On an average week, I’m out of the district for some sort of meeting or staff development or training about one day of five. Last week, I was at principal evaluation training in Rochester on Monday and Tuesday, in district on Wednesday, and out at Data Driven Instruction on Thursday and Friday. I’m now on strike–refusing to leave the district for anything. 😉 I think my next scheduled day out of district is November 7 for more training, this time on the Danielson teaching evaluation rubric.
Is it worth it when I’m traveling to all of these meetings/conferences/etc.? To be honest, it depends. Sometimes the information presented is repetitive or just isn’t pertinent to where we are at RCS. Most often, I leave having learned something important about the direction NYSED is headed or better understanding the tax cap law or hearing a new idea that’s worth consideration.
Never is it more worth it than what I experienced this past Thursday and Friday. Why? I got to learn about data inquiry teams with several of our Randolph teachers. The training was very well done by our BOCES experts, namely Tim Clarke, Tiffany Giannicchi, Brian Crawford and Melissa Devitt. Good teaching was modeled, the content was relevant and important. But the primary reason it was extremely worthwhile for me? The time I had to work together with five elementary teachers and four 7-12 teachers, along with their building leaders. The chance to listen to them, clarify my own thinking and hopefully come to a better collective understanding was invaluable.
I’m more confident than ever that in our own analysis of our student data, collected from our interim assessments and analyzed by our teams of teachers, we will greatly improve our students results. Not because it’s about the test scores but because it’s about the curriculum and better differentiation. As we align every grade level to the common core curriculum and zero in on what each child needs to absolutely know before moving on to the next grade, we will have a systemic solution to maximizing growth for every child.
I’m hopeful that a better evaluation system will help us to improve but I’m excited about the improvement we will see when our teachers have the chance to look at an entire class of students collectively–grouping and regrouping to meet each individual student’s needs. We’ve got a lot of work to do—–a system analysis is next to consider how we fundamentally work to serve our children—-but it should prove to be the most meaningful work we do to ensure we are maximizing learning for all of our children.
I keep repeating myself on this one–we are better together than we are individually and we know what to do to improve. Working with our RCS teachers on Thursday and Friday reminded me AGAIN that we have wonderful, hard working teachers who can figure this out together with us. Learning with Passion, Innovation and Leadership? I saw exactly that in our teachers on Thursday and Friday. Thank you!