My blogs and my curriculum project both show that I can design and monitor plans for students’ academic success. Blogs have helped me to be reflective about my own learning and have reminded me to be purposeful about giving students time to be reflective about their learning and progress toward high standards.

 My curriculum project was a detailed curriculum plan for my Introduction to Psychology Unit in my AP Psychology class. This project blended my personal philosophy of curriculum and the planning and implementation of curriculum designed to improve student learning for a specific unit. I taught this unit this year and it went really well. Students performed well on their summative assessment and were very engaged in the content.

Blogs from Curriculum Class

Curriculum Project_Intro to Psych

I created both of these artifacts as part of the curriculum for EDU 6524: Curriculum Design. For the curriculum design project I showed that I have the knowledge and skills to bring academic subjects to life and align them to content standards.

 The blogs from this course are representative of other blogs I have written and are reflective writings in which I responded to course topics, lectures, discussions, readings, etc. The blogs allowed me to interact personally with the subject matter. Personal connections and interactions with a new subject is a great way to learn. I have taken this knowledge and used it in my classroom. Students are required to interact personally with the material so that they can be more sucessful and remember the material better.

 The Curriculum Project allowed me to plan ahead for a unit keeping the standards in mind. I was able to plan to monitor student learning. Students were very successful in this unit and on the unit assessment.

Blogs from Curriculum Class

Curriculum Project_Intro to Psych

I created this Action Plan as a final project for EDU 6600 Communication and Collaboration. It meets the criteria for standards 6 & 7, the Communication and Collaboration standards. In order to create this Action Plan I had to understand the needs of our school based on OSPI’s Nine Characteristics of Effective Schools and the characteristics of quality professional development. Research shows that targeted, quality, job-embedded, continuous professional development and learning increases teacher effectiveness. Teacher effectiveness is the best predictor of student success.

Part of my action plan is to address concerns with communication with our school community as a whole. I would like to regularly and effectively communicate with colleagues, parents, and students through a variety of means. Many of my colleagues desire to collaborate more often and more effectively, but without a plan these meetings don’t happen as much as they need to. As part of our district professional development team I cooperate with other professionals to bridge gaps between the science departments at our high schools and between departments/disciplines within schools. One area of growth for our school is to communicate more effectively with parents and other community members. These are all a part of my action plan.  

The staff at my high school is working hard to support students, but a lot of that work has been done individually in the past. Part of my action plan involves teachers working collaboratively to solve problems. We are blessed to have OEL in place at our school this year, but meeting 6 times away from our classrooms is not as effective as continuous professional learning (using the skills we learn at OEL). Teachers who are constantly learning and engaged in developing professionally can be more effective with their students. Teachers who work collaboratively are better able to assess student progress toward goals. Planning time to work collaboratively with colleagues will help all of our students to be more successful.

Action_Plan_Acheson_EDU_6600

Because change is a process, not an event, any innovation will take awhile to take root and make gains. Change needs to start with a common vision so that people can work toward a common goal. Just creating a vision doesn’t impact student achievement. While I believe that our actions need to be purposeful we need to spend more time living our plans than writing them.

As we said during my week at NACL, our plans need to be “living, breathing documents.” We will have spent close to 3 years learning how to develop an Action Plan for our district science program. Now is the time for the action part of the plan instead of just the planning part of the plan.

As we continue to work on our School Improvement Plan and SMART goals this week I will keep this in mind and try to share with my colleagues. We often make these SMART goals in November and don’t look at them again until the next year. Our Principal is working to change that so our actions live out our school vision (pg 229). I really like this change. She is trying to make changes in our departments instead of issuing a school-wide decree (pg 227).

I struggled with this quote and my questions this week until I read our discussion postings: “planning is essentially unrelated to organizational performance.” (pg 230). Don’t we need to have a focus so that our actions work toward a goal? What I am left with is that our plans should be dynamic. Our plans need to focus on student learning and need to be assessed frequently for effectiveness. Just like we would do in our classrooms.

We have started a NACL PLC (because teachers love acronyms) and will continue to work through the PD planning cycle. I am starting to see myself as a teacher leader and my role in our department and in the district. It has been so nice to have this class this quarter. Everything I have learned can be applied to work we are doing in our district! I am even in charge of coming up with possible PLC ideas for our group using the resources from this course.

No matter what professional development we have we need to see student learning increase. Our NACL PLC has been looking at data to try to make decisions to best impact student learning. We learned that the first thing that needs to happen is for teacher beliefs to change. Teachers need to believe that all students can learn to a high standard. Part of our plan is to raise up and train more teacher leaders so that leadership is shared. This way more teachers can see that they have a role in changing our school/district climate for the good.

I have a lot of information to digest and will be returning to school for a short week after being gone at the conference for 5 days of class. I am hoping that the passion we have for making our district better will not diminish too much when we get back in the swing of things. At the very least we will have our OEL groups for another 2.5 years so we can develop a protocol for looking at student learning and hopefully by the end people will crave the collaborative work we are doing and demand time for it from our union and district.

With the use of data in a supportive atmosphere we can get teachers to admit that change needs to happen, that our teaching practice needs to be “modified, extended, or replaced” (pg 194, Professional Development). Teachers, especially high school teachers, need to see that working in isolation is not in the best interest of anyone.

