concept of the student success plans. I promise, by the time we are done, you will have a different perspective of student success plans.

ATTENDANCE FOR THE WEEK

Monday: 86%
Tuesday: 86%
Wednesday: 84%
Thursday: 83%
Friday: 78%

STAFF BIRTHDAYS

Emmanuel Okon April 1st
Jackie Brown April 27th
Rachel Levene May 1st
Danita Scott May 2nd
David Deatherage May 2nd
Leslie Tatum May 12th
Maurice Barnes May 12th
John Gonzalez May 15th
John Ciano May 19th
Cassandra Williams May 21st
Zoe Markoupulus May 28th

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Nothing average ever stood as a monument to progress. When progress is looking for a partner it doesn't turn to those who believe they are only average. It turns instead to those who are forever searching and striving to become the best they possibly can. If we seek the average level we cannot hope to achieve a high level of success. Our only hope is to avoid being a failure.”
–Lou Vickery