Day 1: Agency & 6A Reflections

Stephanie and I had a very productive planning session during which we planned the big picture skeleton for the first week of Back to School PD and created a detailed planning guide for Day 1 of PD.

Our Big Picture Looks Like This:

Fri 8/14	Welcome Back Agency Reflection / Discussion 6A’s Reflection / Discussion
Mon 8/17	TF: Launch TF: Ideation TF: Project Management
Tues 8/18	Grade Level Meetings Focused on School Culture Operation MNTHS
Wed 8/19	TF: Rubrics TF: Scaffolding TF: Assessments TF: Entry Events
Thurs 8/20	District PD
Fri 8/21	District PD
Mon 8/24	Critical Friends of Projects using 6A’s lenses

 

Day 1 Consists of: (Visuals Link)

• Agency Discussions & Reflections: Teachers in grade level teams will begin by discussing and identifying their top 5 WHY’s Agency is key to student learning.  Then each teacher will complete a self reflection based off the Agency rubric.  In this self reflection, they will rate themselves and provide related evidence related to Agency’s 11 indicators; they will describe how their Agency strengths and weaknesses impact their projects and classroom cultures: and they will describe how we can help them change their Agency weaknesses into strengths.

• 6A’s Discussions & Reflections:  Teachers in grade level teams will list reasons WHY each of the 6A in the NTN 6A’s rubric is a key piece of Project Based Learning.  Then they will each complete a self reflection based on the NTN 6A’s rubric.  In their self reflection, they will rate and provide evidence related to each of the 6A’s; (optional) volunteer to share strategies with the staff related to their 6A’s strengths, set goals to improve their 6A’s weaknesses; and describe how admit can support their goals.  Then they will gather as a grade level team and brainstorm individual 6A goals for this 6 weeks.  For each goal, they will identify a thought partner, a specific goal, and evidence to measure impact.

Rationale for Day 1 discussions:

Getting To Know the Staff:  I am hoping the Agency reflection data will help us better understand teacher motivations, strengths, and challenges.  Student culture can not exceed teacher culture.  In an ideal world, all teachers will have habits and beliefs that make them at least Proficient in all Agency indicators.  But no one is perfect and everyone has room to grow.  I hope that knowing where teachers need to grow will help us to better support them.

I am also hoping the 6A’s Self Reflection data will help us know where to focus our PD sessions in the future in order to improve PBL design and implementation throughout our campus.

Priming the Pump:  The 2 sets of discussion relate to later PD sessions.  The Agency reflection relates to a grade level team discussion on strategies that can be employed to improve student culture.  The 6A’s section relates to Critical Friends feedback sessions that will use the 6A’s rubric to generate feedback on projects.

Next Steps For Planning PD are:

• Develop Nearpod questions related to Think Forward Slides
• Develop more Advanced Project Expectations for Veteran Teachers
• Convert slides to Nearpod Slides
• Plan Grade Level Culture Building Meetings