March 18th, 2016
“What is the criteria for my child to become a student of the month??”
-Dolphinblue33, commenting on Instagram
Clear expectations are vital for success; all the will and skills in the world wouldn’t matter unless we know exactly what we should be doing with them. My priority this first year is to seek out the expectations we must continue to maintain, and then identify new expectations that should be put in place for next year.
Adhering to the concept of “Power of Simplicity” as laid out by Schmoker in Focus, all of 102’s expectations—old and new—will be framed by the following three questions:
1. What are we teaching? (Curriculum, expectation for students)
2. How are we teaching? (Instructional practices, expectation for teachers)
3. How will we monitor student learning? (Accountability for results, expectation for school)
We need to organize ourselves for maximum impact before we can answer these questions. I will meet with each grade team to discuss our vision for next year, and teachers will be receiving next year’s preference sheets soon after.
Weekly Highlights (Materials Edition):
$500 Discretionary Funds for All Teachers: All teachers will be allocated $500 of discretionary funds to purchase supplies for their classrooms. This is made possible by the money we received as a Title I school (we serve low-income families), and you should consider purchasing items that can make an impact for our families. More information will be given later this week.
All Technology Requests Approved: All technology requests from last week’s survey have been approved and will be purchased shortly. You should not use the $500 discretionary funds for these items.
Air Conditioning for All: A/C units will be installed in all classrooms in 102’s historic wing. We are pushing to have them installed before it gets warm, and I’ll make an announcement once a date is set. For those of you who’ve taught for years without air conditioning in a NYC room with 32 students, I thank (and salute) you. It won’t happen again as long as both you and I are at 102.
New Interactive Flat Panel TVs: 13 rooms will soon be equipped with new interactive flat panel touchscreen TVs. Speech and SETSS rooms will receive re-purposed Smartboards. Install date TBD. (Note: Smartboard’s predatory business model is no longer viable for our school, and we will continue to replace them with better and cheaper alternatives.)
Things You Should Know:
Please complete the Learning Environment Survey tomorrow during the afternoon before meeting with your grade/ department teams at 3:20PM. Receipts for completing the surveys should be submitted to Ms. Delvecchio mailbox by 4pm.
The following two Mondays, 3/28/16 and 4/4/16, will both be self-directed PD days; please plan accordingly.
Supervisor for Grades 3-5. Effective Monday teachers in grade 3 will report to Mr. Borelli and 4 and 5 to Ms. Mulé. They will address issues in these grades until we have a new AP.
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