Date: 2/1/14
To: Michael Z. Green, Superintendent
From: Cari Thomson, PhD
RE: January Summary of Teaching and Learning
During the month of January WMS staff continued to spend time on Monday mornings focusing on our building goal which is, “students will be able to access text and communicate about text.” Staff brought student examples of annotation strategies they have been trying in their classrooms to share and discuss with their colleagues. January 27, WMS spent a day with all teachers diving into common core standards and Hess’ hierarchal scale to evaluate our questioning skills. Mathematics teachers continued their learning in the second half of the day by delving into mathematical practice #3, “Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.”
Heidi Rhodes, the 7-12 mathematics coach, modeled a performance math task in Kari DeBower’s room. She will be continuing modeling performance math tasks in other mathematics classrooms during the month of February as well as math tasks that our staff learned in the January Dan Meyer training.
Barb Lutz and Heidi Rhodes also presented to staff, professional development opportunities for the remainder of the year. Topics include working with para-educators, unpacking standards, looking at Smarted Balanced Assessments, and making use of our Student Information Program (SIP).
WMS also welcomed our new student teacher in mathematics, Nata Alanko. Nate comes to us from La Center where he completed his first part of his student teaching in upper level high school mathematics. He will be working with Kari DeBower and Heidi Rhodes the rest of the year.
Yippee for the Floods! Woodland Middle School’s Lego Robotics team secured a spot in a national competition. The Floods will travel to Lego Land in California in May to represent our school. This is the team’s first national competition, so we are all very excited. Yahoo!