Learning Together

Message from Troy D. Olin, Assistant Superintendent for Instruction

A common thread has emerged as our team has brought the rigor framework to life this year. We have spent time in each building digging into three of the five components of rigor: culturally responsive, inquiry based, and for some higher order thinking skills (others will occur this month). These opportunities have provided meaningful and relevant activities that generated a high level of engagement. The productive hum coming from each cafe/library has been music to our ears.

The pandemic has certainly created distractors and barriers that impact teaching and learning. We see them daily in our learning environments. Teaching is challenging, period. However, as we visit buildings and during our rigorous faculty meetings, we are consistently impressed by the talent each of you brings to our students. The dedication you have to their learning is second to none. Do not let the distractors and barriers of the pandemic cloud your work and use this time to ignite engagement through rigorous instruction.

Our team is working collaboratively with our instructional coaches, Chris Amesbury, Jen Christensen, Matt Harvey and Mike Munski, to develop practical and meaningful professional development opportunities as an extension of these faculty meetings. These learning opportunities will be asynchronous to provide flexibility for your schedules and facilitated by our talented coaches to provide ongoing opportunities for support.

Below you will see examples of the amazing ways our coaches are engaging staff this year.

Here are just some highlights of the work our coaches have been doing this year. Please reach out if there is something they can do to support rigorous instruction in your classroom.

PD on demand

• Facilitated our first asynchronous PD with 20+ teachers this fall, titled Enhancing Student Success. Stay tuned for more asynchronous opportunities available in Frontline!
  
  

Exploring esports

• Supported the launch of the first season of esports at Gates Chili High School. Students demonstrated teamwork, problem solving and critical thinking!

Revving up engagement with robots

• Co-taught using robots to increase engagement, problem-solving, and early computer programming all while supporting curriculum.

• Library/Grade 3 collaboration programmed robots to navigate the Paul Road community and demonstrate understanding of maps as part of social studies curriculum; performed inquiry and research to ‘teach’ Cubetto about climates and measuring weather as part of science weather curriculum

• Library/Grade 4 ELA collaboration taught students the RACES writing strategy and had them ‘teach’ Ozobots about it by programming them through a path
  
  

Building skills with Minecraft EDU

• Grade 6 Social Studies: Students controlled their own learning about Mesopotamia through interacting with a world full of tasks to further their learning about this ancient time period.

• Grade 4 Classroom: Used Minecraft EDU as an esports challenge to engage students with the 4 Cs--Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, and Communication.

• Grades 4-5 Library: Students worked with the Library Media Coach, and Innovation Coach to brainstorm, research, build and cite, surrounding the student's own choice in Minecraft EDU.

• Grade 4 Enrichment: Led by the Library Media Coach and Innovation Coach. Students worked through the research process and demonstrated their learning in Minecraft EDU. Students used Flipgrid to elaborate and share information about what they built using Minecraft EDU.
  

One month in with our Literacy Coach

• Supported each ELA Task Force grade level team in K-5 literacy curriculum work, with the goal of developing consistent and sustainable practices across all four buildings.

• Worked with a third-grade team to use assessments to determine specific student needs in phonics.

• Collaborated with a fifth-grade classroom to develop multi-disciplinary instruction.

• Developed consistent PD incorporating the use of decodables to support phonics instruction for K-1 teachers districtwide.
  

Making learning visible

• Created self-paced Schoology Assessment activities that met learning standards and the needs of the learners. As students worked the teacher was able to be the facilitator and help students who needed extra help.

• Worked with teachers to develop Schoology assignments that allow students to demonstrate their learning of a lesson and/or objective

• Supported a classroom to use Flipgrid as a final project. The process used peer review to provide feedback before final submissions were made.
  

Gates Chili coaches have been instrumental in providing quality professional learning experiences to members of our community. Regularly, these teacher-leaders model promising practices within our learning spaces, teach us how to embed instructional technology, research, inquiry, and literacy into our daily lesson plans, and help to create a culture of collaboration, healthy risk-taking, and high expectations. We are grateful for the in-house expertise we have in each of them, and commend their willingness to continue to grow professionally so as to share this with us all.

Between July 2021 and June 2022, the coaches will have offered over 30 relevant and inspiring in-services, workshops, trainings or collegial circles to a variety of staff. Here's what our staff has to say about their experiences working with our coaches:

"Expert instruction from knowledgeable staff."

“Helped me to think about my current practices and how I can do things easier.”

"So many ideas....super examples...ways to include student choice...helped me become more comfortable."

"This course had a lot of modeling and then independent practice in order to learn from our errors. It was actually quite fun and my mind is spinning on how I may incorporate into my setting.”

“Keeping up with technology and short cuts in the apps I consistently use will really help streamline my work day.”

“AMAZING leaders for giving new ideas and ways to implement them in our own teachings!”

Thank you, Coaches!