To: Michael Green
From: John Shoup
CC: School Board members
Date: 11/3/2014
Re: October Review
Here is an overview of the key activities we worked on in relation to teaching and learning this month.
Monday’s: We used three of the four Monday’s to again work closely with the middle school staff on common core implementation and in particular trying to create and use more challenging tasks in our classrooms. Along those lines, we also have submitted a survey to our high school students to seek some data regarding the types of act ivies and learning expectations they feel are occurring in their classes. We will use this as baseline data to see if our current professional learning opportunities for staff are being effective. The one Monday that was not used for working with middle school staff was used for department collaboration time.
Other information: Homecoming was another successful week at the high school. A special thanks to Mr.Uhlenkott for all of his organizational work in making this a fun and safe event for our staff and students. Fall conferences were very not well attended again this year. I believe we only had about 55-60 parents attend. In fact, our staff is having some preliminary discussions regarding having a completely different format for next year as we move into the new high school. This also continues to strengthen my resolve regarding student led conferences which are held in the spring. Also, our first edition of the new school newspaper came out this month. The paper is an excellent representation of our student’s abilities to write and put together a professional looking newspaper. Mrs. Rose Ruff is our advisor and I applaud her efforts. I hope you had an opportunity to see an edition as it was very impressive. I also wanted to give a shout out to all of our staff and students for all of their work in organizing “Make a Difference” day. Mrs. Sturdivan was instrumental in making this day possible. We had about 60 students of all ages participating on Saturday, October 25th to help make Woodland a better place to live and work.
All is all it was a good productive month at WoodlandHigh School.