Ensuring Thinking for All

How many of your students are required to think in your classes each day?  How are you holding all students accountable to think and think at high levels?  What strategies do you use daily to ensure that all of your students are required to think?  How are you making student thinking visible?  Our new assessment ILEARN is an assessment of thinking.  What we have learned so far about the ILEARN assessment is that students are going to be required to think.  Here is an example of the thinking that students will need to be able to do. 



Although this is an example of a 7th grade performance task that students will see on ILEARN all teachers and classes can help prepare students for success on such types of questions.  We can do so by asking students to explain their answers, to write summaries of their learning, to teach others, to solve complex problems, to engage in positive struggle and to provide evidence to support their answers.  So as you design learning opportunities for students it is of immense importance that we are asking all students to think.  We will visit depths of knowledge in upcoming PD in the meantime.  Don't let students off the hook and ensure that all students think in your classes. 

Highlights of the Week

Behavior RTI meetings-  Teams of teachers coming together to strategize how to provide students more help and support in meeting behavior expectations.  Teachers sharing what they know about students with others.  Getting to know our students, their interests, strengths, weaknesses, and who they are as learners will help us help students meet our expectations more often and more of the time.  I saw one team already meet with the parents of one of their identified students in order to learn more about the student and build consistency between the expectations at school and at home.  Great job everyone in making this who we are and what we do.  We will continue to grow in this work and it will pay dividends. 

On time every time that is Lincoln Time:  Hall sweeps this week caught few students that were tardy to class.  This means that students are getting to class on time.  Thank you to teachers that are out in the halls encouraging students to be on time.  The best strategy to get students to be on time is to get to know each of your students each period and to show them you care about their punctuality.  Students that are excited for class are on time.  Continue with your high expectations! 

Announcements:  It has been great to learn about our new teachers on the announcements during the first month of school.  What a great way to introduce the new teachers to all of our students.  It has also been great to see the variety of students on announcements thus far.  Keep watching our announcements on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. 

Upcoming at Lincoln: 

World's Finest Chocolate Fundraiser-  We will kick off our fundraiser next Wednesday at 1:00 in the red gym.  Students will go to their advisories after lunch on Wednesday and classes will be called to the gym starting at 12:40.  We would like for teachers to sit with their advisories in the bleachers during the kick off.  After the convocation students will return to their classrooms and we will them call classes to the cafeteria for chocolate distribution.  The fundraiser is from Sept. 26th to Oct. 8th.  Each day of the fundraiser students will report to advisory for the first 10 minutes of the day.  During this time teachers will collect and record money turned in by students.  Teachers will not need to count money, only record the money turned in by the students under the students name.  All teachers will receive an envelop with their students listed on the outside to record this information.  The envelops are then sent down to the cafeteria each morning.  There will be rewards for the top advisory classes in each grade and a grade competition. Our goal is for each student to sell one box of chocolate.  Encourage your advisory to meet this goal and to win the competition.  This fundraiser was a huge success last year because of the enthusiasm of advisory teachers encouraging their students to sell.  We have 800 boxes of chocolate ordered this year.  Lets encourage our students to sell all of them.  We will have a short stand up meeting next Wednesday morning at 7:45 to go over the procedures for advisory teachers.  Meeting will be in the red room.  Informational student Handout

College Go Week- Advisory teachers continue to have your students prepare their presentation for our Gallery Walk on Friday Sept. 28th.   Gallery walk directions coming soon

Monday PD-  Monday we will have our first Academic RTI collaboration meetings.  These are the same teams that you met with last week for behavior only this week our focus will be on academics rather than behavior.  Teams should collaborate to identify students that are not responding to tier one instruction because of gaps in their learning or deficiencies.  Teams will brainstorm and share strategies (tier 2 supports) to help provide these students more time and support with tier one instruction.  Teams will track progress of these identified students. 
 Academic RTI Information 
Academic RTI Spreadsheet 
STAT Form 

September Discussion Meeting - Monday 3:15 Lounge