1st Professional Development for Teachers

Jessica (school principal) and I spent many hours dissecting the process we felt our teachers need (we found we should have started in a different place--that will come in a different post).  We knew we needed to give teachers time to understand the transformation and time to work on all the areas that come into standards based learning.  We needed to build in the why and importance of the change in grading and learning.  We started with a quote for teachers to reflect on their own practice up until this transformation point (October 2017).

We then followed with a standards based grading video: Standard-Based Grading Overview

Then in our department PLC (professional learning community) half day work we dove into our standards.  Asking, what are the skills our students need to become proficient at the standard.  Referring to the PLC questions #1: What do we want our students to learn?  Being specific with teachers this is not activities or task we want our students to complete but what skill and knowledge do they need to know to be proficient.  Teachers did a standard dive (as we called it) for every standard they were going to teach throughout the year.

Once teachers spent hours deconstructing the state standards for ladder of proficiency they then created student friendly I CAN statements. 

Example from math: 

Focus Standard 8.EE.A.1 Understand and apply the properties of integer exponents to generate equivalent numerical expressions.

I CAN learning targets (student friendly) I can recite the properties of integer exponents. I can explain how to use the properties of integer exponents. I can simplify expressions that contain integer exponents. I can simplify expressions that contain exponents of 0. I can simplify expressions that contain negative exponents.

Example from ELA:

Focus Standards: RI.7.1 Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says (main idea?) explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text

I CAN learning targets (student friendly): I can identify the main idea of informational texts I can find evidence that supports the main idea from the text I can recognize the difference between directly stated information and inferred information I can make inferences about the main idea based on the text I can find evidence to support inferences in the text I can rank evidence by order of importance to support the main idea of the text as it applies to the main idea