The New Year 2014

As I sit and watch some basketball on the couch on this January night an email comes across from the state superintendent announcing that our school corporation grades will be announced shortly. This announcement will finally put a close to 2013.  Yes, we know our school grade was a B and that it was an improvement from the prior school year.  Kudos to all for your hard work.  The question now becomes where do we go from here.  The answer is wherever we want to go!  When we have a growth mindset great achievement is possible.  When our mindsets are that what we do everyday in every class matters and that we must take advantage of every minute then our students will be prepared for any test and for their futures.   Our conversations and meetings must continue to be about instruction and student learning.  We must continue to do the right work.  Making instructional decisions based on student learning data continues to be important.  How are students doing in our classes?  How are we responding when they are not producing the results we want? How are our students doing in problem solving, literary and informational/non-fiction text analysis?  Remember these were our target areas for improvement.  The right work is to continue to challenge students through abundant amounts of reading, writing, and discussing.  We must ask and require students to think in our classes and ask them to do higher level tasks such as writing in response to interactive lecture and reading.  We also know that the feedback that we give students has immense impact on student achievement.  Students should know where they stand in relationship to our expectations.

Team LJH must be built on trust if we are to be a high functioning team.  I have trust in our ability to do the right work.  As we gegin 2014 and another round of ISTEP testing, just one measure of our success, we will continue to do the right work by keeping our nose to the grindstone and FOCUSED.  Lets have a great 2014.