Thursday Thriller
February 27, 2020

This photo is Cyndy Knight, the Executive Director of WW Valley Disability Network. The www.wwvdn.org is an amazing network of people who have and are a plethora of knowledge and resources for parents of students with disabilities.  I learned in one short evening how desperately parents of students with special needs just want to be included and what can we do to facilitate this.  How do we teach our 'gen' ed students to include and not be afraid of our students with special needs (I know I am over generalizing.  However, we do have some work at bridging to do.).  It was a great evening!  More to come.

Wow! Have our 6th graders improved from this fall!  Did you know that Roger has students play the University of Michigan Fight Song and has done so for the past 30 years?  Caleb, how do you feel about that?😉 

NUTS-n-BOLTS

1.  Next Wednesday during collaboration we are going to look at the results from the grading survey, talk about what we see in the data, read an article and take some next steps on the 'ah's' we collectively find in the data.  This is NOT a process so we all walk away from grading the same.   This is about consistency, how we interpret grades and what we want our students to know and learn about grades.
Here is an article from Educational Leadership that caused Guiding Coalition members to think about current grading practices in their own classes.

2.  Please look over the email from Roger on which students will be out of the building traveling to University of Idaho for the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival for tomorrow.

3.  Sherry emailed certificated staff on Tuesday regarding 2nd quarter grades.  Please make sure you have current entries in your grade book.  This is also a great time to review your grading policy again and document it.  By doing so, when parents have concerns you can let them know the dates you went over your grading policy.

4.  As stated on GNN, 10 x $5 gift cards to Dutch Bros.  The goal is to find 10 students who stand out as having school spirit, are nice to others, showing integrity, etc.  Email me names.  I will announce winners Tuesday or Wed. morning.

5.  Beginning next week, Jose is going to run a Math Lab in the morning from 7:45-8:15.  I will announce it on GNN.  Please encourage students who need assistance in math to take advantage of this opportunity.

6.  Please post either outside your classroom or inside where students know when you are available for 'office hours.'  We do need to be accessible for students to come in, ask questions, make up work, etc.

7.  Don't forget to order your Garrison gear.

SOMETHING to PONDER
Although this podcast is mostly and predominately for teachers, I have found some extremely useful information because I consider GMS staff my classroom! :D  We have all had those moments when we ask a question and we get crickets. There are a lot of reasons why we get crickets.  In this podcast which is roughly 15 mins, Jennifer Gonzalaez, YES, Cult of Pedagogy gives us reasons and strategies to avoid the crickets.