Welcome to 2019

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New swag on Christmas morning!

What a treat to spend lots of time over the Break with family, including these two monkeys!! Hope your Break was AWESOME too!

Unwrapping presents from my nephew who is promoting his new school!

Crew 1st Monday AM:

Remember that we are starting Monday back with Crew and are using this revised schedule! If you have a cool “welcome back” Crew idea, feel free to share it!! 🙂

The Student Announcements :

  • I have updated the with a January calendar of important dates for students to know about…  hopefully it helps them stay up to date! Please feel free to add to it!
  • There are close to 50% of our students who need to sign up for a Pump & Stretch 1st thing during Crew on Monday am and then I will collate and post the actual lists by end of the 1st period after Crew… please make sure they get signed up!

Crew:

Michelle and I did a little planning over the Break around two topics…

  1. Entering Crew grades. As you know, Crew is a .5 credit class (whole year). Few of us though have started entering grades because we haven’t had a clear format.
    • To get started, please enter into your Crew gradebook the three LTLT’s (long term learning targets) on this document and take a look at our assessment ideas here as well
    • We will be working in an upcoming SIW to clean this work up and help you all have a plan for grading Crew. Because it is a full year class (unlike our other classes) our deadline is softer… no 1st semester grade needs to be submitted
  2. Crew Curriculum Planning

EL Education Off Site PD:

We need to get ourselves booked ASAP for the following EL Education off site training!

Can the following people please click on the links below and walk through the registration process. Use the PD Code: 16Y2WYH . There is NO CHARGE for these institutes as they are a part of our “cooperating agreement” with EL.

REGISTER NOW:

Once you have registered please let Jennifer know ASAP so she can begin working on flights! AND, If this plan doesn’t work for you, let me know ASAP so I can plan a work around!

STILL TENTATIVE (don’t register yet):

Shared Leadership & SIW’s

I have drafted our Wednesday/Thursday Meeting Calendar (with some help from MH!) for the next couple of months and want share it with you for two reasons…

  1. So you know what’s coming
  2. So you can add your voice/ownership to these planning/pd sessions by submitting specific agenda topics and/or by taking a turn to facilitate! There are links in this Meeting Calendar to “blank agendas” where we’d LOVE for you to add your thoughts/needs/requests for topic-related planning. Check them out… the idea would be to add your thinking by end of day Monday prior to the Wednesday meeting. This is a step towards distributing leadership and ownership over our collective work to you… you all have a lot of talent and good ideas!!!

Extra paid planning time in January:

January is going to be super busy and I know that we/you are going to need to put in significant time outside of our contract day to make all the parts of our school work smoothly! I would like to provide each of you with up to 5 hours of paid extra time to work on one of the following:

  1. Tuning up your classroom &/or our campus with displays of student work in advance of our Presentation nights (9th grade night, 8th grade Info Night, 10th grade night)
  2. Planning intensives
  3. Planning 2nd semester expeditions/curriculum

You can use these hours to get together with a partner(s) and do some curriculum planning work outside the contract day or to dig in to some solo work… whichever is your biggest need. This is self directed time that you can use.

To “claim” these hours on an upcoming timesheet just add a sticky note or send me (and Jennifer)  an email saying how many of the 5 hours you used and a quick word or two on what you used them for (no more than a sentence!!)

2nd Semester “Soft Start” & 10th Grade Power & Privilege Presentation

Officially, the 2nd semester starts on Monday February 4th. However, this does NOT mean we have to kick off either of our Spring expeditions on that date. For example:

  • It may be that the team would like to continue the Power & Privilege expedition into February so that you have more time to finish up the Homelessness Case Study and execute the mural AND buy more time to plan the Spring expedition??
  • What about 9th grade? Still to be determined in planning session coming soon
  • We discussed a tentative P&P Presentation (mural, leaders of change work, maybe something about the case study on homelessness?) in February, and given various calendar issues, the best week for this is the week of Feb 25th (likely best on Thurs Feb 28th). I have placed a TENTATIVE event on our calendar, but it needs to be firmed up.