Great things occur when joyful leaders model growth mindset to students. Welcome adversity & reframe failure as an opportunity to grow! - Jeff Hiser @jeffhiserBL
Important Dates
August 28 - Department Head Meeting
August 29 - Open House 7pm - 9pm
August 30 - Professional Learning Communities Begin
September 1 - 4 - No School - Fair/Labor Day
September 12 - Staff Meeting
September 14 - School Picture Day
September 15 - Marching Band on Fox 8
September 21 - No School - Rosh Hashanah
Important Information
Great Start - I want to thank everyone for a great start to the school year. Every adult in our building did their part to help ensure for a successful school year for each and every one of our students. Let's keep the focus of reaching every student and ensuring all reach their potential.
Opening Day Folder - Please make sure you read all of the documents in the Teacher Opening Day Folder. There is a lot of information contained in this year's folder that will be helpful as you plan your year.
Staff Emergency Medical Form - Please make sure all of you complete this form and provide it to Joyce. She will keep it on file in the event of an emergency. Thank you.
Parent Contact - Parents can be your best partners when working to see your students reach their potential. It is important to develop positive relationships with all of your students' parents. You can begin this process by sending home an email introducing yourself. Be sure to include some goals and outcomes you will work hard to have their children achieve throughout the year. It is great to see that many of you send out weekly emails describing assignments and noting upcoming tests and quizzes. Keep it up! Don't forget to include your contact information in the event they need to reach you. Here are some additional resources used to build positive relationships with your parents.
Google Classroom - Google Classroom has a nice feature that will email parents/guardians with students' individual course progress. It will give details and allow parents to have a better understanding of the activities and assignments occurring in your class. Click here for more information and learn how to begin utilizing this tool asap.
School Safety Drills - Please take some time in all of your classes to discuss school safety drills that will occur throughout the year. These drill include tornado, fire and ALICE. Safety drill information is posted in your classroom near your door and should be used as reference. ALICE information is posted in the Teacher Opening Day Folder and needs to be review prior to discussing with your students.
Calendar - If you advise a club, group or have events that need to be on the school calendar, please send information to Lisa Porter so it can be placed on the high school's calendar.
Open House - Open house will take place this Tuesday from 7:00 - 9:00. Parents have been asked to report to the library between 6:45 and 7:00 to pick up schedules with the first class bell ringing at 7:00. Please have available any textbooks and/or resources you expect your students to bring home or use in class. Explain where students and parents can find class documents, website and presentations online. Discuss how your parents can view your Twitter accounts and/or sign up for the class Remind 101 accounts. Your classrooms and hallway bulletin boards should be decorated with relevant classroom materials. Joyce will print name tags and parent sign in sheets for each teacher. Here is the parent flyer containing the bell schedule that has been distributed to families.
PLC's - PLC's begin this week. Every Wednesday morning is an opportunity to collaborate with peers in order to improve students learning. Please be prompt to each 7:15 PLC meeting as your time and input are extremely valuable to the collaboration process. Specifically, you will want to address the following during your PLC meetings:
- Standards to be taught in upcoming weeks
- Updated pacing guides with thought to instructional practices for upcoming lessons
- Upcoming formative and summative assessments. Also, data from given assessments and strategies to reteach struggling students and strategies to enrich successful students.
- Focus on Results - Dufour
- What is it we expect our students to learn?
- How will we know they learned it?
- How will we respond when some students do not learn?
- How will we respond when some students already know it?
AIR -Practice Tests vs. Item Release - This difference is very important between and important to note. Teachers can use practice tests to align question types and should not use them to align actual content. For aligned content questions, look to the released items. Released items are located in each tested area's results Google Drive Folder. Practice tests are contained in the student resource section of the TIDE testing page.
- Practice tests - These tests contain items to allow students to practice test taking strategies (graphs, maps, click and drag, drag and drop, drop down menus, etc). They do not necessarily have standard aligned questions. Some contain questions not aligned to standards at all.
- Item Release - These questions are curriculum aligned items that have been test questions.
Good Professional Reading (or Watching)
Writing Multiple-Choice Questions for Higher-level Thinking
Consider These Google Extensions
Grammarly - Grammarly isn’t just a safety net. You’ll get detailed explanations for all your mistakes and weekly progress reports to keep you on the ball.
Doctopus - Doctopus allows you to easily set and control access levels for individuals and for the whole class on assignments. Create student assignments templates in Google Drive, and then distribute them based on individual student level and need.
Goobric - Grade using a rubric in Google Doc. To be used with Doctopus.
Draftback - Draftback lets you play back the revision history of any Google Doc you can edit. It's like going back in time to look over your student's shoulder as they write.
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