Anticipating 2012-2013

Academic year 2012-2013 will be a year of many changes for Hixson Middle School.  This is both exciting and daunting.  We will work together on how to manage these changes, how to support one another during these changes, and how to innovate them as well.
To summarize, we will:

• Flip the master schedule,
• Return to four lunches due to an increased student population and a decrease in available teachers for lunch supervision,
• Work with different team members (those of us on team),
• Implement expectations for Discovery (click here to see a draft of these),
• Learn to use new software for our web sites (time for this learning is already being planned with Dr. Simpson),
• Develop a bring-your-own-device environment for student-owned technology,
• Participate in a district-wide book study of The Art and Science of Teaching in anticipation of a new evaluation instrument (hopefully, you will receive this text before the end of the school year),
• Receive three new copiers in the building mid-year (our current contract ends mid-year, so we will have brief, new-copier-related PD on 1/4/13),
• Introduce a new role: Building Curriculum Facilitator (Mrs. Jill Right will serve in this role), and
• Welcome some new teachers to the building.

In addition to what is above, we will continue:

• Learning about and drafting unit plans,
• Moving forward with PBIS,
• Working on responsive teaching, interventions, and implementing a Care Team,
• Meeting for an hour monthly as departments (times to be determined by the department), and
• Engage in some of our annual required staff training together.

In order to accomodate these changes, we will

• Work an additional contract day before school begins, 8/10 (this day will be used primarly for PD),
• Meet twice a month as a faculty (on second and fourth Mondays),
• Engage in district-provided PD on the Common Core State Standards,
• Engage in district-provided PD for our new web software, and
• Continue to devote as much release time as possible to our work together.

I hope this list is exhuastive, but please be patient with me if it is not.  Many of these projects are ambitious.  Ambitious projects call for powerful actions.  I believe in the power of your work and the power of our work together.  This collective effort and support can ignite collective enthusiasm, particularly as we watch our remarkable results unfold.
The key is to start small, to work collaboratively, and to think BIG.
I have great expectations . . .

First Drafts and Next Steps

By the end of this academic year, each department will have completed a draft of two unit plans. A draft of a unit plan has three parts:

1. Desired Results: What students will know, understand, and do (KUD).
2. Acceptable Evidence:  What the summative assessment will look like and what level of proficiency is considered acceptable.
3. Learning Experiences and Instruction: Some sample learning experiences.

I use the word draft broadly as this is the building's first collective attempt, of which I am aware, of thinking about planning in the same way.  We are writing drafts because the intent is to keep learning and keep revising; in this sense, I suppose we are creating working drafts.

For further information about the above, you may search the following tags for related posts: 3 Stages, Unit Definition, Know, Understand, Do, Assessment Evidence, Learning Plan, and Templates.  You can find these tags to the right on the blog.
This year, the Learning Designs blog has, hopefully, answered questions about the "what" (as in what are we doing?) and the "so what" (as in why are doing this?).  The final questions may be about the "now what" (as in what do we do now that we have a draft?).
There are two answers to these questions:

1. Perhaps the most obvious is . . . implement the unit. 
   
   • Use the KUDs, vet current assessments against the assessment evidence section, and revise them if necessary, and try the differentiated assignment described in the final stage.
   • Keep notes for revisions based on your department's feedback after having implemented the unit.
   • (Unit drafts will receive feedback from department chairs and from me.  You may consider these revisions before, or after, you implement the unit.)
2. Continue drafting new units over the course of next year using your knowledge and experience from this year and new knowledge next year so that the process and product are both better.

The process we have worked through this year has not been so simple as the word draft might indicate.  Still, I hope that our collective effort throughout this rigorous process has generated both actions and results of which you can be proud (and perhaps a little excitement as well).

The Complete Unit Design Template

On Monday, I will be reviewing the complete template for unit design study.  If you are interested in see this, click here.  You will notice that all three sections are in place.  As a reminder, we are creating drafts.  As we learn from this experience and as we learn more about unit design next year, subsquent drafts of units will be easier to write and the product will be stronger.  We are involved in a recursive process.
I posted the following on July 19th, 2011:
We are engaging in this work to:

• support quality unit and lesson design and assessment in the building,
• support ongoing teacher professional development around pedagogy,
• foster a more consistent vocabulary and expectations for teaching and learning,
• share some of the learning from TLA and other development, and
• make better sense of our district curricula.

This work will be ongoing, so please resist thinking about "having it all done" by the end of the year.  I will share more information with you and with the department chairs about this process.  We will work on this together: an ambitious project that will have remarkable results.
I hope that you are beginning to see your work take shape.  I hope that collecting all of your work, representing conversations, revisions, questions, and reviews, in this template feels like a strong accomplishment.  I look forward to seeing the results of your work.