I have just completed my first 2 hours of my last year of the NACL conference. We have spent 2.5 years discussing how to use data to drive discussion about student learning and professional development. Our Zepeda reading is very pertinent to what we are discussing this week- our professional development plan for our district for the forseeable future. Coaching will need to be part of our plan because it is so rich and embedded in context.

We spent tonight talking about Designing Professional Development and how to build a sustainable program. We spent a long time in our district group discussing what sustainability means and what we want it to mean for our district science program. We do not want to become stagnant in our program or approaches. “Sustainability” means more than maintaining the status quo. Being “sustainable” means growing and changing with our students and as professionals. This is going to be a great week!

Dr. Lumpe addressed the idea of formative and summative assessments and their uses in the lecture in Module 6. Many educational assessments are like autopsies because they aren’t used to diagnose student needs or to address instruction to meet student needs. Too often those assessments are punitive and high stakes. Teachers and students don’t learn much from the results and can’t use the results to continue to work toward standards. I think this analogy is apt and it should used more often. Data needs to be used to drive instruction or decisions about what instruction should be used to help students achieve a high standard. We live in an age of ready access to more data than we know what to do with. It is time we use some of it to benefit our classrooms.

On Common Ground (pg 82) states that PLC’s (or whatever we want to call them) should analyze and deconstruct standards in order to create high-quality assessments OF and FOR learning and that those assessments are analyzed together with results interpreted and shared as a group. This kind of assessment is more like a physical. How are the teachers and students doing? Are they all reaching high standards? What can we do differently? What is working well for students? These are the questions that should be asked about assessments for them to mean something to students and teachers.

Assessments should also show students what they have learned and how much they now know as well as showing teachers how much students have learned and where gaps in knowledge remain. I spent all of yesterday grading an assessment for which most students didn’t study or take seriously and I am wondering what the point of this particular assessment was. I want to make changes for next year while still holding my students to a high standard.

I try to focus on those reasons for assessment in my science class. With so many students in class who are used to failing I feel like part of my job has to be to help them build confidence. Some teachers in my department frown on me allowing students to take tests orally with me and make corrections on assessments, but I feel like even if it takes students a little longer to learn a difficult concept they have still learned it. I don’t lower my expectations, but try to help students reach that high bar. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m working on it with a few other teachers to make it great.

In part because of my masters work and because of being volunteered by some colleagues, I am taking on a much larger leadership role in my department and school than I ever anticipated. God is opening doors, increasing my sphere of influence, and pushing me to go places that I often don’t feel qualified to go. The reading this week helped to remind me of the amount of work it takes to really work collaboratively with colleagues. On Common Ground by Dufour is a great resource for how and why to establish collaborative groups at schools, whether or not we call them “PLC’s.”

My science department just underwent our first foray into the OEL process ( 5_OEL Findings ). Our whole department came together to design a lesson, watch it in progress, and really look at student learning. I can’t wait for the next installment of the process. Now that we have done it once we should be able to concentrate more on the “meat” of the process instead of the nuts and bolts. OEL should help us to design collaborative lessons and focus on how kids learn. I am excited for the gains in student achievement and the more purposeful collaboration, common vocabulary and vision we will share as a department.

I head out to NACL in 2 weeks and am looking forward to bringing back what I learn to my department. Between NACL, GLAD, AVID, and OEL I am surrounded by acronyms and great strategies. I need the words to share what I have learned with my colleagues, which I have not done a great job with.

Our department, school, and district are hungry (overall) for change. Most of us want to change the way things are done so that students benefit. I love working with my colleagues to develop lessons, and want to make sure that students are learning our Learning Targets and learning to think and feel confident in their abilities. Otherwise, what is the point of all of our hard work?

I am headed to the National Academy of Curriculum Leadership in the Tri-Cities in a few weeks and will go with more purpose this year. I want to come back to my school with more techniques for how to be a curriculum leader in my school. Distributed leadership is a great way to run a school- teachers feel their expertise is valued and one person is not completely burnt out with too much work. I want to make the most of my time as one of our science department heads this year and look forward to taking ideas to my school and district groups this week and the rest of this semester.  After my fourth year of teaching I feel like I can step up and start contributing in a more leader-like role in our department.

The neighborhood around my school has changed dramatically in the last 10 years (even in the last 5 since I have been there). Our families are so busy trying to live their every day lives that school is often seen as a burden and not as a way to liberate students from lives of poverty. Many of our parents don’t speak English well and/or struggled in school so they are nervous about coming back. Other parents feel like their high school students can be “on their own” now and don’t need a lot of parenting. We need to work on sending the message that high schoolers need parents too and our school wants parents to feel comfortable to be on campus.

Our school is trying to address barriers to family and community involvement (pg 4, Family and Community Connections). We have Open House every year and only the AP and Honors parents come. We are working on trying to figure out why more parents don’t come. Are they not comfortable on campus? Do they not see the importance of coming? Is there importance in coming? Have they already been to too many Open Houses with older siblings?

The meeting strategy discussed on page 5 seems like an interesting approach. Why not ask those involved in the community what the community looks like to them and why they aren’t involved? Using curriculum that is relevant to students lives outside of school and involves their parents and family members may be a good way to show parents how to stay involved in their high school students’ lives. We are working specifically with our AVID parents to see how to get them involved in hopes of generalizing that to other parents.

The message needs to get out that teachers, administrators, students, and parents are a team and can work more effectively as a team than we can alone.