Collective Responsibility & Collaborative Practices
In a recent blog post, Beth Kellogg, principal at RVS, highlighted how the small team in Roxbury gathers frequently to discuss the progress students are making. They problem solve together around next instructional moves and are working on how to be more targeted in their instruction. The administrative team recently came together to do a problems of practice protocol. Each administrator came away from that process with ideas and support to move their school forward. Learning is a complicated endeavor - we know that no one person can do this alone, but collectively we can.
Time for our teachers to truly sit and discuss in depth these four important questions: 1) What is it students need to know? 2) How will we know they have learned it? 3) What will we do if they don’t learn it? 4)What do we do if they already know it? Is one of our most common sources of stress with this work. We only have our teachers for so much time during the day and the demands for that resource of time are high.
High Quality Instruction in Every Classroom
Our Vlog series recently featured the classrooms of Max Jennings and Emmanuel Riby-Williams at UES. During our visit, they were working with students on a super fun circus unit designed to increase hand/eye coordination and balance. Watch closely and you will see both Max and Emmanuel scaffolding challenges for students and differentiating what they do to support the kids as they walk on stilts, balance plates, or travel on pogosticks while having a whole lot of fun.
Currently the administrative team is in discussion around how to best provide learning opportunities for every teacher in our District so that we see high levels of engagement in every classroom. This is harder than it sounds as we have to consider different age levels, content, and time for professional learning.
Timely System to Enrich, Intervene, & Remediate
I was excited to be able to highlight the work in this area by visiting the UES Intervention Team for our VLOG. This team has worked with colleagues to change many of the ineffective systems that had been in place for years. They are working to create more targeted goals, doing rapid research cycles to find the most effective and efficient means to reach those goals, and ensuring we have evidence that gaps in students’ learning have been filled.
We’ve learned that this system will look different in our different schools because of the uniqueness of each age level, scheduling, and availability of people with expertise. For instance, our high school intervention team currently has a smaller staff and the nature of the HS schedule only allows for approximately half the meeting time with students that UES’ schedule allows. Our schedule should not dictate the amount of supports students receive. This is, therefore, an area we are actively working on.
We’ve made very good progress thus far this school year and we have more work to do to ensure every child has the opportunity to be engaged, successful, and confident learners. We believe that time is variable here, not the learning. Our systems are moving to match this belief!
