Thursday, April 29, 2010

Next week is another one of those crazy travel weeks for me. Here is my schedule. You can reach me by email (almost immediately on my phone) and I will check in with the office regularly.

• Monday morning I am in Administrative Team meeting till noon.
• Monday afternoon I need to leave a few minutes early to make a late afternoon flight.
• Tuesday/Wednesday I am at an assessment conference in Portland. Return Wed. night.
• Thursday morning I should be here, but fly out early afternoon. I do not return until late Monday evening.
• I should be back Tuesday morning, May 11th.

I have noticed a lowering of expectations for students to move through the halls quietly. I believe some have given up because other are noisy outside their classrooms. Please reteach this skill and expectation to your students. If we require it, we will get it. It is part of being respectful to others, and "protecting their right to learn". Some Mill Creek teachers have been teaching the red/yellow/green system. Discussing what green looks like (ready to move) and taking a picture of kids modeling that. Discussing yellow (almost ready to go) and taking a picture of that. Then the same with red (not really in line or ready to go). Then the teacher simply holds up the red, yellow and green cards with pictures indicating the level of expectation they are achieving. Might work if you want to try it.

When I return on the eleventh we will have one week to finalize the details for our parent event on May 18th. Here is what I know. We will serve a free spaghetti dinner from 5-6:00 pm. We will offer short informational meetings for parents, offering each topic at two separate times. Topics include history and purpose of gender separate classes, combined grade level classes for next year (what that might look like), and data from Stephanie's self efficacy study with single gender classes. If anyone wanted to host a session on how to help with math homework with this new text, let me know. I still need volunteers to help with serving dinner, managing free book tables, greet and direct parents to meetings. We should be done at six, with just a one hour event. This will allow parents of fifth grade students the opportunity to attend the Middle School overview that same evening at Mill Creek.

I am excited about the Character Education and Positive School Support committee work that we will jump into. I see so many opportunities to make this a great thing for our school next year. We are so close to this RtI model for behaviors, that we can do wonderful and mighty things with staff and students.