Thursday, October 13, 2005

ESUs, Higher Learning, and State


ESUs, Higher Learning, and State.
We've heard that you're going to plan what to do next. When you figure out what you need from us, we'd like to hear from the districts.
We need to start planning as a group. We need to figure out what we’re going to do for the people who are here. We’re going to meet as a team and divide and conquer. I heard personal learning plans and need for help. We want a blog for ourselves and take advantage of what InnovationLabs has started for us. We want to thank InnovationLabs for helping us with this in getting started.

We want to add to that and thank all of you for coming. Don’t be afraid to ask. If you need a waiver for something, just ask. You are way ahead of the rest of the state. The commissioner loves to come to this part of the state. He’d love to work with you. We’ll look for money and trying to help with some funding opportunities if we can.

Round 10: District Plan: Wahoo



Round 10: District Plan: Columbus


Columbus. We want to implement a block schedule and tried to align the nine points with this. We felt we were hitting on most of the points. With the change if it’s done correctly, you’re able to train your teachers and have more flexibility with their schedules. We put together a timeline. We don’t have enough time to communicate with our kids. We’re going to change that by having longer times with the kids. We found that SSR was a very good aspect of our day. We’re going to use it next year so that we can all transition into personal learning plans. We hope to move from the block scheduling into the personal learning plans.

Round 10: District Plan: Wakefield


Wakefield. We chose to focus on developing personalization not only among the students but also among the staff and faculty. With the new information we will look at our new demographics and the needs of our students.

We thought we could open up a whole new area of staff development. We will be having a lot more conversations.


Round 10: District Plan: Emerson Hubbard



Emerson Hubbard. We want to develop more relationships and want to beef up our advisory groups.

We’d like to turn it into our personal educational plan. We’d like to meet more and have more student reflection.

We’ve been delegating and telling them what to do but we’d like to have more input from them.

Round 10: District Plan: Wayne


Wayne. We decided to go with small steps at first. We already have advisory groups that only meet once or twice a year. We’d like to get reconnected with those kids. We’d like to start meeting monthly. We need a committee to get together to come up with topics. We’d like to bring people in from the community.

We also chose innovative assessment. We want to get the staff resources so they could do this. We want to target getting it to them by November and then in the next semester try something new. We’ll have the results given to our principal and see where to go next.



Round 10: District Plan: South Sioux City



South Sioux City. We had a lot of things that other people have said. We will have Student Teacher Academic Research Time (START). We will help them for both academic as well as other practical things. We have 40 minutes built into this and we might as well take advantage of the existing schedule.



Round 10: District Plan: Pender


Pender.
We decided on the PEP also. This affects so many other areas. We’re counting on our ESU to help us.

We would like to have help in communicating with our staff.

We’d like to have the staff set priorities. We could set up our mentor program in January. We’d like to have parent teacher conference and have something in place then the staff can meet with those parents. In April or May, we want to see what it could like in the coming year.



Round 10: District Plan: Fremont


Fremont.
We’ve already done some things with our conferences. We’ve had an advisor-advisee situation in place but it’s not quite where we want it to be. We’ll need some staff development to understand the process. We want to focus on students and think we can hit all three parts of that student gradient.
The tools we will use is the connection with the adults and upgrading our technology program as well as concept based thematic learning. We need to include revisiting our schedule. We want to get counselors involved.

Round 10: District Plan: Logan View



Logan View. We want to implement an advisory period with our learning communities. We listed our brainstorming for these topics, such as teambuilding, social issues and current events. We’d like to present this to the staff and get their input. We want to find out what other schools are doing.

Next spring we’d work on the staff development. We’d like to implement this by next year and evaluate on a quarterly basis to make sure we’re on the right track. We want to involve the students, parents and the community.



Round 10: District Plan: Lakeview


Lakeview.
We’re going to take something back to talk to our staff. We have a home room right now which is not structured. We’d like to take advantage of some of that time and take advantage of the student-advisor relationship.


We’d like to set up coffees for the parents. We also want to have all of our teachers do some classroom innovations, such as having them be facilitators instead of lecturers. I’ve already gotten good support from our administrator. We will also celebrate our teachers for just trying, regardless of whether the experiment is successful or not.



Round 10: District Plan: Boone Central



Boone Central. We want to start researching and get the ideas of the staff and the students. We’ve already started on building relationships. We already have some positive contact between teachers and relationships. We’ll ask the teachers for their ideas of building better relationships and we can improve the parent involvement.

Facilitated learning was another hot topic. We want to determine the best practices and try pilot programs so that other teachers can see what works.


Round 10: District Plan: Howells



Howells. We want to target our areas of action. We want to be interdisciplinary and relevant. We want to do innovative assessment. We’re hoping our staff is willing to be collaborative. We look to performance-based and portfolio-based assessments. Some scholarships are based on class rank and we want to be able to answer this.

This is a work in progress and we hope to meet our timelines.

Round 10: District Plan: Leigh


Leigh.
We talked about some of the things we were doing which are pretty good but we didn’t feel comfortable coming up with plans without the staff.

We’re going to get the input from them and mark it on our sheet here.

From there we will begin our process and look at data. It’s a work in progress for us and see what our staff does with it.

Round 10: District Plan: West Boyd


West Boyd. We want to have a personal learning plan. In a small school we have the luxury of every teacher knowing every student in the school. We want to make sure the members of the community are involved and the relationships with that are improved.


With the facilitated learning we have an exciting opportunity for teaching of being not just lecturers but facilitators. With staff development we hope to get everyone to buy in to the idea.

We want to focus on the PEPs and we need to integrate it with our entire staff. We want to get the staff comfortable with the programs.

Round 10: District Plan: Elkhorn Valley


Elkhorn Valley. We’re focused on learning communities. On Fridays we have an early dismissal to work on things and usually we don’t have that much to work on. Now we do. We’ll have staff communication about best practices. This way we can talk to our staff about how to handle various things. We’ll have an advisory team.

We’ll develop peer-mentor relationships. We want to build relationships and develop a committee to look at our school setting. We want to include a meeting with our kids.


Round 10: District Plan: Madison


Madison. We were generic and didn’t pick the top 3.

We’re going to talk to our staff and take them through a mini-version of this whole process. We want to take them through learning groups and communities.

We’ll try to get this done in the next couple months. We’ll schedule a day in November. We’ll develop 5 or 6 learning teams and have them do some research projects.

Round 10: District Plan: Norfolk

District Plans (in order of report out): Seward | Valentine | Norfolk | Madison | Elkhorn Valley | West Boyd | Leigh | Howells | Boone Central | Lakeview | Logan View | Fremont | South Sioux City | Wayne | Pender | Emerson Hubbard | Wakefield | Columbus | Wahoo | ESUs, Higher Learning, and State |


Norfolk.
We picked 3 of the 9. We want all our teachers to interview the students.

We can do some of the kinds of process we did here and we want to talk about all kids.

We have an advisor program that we have once a week. We used to have the every day home room so we will consider that but also we want to have mentors and consider having the students choose them.