Thursday Thriller
September 17, 2020
Some fun pics from this past week.
Nuts-n-Bolts
1. The Walla Walla Public Library has sent some great information with resources for our students and families. I attached them in the email. I will put a plug in on GNN. We will also try and post this information on the Web Page.
2. You will be receiving calendar invites from Mary Erdman, special education para educator, to attend IEPs of your students. Please keep in mind, Special education students are gen ed students first. Part of our professional responsibility is to attend the IEPs; attend the full time. Coming late and leaving early unless there are extenuating circumstances (we will try and schedule accordingly so it will not interfere with your classes). Cesar has prepared a document that we will be sharing with the GC team on Tuesday. We have 96 students on IEPS with approximately 30 of those that have a three year eval. Some classrooms have more students on IEPs than other colleagues. How do we create an equitable process so that as many teachers as possible can attend a student's IEP? We know we only need, by law, one gen ed teacher to attend the entire length of the meeting. However, the more teachers to represent that student the better. Stay tuned. :D
3. iReady Diagnostic testing begins next week for math. The math department has a plan and has communicated their plan to students. The following week (Sept 28-Oct 2nd) ELA will be doing the reading diagnostic. Communication from Carrie LaRoy will be going out to families, you're communicating with students so I won't muddy the waters with communication.
4. Next week I will begin classroom visits. In a non-pandemic year, would normally call these 'walk throughs/mini observations.' We are calling them 'Zoom Throughs.' (I just made that up LOL). The goal is stay 10 mins (sometimes I lose track of time and stay longer) give or take, listen in see how students are doing and learn about your content. I will follow up with an email. The purpose for classroom visits is to see what's going on (can't coach a basketball team from the locker room). My plan is to visit content teams. Looking at the vertical alignment, as well as, observing how the same standard is taught in different classrooms is truly one of the PERKS of my job!! I KNOW we are not deep into content. I KNOW we are not on the same chapter, same paragraph, exact pacing as your teaching partner. I KNOW we are still working through the ins and outs of technology. Grace :D
5. Dare I say...some of you have asked about conferences (October 12-15). :0 In talking with Chris Gardea, he said Ron Higgins, high school principal, thinks there is some setting in Skyward where we can schedule conferences. Chris and Ron are looking into it. I don't know how conferences will work. Frankly, I would love to push them back to November but not sure how that would work. I think we are looking at school and literally 'doing' school differently than we have ever done before. Why not do the same with parent/teacher conferences? My 2 cents.
6. You are doing a FANTASTIC job problem solving and fielding the inappropriate behavior that is slowly rising in Zoom lessons. I think it will get worse before it gets better because of the nuance of it. This is a short,
1:50 video, Sam made regarding students re-naming themselves. If we are changing our re-occurring link as well as changing how students rename themselves, we might be able to put a kibosh on the hackers for a while until they figure out our system. Thank you, Sam!!
7. Please make sure and complete your safe schools training. You have received an email that looks like this:
