Action NOT Perfection Is the Goal

     Our school district and our school have embarked upon a new adventure with the advent of Professional Learning Communities. What is a PLC you ask? The Professional Learning Community is a method of working in schools where educators are continuously improving teaching and learning through collaborative practices done in consistent and regular work sessions. Our district is following the research of Richard Dufour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Thomas Many in the book, Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. 

     I feel like our school had a slight advantage in stepping into this initiative because we had been preparing for common assessments for two years. We spent the first year immersing our school in data analysis. The second year we spent reviewing data for student impact. This third year we are investigating and reviewing student AND TEACHER data to determine the differentiation needs and match them to the teacher practices! This is exciting work, and our campus has definitely got some pockets of greatness occurring. Even better, there is a collaborative dynamic all over campus, and it will only make us stronger and better able to serve our students. Everywhere on our campus we are moving forward which follows the greatest premise of the PLC mentality...

The goal is action, not perfection!

     Here is a video of our first grade team sharing their work through the PLC process. The items of brilliance to watch for are:

1. Use of Norms
2. Distribution of Roles
3. Data Analysis of Student Achievement
4. Alignment to the Standards and 8 Mathematical Practices
5. Increased Rigor
6. The use of other resources when the provided resources are insufficient
7. Teacher-developed items formatted to the standardized summative assessment(s)
8. The use of performance items
9. The use of rubrics and progression scales
10. Student self-assessment

     It is our hope to continue improving our practices at every opportunity, and this is definitely a step in the right direction. Click below to see the video on YouTube.

Setting Professional Goals #SAVMP #15

Goal Setting is my contentment. I love the day-to-day goal setting, the short-term goal setting, and the long-term goal setting. I revel in the sense of accomplishment that I achieve from crossing things off my lists. Being task-oriented always leads me to a sense of jubilation at the end of the day because ..... if I write something down, you can be assured I will get it done.

So what are my professional goals at this time?

The start of the school year yielded the genesis of two long-term goals from last year. The data showed that we had been missing the mark for our lowest and highest performing students. We added an inclusion program this year AND we added a TAG program for our Talented and Gifted students. So far so good. The programs seem to be setting down roots and flourishing. Certainly they have had their share of starts and stalls, but the students are growing and achieving--that is the ultimate goal. That is what makes every day fresh and exciting...to see our students thrive.

Since school began, I set out with several major goals for this year:

1. Move our faculty from data awareness to data interpretation for impact.
2. Develop a writing team and action plan to grow our students' abilities to write proficiently.
3. Work on rigor and engaging instruction within our core reading program.

Again, we seem to be making progress in all three areas. The writing and reading goals are moving along swiftly. We are using a core replacement program to increase our reading scores. Our writing team is a highly effective group of faculty who are sharing the leadership in spreading writing success across our campus. They are peer-rating papers, cross-calibrating scoring, and analyzing the data to attain greater proficiency for our students.

The data goal is the one that is most daunting. My greatest desire and vision for our school is to develop our school into a school where data drives instruction. We need to be watching for the exact moment where a student stops learning so that we can reteach the skill/concept and help them achieve mastery. This can be difficult to do if teachers are not paying clinically close attention to daily and weekly formative assessments as well as analytics provided by online learning progress monitoring data.

This data journey presents challenges as we must look beyond interim assessments and drill down to the data collected minute-by-minute and day-by-day. That data, the data of learning, is the data that should and needs to drive our instruction. We are building this capacity across our campus, and I love hearing the amazing stories of things our teachers learn about their students every single day.

I certainly have long-term goals as well, and the top three are:

1. Student Achievement (OF COURSE)
2. Faculty Family
3. Facility Improvements

Goals 1 and 3 are complementary. One focuses on what is going on inside the classrooms, and the other focuses on the classrooms and the buildings. A great mentor just shared with me this weekend, that at a school....."I should see your fingerprints all over it." Wow. That is a humbling thought. Progress is the goal in both areas.

The challenge lies in the second goal. I truly, truly want to develop a feeling of 'family' among our faculty. I know they are still learning to trust me and to accept the demands of our situation. It is an ever tenuous balance to raise expectations and to also keep morale high. I will leave no stone unturned to keep this harmony.

Goals for the goal setter--I love them. I find elation in the art of achieving, and I look forward to every morning to get started on my latest mission. GO is the first word in GO-a-l. Go for it!