I am very proud of our teachers and students. They work very hard. Having been the testing coordinator at our middle school over the past 3 years, I can honestly declare that our kids have…
There are many strategies that our reading teachers have utilized to create a strong reading culture at our middle school. One strategy has been to have teachers post this poster and then update it with the book(s) they are currently reading and have…
I learned from an early age that words are very powerful. So the word of the day for me is perceive. Since I am bilingual I am always very curious about how…
This is the title of a talk I gave to our AVID 7 and 8 students today. Not all of them were there as there was a rehearsal for the upcoming choir concert so I thought I would try to re-create the message here and maybe they might see it.
Who I am… Who are you?…
At the beginning of the school year our school engaged in staff development centered on learning targets. Our goal was to move our people forward in their understanding and utilization of learning targets as they align with assessments. This was particularly important as many of our dyad teams had a new member and/or…
Two and a half years ago I began participating in a district committee called Effective Feedback and Grading in which we looked at the work of Thomas Guskey, Ken O’Connor, Douglas Reeves. We also studied the systems changes that local school districts had made and were in the midst of making. Today culminates a major…
Today I had the pleasure of watching Baruti Kafele’s video series “Message to Your Son: You Are Not the N-Word.” I have discussed this message with students in the past and when I have the need to have this conversation in the future I will show this video so that the children can see a…
At Valley View this year our PBIS team has promoted monthly staff challenges to connect with our students called the Impact Challenge. The goal is to impact students lives by doing simple yet powerful actions to show them that we care.
In August we wrote post-cards to each student in the building welcoming them to a…
Today I had the pleasure of meeting with our new teachers for our monthly meeting. We have 8 new to our building teachers this year and they are awesome! Our topic today was classroom management and student engagement. We previewed the following resources:
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/233131718183922491/
https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/new-teacher-classroom-management
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LWOHVzY9m8
Then they created a list of tips that they…
I am super excited to share that we are having our first ever coding club meeting today at our middle school! On the VVMS news today we showed this video Anybody Can Learn- 60 sec teaser and our math teachers showed this one to encourage students to consider coming to our after school club What…
