Well... the year has started and I hope everyone is getting comfortable in their new arrangements. I hope you are all optimistic about your classes and teaching schedules, and that you will achieve great successes over the course of the year.
I just wanted to take a minute and write about the resources and support that the new Instructional Services website can provide at this critical time of year. All of you are required to submit year and unit plans, along with your Eluminate reporting outcomes to your principals on September 19th. As such, I wanted to direct you to some things that might help you with this process.
At the bottom of the Instructional Services website, there are links to Long-Range, Unit, and Lesson Planning pages. They look like this:
I just wanted to take a minute and write about the resources and support that the new Instructional Services website can provide at this critical time of year. All of you are required to submit year and unit plans, along with your Eluminate reporting outcomes to your principals on September 19th. As such, I wanted to direct you to some things that might help you with this process.
At the bottom of the Instructional Services website, there are links to Long-Range, Unit, and Lesson Planning pages. They look like this:
From these links, you will be able to access key information about planning at all three levels. In each one of these links you will find information about what each of the levels of planning are and what you need to have in them. This is pretty standard stuff, regardless of which school jurisdiction you work for. The most important thing, however, is the links to templates and exemplars of quality planning. Those links look like this:
In addition to these templates and exemplars that you can download and use to write your own effective plans, there are also checklists that you can use to determine whether or not you have all of the necessary components of a unit or lesson plan. These checklists look like this:
Lastly, and maybe the most beneficial to you will be the checklist that I will use when coming in to observe classroom lessons this year. Like the other checklists on the website, it can be viewed or downloaded. On the website it looks like this:
I have also formatted this in an excel spreadsheet so that I can quickly observe the extent to which these things occur during a classroom observation. It will also allow me to email a copy of the spreadsheet to the teacher being observed for direct and immediate feedback on the lesson that I observed. My hope is that this will help teachers in their reflective process as they work towards being the best teachers that they can be. The spreadsheet looks something like this:
With this spreadsheet, I plan on simply putting Y, N, or N/A for the outcome of each thing that I'm looking for. As such, it can be a quick and easy way for teachers to see what it was that I saw and also consider the extent to which they are doing the essential things in an everyday regular lesson.
Anyway, I hope that this can be the first of many supports and/or resources that I can provide as a benefit to teachers through the use of the Instructional Services website at NEA. If you do not have a link to the website, you can access it through the department page on www.scnea.com as follows:
Anyway, I hope that this can be the first of many supports and/or resources that I can provide as a benefit to teachers through the use of the Instructional Services website at NEA. If you do not have a link to the website, you can access it through the department page on www.scnea.com as follows:
Or you can access it at scneainstructionalservices.weebly.com.
Cheers and have a great start-up everyone :D
Ryan
P.S. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions or concerns related to planning for the year. I would be happy to answer questions and/or come and work with you individually to ensure that you are happy with your planning and that it meets your needs, the needs of your principal, and most importantly the learning needs of your students!
Cheers and have a great start-up everyone :D
Ryan
P.S. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions or concerns related to planning for the year. I would be happy to answer questions and/or come and work with you individually to ensure that you are happy with your planning and that it meets your needs, the needs of your principal, and most importantly the learning needs of your students!