SEL Concerns Ticket Please use this if you have concerns with a student’s lagging SEL skills and you would like to do some collaboration with us (Heidi T. and/or Brian) to problem solve. Thanks!
FYI Ticket Please use this if you have an incident or recurring incidents with a student. This helps us with follow through, communication and data. Thank you!!!!!
How’s it going? – I really appreciate you taking the time on the first round of these and I am encouraged and inspired by your input so far – thank you. I will run this each week and I invite you to use these to help me address your concerns, questions and look for trends that can help our entire team. I will clear the survey each week (probably on Wednesdays) to start new. I am also doing my best to provide some follow up either in person or email when necessary. When I notice larger trends or issues arising with multiple people I will use this information to shape the weekly updates.
HDESD Culture of Care is also hosting two book studies over the 2021-22 school year for individuals working in education. You may sign up for one or both read alongs. Click here for more information.
Highland Culture of Care is looking for teachers and/or grade levels to sign up for assembly videos! You can do that here. Thank you!!!
Our character trait for October is FRIENDSHIP! Look for friendship books coming soon to the library shelf and Heidi will link resources soon to the assembly plan sheet.
Civil Rights Training Follow-Up:
Through our Excellence and Equity listening sessions in 2019, we gathered incredibly valuable information about our students and families: who they are, and what their experience is like in our district. However, we don’t have this same level of information on one key district group: our employees. We care deeply about who you are and what it’s like for you to work in our organization. Getting a better sense of this will help us ensure our staff have the same civil rights’ protections as our students and families, and that we have supports in place for you. You are invited to share your identity, experiences, and perspective with us via a brief survey.
The survey:
- is entirely anonymous;
- will take less than 10 minutes;
- is intended for all Bend-La Pine employees (certified, classified, administrative, and confidential); and
- will only be used to gather district-wide trends about our workforce and to identify areas we can better support our most valued resource: you!
Thank you for partnering with us. Please aim to complete this survey no later than October 29.
Kinsey Martin
Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Title VI Coordinator
Bend-La Pine Schools
She/Her/Ella Orgullosamente Bilingüe
Fall Conferences We know that elementary schools like nothing better than to plan ahead. That said, we are unable at this time to declare that conferences will or will not be in-person or virtual. At this time, we would recommend moving forward, contacting families when you are ready and scheduling conferences, with the understanding that they could all be virtual or they could be in-person with virtual options for families who want them. That way you can have interpreters scheduled, families can plan around the time, and teachers can decide how best to plan for the conference. We want to see what the community spread is during the week of October 15. If we have moved from High or Substantial into Moderate or Low, we would then most likely offer in-person conferences to families open to it.
Staff Meetings:
We currently have 9 staff meetings scheduled for the year. In previous years we had up to 16 scheduled, however some of those were cancelled so I think the most held is probably around 13. During our last leadership meeting we had a discussion about the need for more staff meetings and it came up in two comments in the survey, so I want to dig a little deeper. But first, let me share my intentions.
I am intentionally trying to reduce “staff meeting” time. For several years I have listened to you describe your burn out and watched as your time is continuously eaten away by extraneous factors that have very little to do with your actual job (COVID has only exasperated this impact). One of the most obvious things to reduce is unnecessary meeting time for any organization. My intention has nothing to do with reducing your input or not wanting to hear from you; it is entirely about trying to save your time. Historically many of our meetings run at least twice as long as planned, they are often redundant and frequently address issues that have little to do with teaching and learning. Your time is far too valuable. I cannot remember too many meetings where we can walk away and say we accomplished a lot. Adding meetings is rarely a solution to increasing the quality of any workplace, in fact most often fewer meetings run more effectively can be far more valuable.
I am intentionally trying to increase our time together for purpose and accomplishing work that impacts your effectiveness as a team and as individuals. This can happen through storyline work, culture of care work and professional learning communities. Everything else is a distraction from our profession and it eats away your time. Our Culture of Care team is planning an SIW that will provide this kind of experience. My hope is our leadership team will plan our PLC and EBISS experiences throughout the year that will contribute to this cause. And our times working together on Storyline often contribute to the cohesiveness of our team.
I am also always seeking to increase your individual prep time. The more you can complete in your work day the less you take home. The less you take home, the better you can care for yourself. The better you take care of yourself, the better teacher you can be….and so on.
If I am being completely honest, there are only a handful of staff meetings over the past 6 years that could not have easily been replaced by an email or update. All those other meetings add up to quite a bit of time that could have been put to much better use. Nevertheless I do want to hear back from all of you and I will use this input moving forward. Please take a minute to complete the following survey. Meeting Survey
Regardless of whether or not we add meetings, I want to make it clear that we will not hold a staff meeting or any meeting without a clear purpose and agenda. If you have something you feel needs to be placed on the agenda it must be shared with me no later than the week prior to our meeting.
