I will again be using this as a tool to share and store information about the weekly department chair meetings and what is going on in the building from that perspective. Here are the highlights of today's meeting!
- The administrative team is expecting department chairs and their colleagues to hold monthly meetings. Principals and Amy Hayward are to be invited to be a part of these conversations. The goal is to create better communication in the building and foster a professional community among staff. Early Release Wednesday times may or may not be available for this purpose, so we may need to be creative with setting these up. I will let you know what the plan is as soon as I figure one out. :-)
- The department chairs decided today to discontinue the use of quarterly assessments in the core as a means of communicating student growth to the district administration and board of education. Remember, the district has a goal of showing one years growth for every student in reading and math. Alli would like to see us move to something more encompassing for measuring growth that includes all the courses a student is taking. The concept she shared today was something along the lines of "Bachelor of Science" curriculum and "Bachelor of Arts" curriculum and reporting growth along these lines. I am not sure I understand how exactly this works or where precisely we are going with this, but I will keep you posted. I suspect we are going to become more involved in this process.
- We are going to continue to have students of the month here at the high school. Please let me know if you have anyone deserving of this honor and I can submit their name. Additionally, if you would like to nominate someone for Top Tiger, I can pass that along as well. (Remember, Top Tiger can only be awarded once in a student's career here in Cuyahoga Falls.)
In addition to the above topics, we had a lengthy discussion about where we are in each department with OTES. I am proud to say we are one of the few departments that has already administered both assessments and are on our way to analyzing student data. If you have any questions or concerns about any of the OTES stuff, please let me know. The district OTES committee is meeting tomorrow and there are many questions on the agenda. Specifically for us, we need to notate any problems/concerns we have with our materials so we can update them for next year.
So what should you be doing right now? Here are some things to keep moving forward with!
- Keep working on those SLOs! Remember you need to create two separate documents, one for the pre/post and one for the performance assessment. The information about students and interval of instruction should be exactly the same. The details about the baseline and trend data should be different. Next week, we are going to focus on writing the SLO area covered by the standards the assessments cover and what the assessments are. If you can stay on top of this, you should be able to write your entire SLO in the ERW time. Please let me know if you need any help or have any questions!
- As we move through the SLO process (and once our SLOs are complete), we will again revisit the work of mapping and assessments. At this time, the thought process is we will be expanding OTES to cover additional courses. More details about what that specifically means for use to come.
As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns! :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment