To Do:

• At our Leadership meeting on Monday I’ll be asking you whom from your building will be attending the CONNECT Training next week. Again, we are hoping to have one admin and one counselor from every building attend if possible. If you are not able to make this training, we plan on having another later this year. If you’ve forgotten what this training is about, here is what I’ve communicated in previous TRIBE posts: Please mark your calendar for an upcoming CONNECT training from 1:15 – 3:15 on both Dec. 18 & 19. The intended audience is MS building admin and counselors.  I hope to have one MS admin and counselor attend from each building.  Here is more of what this training will be about: Engage and build capacity for key members of our school community to respond to suicide. The goal of suicide postvention training is to promote healing and reduce risk of future suicides. Participants will become competent and confident to respond to suicidal incidents across the lifespan. They will use a community-based approach for early recognition, skill-building, and to promote healing and reduce risk after a suicide.
• If you knew me well, you would know that I like to compete. To win. In full disclosure, I am getting a little soft in my old age as I don’t make Christie play another game of cards with me (like I used to) if she happened to beat me the first time. But I hope this “contest” gets you going a little bit like it has me. Jay spoke at Leadership on Monday about a “student shadowing activity” that we are encouraging school administrators to be a part of. Lora has also emailed you a description of the parameters for participating, some interview questions, and a Google form for your reflections. Now here is the deal: the level with the highest percentage of participation will receive a hosted happy hour at McMenamins. And, to be honest, I all but guaranteed the MS level as winners already. Which probably ended up as a quote on some elementary and high school bulletin boards as motivation for them to participate. So let’s show others we at the MS level are empathetic and concerned about student equity by spending some time shadowing a student!

This and that:

• Assessment is often part of the conversation (rightfully so) when considering whether students have learned what they have been taught. Assessment can also be broken down into two major categories, formative and summative. Although this article is specifically addressing questions or prompts that a science teacher can incorporate into her/his lesson, I would challenge you to read it with the question of: “How might a teacher in any discipline plan lessons where they ask questions with an eye on assessing student learning?”  I believe this article provides a practical outline for the types of questions/prompts that can be asked to formatively assess student learning (and applied outside the walls of a scientific environment).
• Here is a “hot off of the presses” announcement: The Bulletin’s Newspapers in Education Program is very excited to announce free access to the digital edition of The Bulletin and to our new NIE Program webpage for registering teachers (and for their students) in Central Oregon’s public school districts.  We will still continue to provide the print edition delivery option, as well, until further notice.    In order to participate and receive free access to the digital edition, teachers will need to register (it takes less than five minutes) at the following link:  https://www.bendbulletin.com/WhyNIE . [Note: the link will only be usable in class.]  If teachers currently receiving print copy deliveries would like to register for the electronic version of The Bulletin, they may do so by registering through the new registration page, as well.  Accordingly, we will stop the print deliveries based upon their request.The webpage will allow teachers to:
  • receive the daily Bulletin newsletter highlighting top stories of the day
  • digital access to that day’s electronic edition of The Bulletin and Bulletin archives for student research purposes
  • access The Bulletin webpage which contains Classroom Shortcuts (broken out in sections for quick content access), Teacher Resources, Key Common Core Standards (correlating the use of informational text/newspapers to key standards), and the latest local Education News.

   

Reminders:

• Monday we’ll be having our Horizontal meeting at PBMS starting at 3:15. Please have chapters 4 – 6 read in The Culture Code.
• Don’t forget to “send” home the SBAC opt-out information that was included in last week’s blog post.  Unfortunately, we have not yet received back the Spanish version of the district letter that we want to make sure is a part of this communication. We will provide that to you as soon as we receive it.