Show this video!! http://www.upworthy.com/watch-a-teacher-make-her-3rd-grade-kids-hate-each-other-for-the-best-reason-imaginable-2
1.create professional networking communities as per my reflection from 6620″The idea of the professional learning network is an excellent idea. wonder how we can get teachers willing to work that way. One thing that concerns me is that the teachers that are already on board will be part of the group and those that are not learning the technology won’t do it.
Maybe it would be effective if an administrator implemented one evening a month or so to have a networking community. Instead of organizing by departments it could be organized by topic and teachers could choose which group they wanted to learn about and different teachers could facilitate the sessions. These could be on technology skills, iPads, attendance, whatever topic they were interested in….”
The PLC would need to operate over a year and the needs could be addressed in the school-based PD days, this would also help set goals and reading etc for the year. How can we fit more time into the school day and not ask teachers to do more?
2. administer an attendance policy – this Minnesota policy sees the importance of following up on every unexcused absence and disconnecting grades from attendance.
This quote reinforces it, “In the words of one, “Last year I could skip and nobody cared. This year, if I skip once I’m taken to the woodshed.” The woodshed being – calling home that day, detention for every unexcused absence.”
Comprehensive analysis about truancy behaviour:
3. Do an intervention for fifth year high school students – http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE33-1/CJE33-1-KirbyGardner.pdf
4. Write daily letters of appreciation to the staff – these would be meaningful feedback with clear detail – this would need to be tracked so I could hit all staff members evenly, also I would send detailed letters of appreciation after every big event, i.e. talent show, trips, sporting events
5. Choices about who should get new technology/resources would be based on proposals about how they would be used in the classroom/willing to attend summer/after school PD sessions
6. Look at fairness of assessments – go.solution-tree.com/assessment. Analyze data to see boy vs girl honour roll, boy vs girl failure rates, boys vs girls remedial/advanced placement. Analyze data about drop-out rates, failure rates
7. Have an early dismissal once a month to work on PLC’s
8. Dr. Reeves (2013) in his lecture about Specificity in feedback recommends that teachers model accepting feedback and using it to improve by having students fill out exit slips with a rubric where they evaluate his teaching for the day. In administration, one could use this same modeling to show teachers that the administrator is willing to improve. Having exit slips from a staff meeting or after some kind of strategy implementation and asking teachers for feedback and how to improve changes the conversation from behind the back complaining about failures of administration a collegial discussion on how to improve. At the beginning of the PLC process and it can give a great idea of how the meetings went and what could be improved in the process. This also gives individuals a feeling that their opinions are being validated and heard.
9. For 5% of major discipline problems look at using Positive Behavioural Supports and doing a functional behavioural assessment – Hoy & Miskel, 2012
BLMS World Issues 120 