Today, during our PLC we began our time together discussing our visitor experiences and feedback from their time touring Bill Roberts.  The visitors came from schools supported by The City Year made up of people who meet with small groups of students needing intense academic intervention.  They toured our school to get a better idea of how to meet differentiated needs of students while still meeting deeper level thinking skills.  Needless to say, they were, “wowed!”

Then, 2nd Grade shared out some of their writing samples for their prompt this week related to College Awareness.  College Awareness will be a concept that will be a feature throughout the year.  We want kids to connect with knowledge that everyone will go to college.  By the way, the 2nd Grade comments and writing samples were sweet, innocent, funny, and insightful.  Who knew you have to go to college in order to get a driver’s license?

The rest of the PLC was devoted to creating district-required Student Growth Objectives for our individual classes and content areas.  The goals are connected to individual student growth related to a specific body of evidence, i.e. writing samples, standardized test scores, classroom teacher made assessments, etc.  The conversations between colleagues were deep, and were focused on the best way to measure the student growth through thorough and direct instruction.  The objectives were written and submitted to Administrative staff at the end of the PLC.

Today we had Michelle Jones from PEBC presenting to our staff for our PLC time together.  We are focusing as a staff on backwards planning though a book titled "Understanding By Design".  Each month we focus on a chapter or two and use the strategies to help us with our planning.
Today we also brought artifacts from our classrooms to share with our colleagues how we are integrating the thinking strategies and routines.  As a school we have been focusing on using these in our teaching practice, so sharing things that are going on in our classrooms is so exciting.  I love seeing what other teachers in our building are doing, and I also love getting ideas and having feedback on what we are doing in our classroom.  I brought with me a few student examples of our interactive math notebooks and how the items that I have the students add are very intentional and designed to help them with the thinking strategy 'Determining Importance'.  As the year progresses I'll introduce more thinking strategies, but at the moment this is what I believe my students need the most (especially in relation to word problems). 
Another exciting thing going on at our school is classroom observations.  Our amazing staff is giving up their plan time for two days next week so that we can observe each others classrooms and have a formal feedback session on what amazing things we have happening at our school.  What better way to learn than from each other?!  I will be going up to a 3rd/4th grade math classroom.