Week Ahead: Feb. 10-14

Power of a Problem
Before you check out the rest of this post, take a moment to reflect on all that we have accomplished together in 5 days.  There are only a few times in my life when I have truly had a “big ask” made of me. The type of ask that requires us to set aside everything and focus only on that urgent problem.  The type of ask that is audacious, that requires us to draw on each other’s strengths and to work together in unity to even have a hope of accomplishing it.

This has been that type of ask:  Retool your school for an online learning virtual environment in under 24 hours.  We had Virtual School up and running by 1:00 on day one.  And it wasn’t just “did it” … it is being done successfully with solid systems in mind.  It is being done with a focus on our students’ needs.  It is being done with a positive, solution focused mindset from all of us.

Focus for This Week:
Now that we have a system and structure in place, our next step is to refine and tweak.  We are moving out of initial “creation” of the system mode into refinement mode.  We will be thinking carefully about how we can ensure the experience for students remains strong (especially as their energies will be more taxed the long Virtual School lasts).  One refinement/tweak has already been determined.  Please see below for information on the requirement to use “collected” and “missing” flags for all assignments the day after the due date.  This will also be shared in more detail by your team leads on Monday.

We can now slow down the pace of change a bit and move into a more sustained pace of work.  It was a pretty intense cognitive load last week. Last week, it was necessary to push, push, push to get things done.  But that isn’t a sustainable pace for anyone – us or our students.  Because we put a heavy emphasis on building sustainable structures, we are now well positioned.  Another key way to move to a more sustainable pace is to be clear in our prioritization. This is true for us as a division and for you in your role as classroom teacher.  Our focus needs to be on delivering high quality, accessible, learning experiences that support our middle school learners in a virtual environment.  We must remain laser focused on this.  To support this, we will be offering short, targeted trainings as well as providing other PD resources focused on online learning strategies.

The final focus of this week is to attend to the social, emotional, and physical needs of our students and ourselves.  The situation we are going through is a crisis.  Yes, there are worse crises we could be experiencing for sure – but the demands of a this crisis are still intense and must be attended to.   We will be utilizing the student survey to assist us to understand the needs of our students.  We will also be continuing to focus on the needs of faculty and staff.  The last few posts to the Wellness Blog have been on these topics: Read the all school Wellness Blog from the WELL Core Team

Okay – so on to this week:

Monday, Feb. 10
Day 4, FGHE
8:45-9:15 MS Leadership Team mtg – morning check in
10:00 Maker Monday – brain break in the Library (see below)
2:00-2:15 Teacher DEAR time in Library (see below)
3:15-4:30 MS Leadership Team mtg

Tuesday, Feb. 11
Day 5, CDAB
2:00-2:15 Teacher DEAR time in Library (see below)

Wednesday, Feb. 12
Day 6, GHEF
*Happy Birthday Erin Lu!
2:00-2:15 Teacher DEAR time in Library (see below)
3:15-4:30 Divisional Mtg – combination of short trainings, team mtgs and/or dept meetings (will update on Tuesday as needed)

Thursday, Feb. 13
Day 7, DABC
2:00-2:15 Teacher DEAR time in Library (see below)

Friday, Feb. 14
Day 8, HEFG
2:00-2:15 Teacher DEAR time in Library (see below)

Upcoming Events:

Feb 26-29  Positive Education Workshops (will be done via video conferencing)

New Procedure: Marking Assignments Collected:  As we head into week 2 of Virtual School, we need to help us all better understand student progress.  Like the students, we are finding some things take longer in this new environment – grading is one of them.  In order to support this reality as well as the need for communication with parents, we have set up a new procedure.  The day after an assignment is due teachers must mark in the PowerSchool grade book if a student turned in the assignment.  We will be using the “collected” and “missing” flags for this.  This should be done as soon as possible each morning after each due date. Please note, this is not a measure of quality of submission – just that a submission has been recorded.  For submission through PowerSchool Learning, you can easily see who has submitted by the deadline and who has not.  David Rynne will be providing support for those that need assistance in using PSLearning submission analytics as well as those needing support in using “flags” in the PowerSchool grade book.

From the Library:  The library is at your service during school closure! Please reach out if we can help gather resources for your classes and support virtual lesson development.   In addition to that, we have some fun things planned:

Maker Monday @ 10am

DEAR @ 2pm