Quick Lexia Tips – 5-Minute Check-In Video and doc.
Lunch Scenerios – I updated this to provide the plan for indoor lunch and outdoor recess once the temps start running below 45 degrees.
Week Preview:
- Monday 10/4
- Just another manic Monday…oh, whoa, oh
- Tuesday 10/5
- 12:30-1:00 Fire Drill – drill won’t be for the entire half hour, but it will be during this window of time.
- Wednesday 10/6
- SIW – 1:45- 2:45 – Lexia Workshop
- Leveling up our usage.
- Increasing our proficiency with using the program to inform instruction for what students need.
- Refine strategies for implementing Lexia usage for each grade-level literacy blocks.
- SIW – 1:45- 2:45 – Lexia Workshop
- Thursday 10/7
- 2:30-3:15 Leadership
- Friday 10/8
Universal Design for Learning in Math Classes
In this article in Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, Richard Lambert (University of California/Santa Barbara) describes three math lessons in which teachers used UDL with inclusive groups of students:
• A kindergarten class gathers on the rug as students prepare to measure a sensory path they are designing in the hallway outside their classroom. After discussing measuring tools and how to be a supportive partner, students team up, gather sets of connecting cubes, and get to work. As they count and measure, the teacher circulates, reteaching and clarifying. Before long a student notices that his group’s measurement isn’t the same as another group’s, and the teacher leads a mini-lesson on accuracy in measurement.
• A fifth-grade class is asked to figure out how a family of eight can share six large burritos in a fair and equitable manner. The teacher gives students a moment to think and then lets them choose whether to work in a small group, with a partner, or independently. Students work with manipulatives and supplies, and when they’re finished, they gather and share their strategies with the whole class. The teacher names each strategy and helps students troubleshoot their solutions.
• A ninth-grade class continues its multi-day exploration of functions as two quantities with a relationship. Some students graph data from a video of their classmates throwing balled-up paper into a trashcan. Others graph problems on the online program Desmos. The teacher works with a smaller group doing a paper-and-pencil graph of a function. Near the end of the lesson, the teacher calls the class together, reminds them of the big idea of the day (Functions have multiple representations), and asks, “How did that idea emerge in your work today?” Several students respond, and the class wraps up with students doing a self-evaluation of their work.
The key element in each class was that the teacher’s lesson plan made learning accessible to a wide range of students, including those with disabilities. “Learners vary in how well they see, hear, and move,” says Lambert. “They vary in how well they can remember mathematical facts and their ways of paying attention. Learners vary in their emotional response to mathematics.” The key insight of UDL, he says, is that by planning skillfully around the needs of students with learning differences, teachers can meet the needs of the whole class.
UDL lessons are built on empathy for students’ experiences, says Lambert, with the aim of all students succeeding and becoming expert, strategic, and lifelong learners. He recommends conducting “empathy interviews” to better understand what makes students tick and identify barriers to their accessing learning. Lesson design especially benefits from an understanding of marginalized students – understanding issues around disability, race, gender, language, and other social positionings. “If we as teachers can learn more about the experience of students who are at the margins,” he says, “we can leverage that knowledge to design across differences.”
The researchers who developed the UDL framework proposed that lessons should be designed to target three domains:
• The why of learning – Presenting lessons so learners get engaged and stay challenged, excited, interested, and motivated; key elements:
– A supportive classroom environment: Do students feel safe enough to take risks? (This means deemphasizing speed and accuracy.) Are students building relationships in and through math?
– Meaningful mathematics: Is the math relevant, engaging, and culturally responsive? Do students regularly work in groups and engage in sense-making?
• The what of learning – Presenting information and content in different ways because students differ in how they gather facts and categorize what they see, hear, and read; key elements:
– Focusing on core ideas: Do unit and lesson plans guide students to understand and remember fundamental math ideas?
– Multimodal: Is math content accessible? Can students choose how they solve problems?
• The how of learning – Differentiating the way students show what they have learned; key elements:
– Equitable feedback: Does feedback help students grow as mathematicians? Is assessment appropriate for all learners?
– Understanding oneself as a mathematics learner: What do students learn about themselves as math learners? How do lessons support that development?
“The Magic Is in the Margins: UDL Math” by Rachel Lambert in Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, September 2021 (Vol. 114, #9, pp. 660-669); Lambert can be reached at [email protected].