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POWER Zone Updates

  • August 2015 Update

    Values: Climb with Care and Confidence * Create a Loyalty Effect * The Most Important Person in the World * Family First * Serving our Community

    Mission: Purposeful Risk * Ownership of Learning * Whole Child/Student Concept * Engaging Inquiry * Respectful Relationships

     

    Current and Ongoing Activity

     

    Primary Literacy

    Last May, at the completion of a Language Arts curriculum review and adoption process lead by Sherry Kyle, POWER Zone elementary schools began to plan professional development around new programming entitled Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA).  Two days of training occurred over July 30th and 31st.  K-5 teachers dove into the material and began a learning process to better understand how to best deliver these materials to a wide variety of learners.  The program was chosen primarily due to its strong explicit core phonics instruction, along with the relevancy and engagement of their reading passages.  This particular resource will align well with current benchmarking indicators and will provide the zone with the opportunity for whole zone collaboration around reading and writing instruction.

    D49 Pathways

    VRHS now has a dedicated lead Individual Career and Academic Plan (ICAP) advisor whose primary responsibility is to ensure a core group of selected teachers are continually trained in the development of ICAPs for every student.  Advisory will now have an ICAP focus at strategic points throughout the year.  No longer will ICAPs be a formulaic checklist with little to no differentiation per student.  The expectation at VRHS is that ICAPs will be targeted and supported a monthly basis for each and every student.      

    Assessment Work

    POWER Zone will now use Beacon Assessments in place of Scantron for ELA and Math in grades 2-8.  These assessments are aligned to on grade level material that has the most impact on student learning.  Beacon also creates a virtual concept math for each individual student that can then be tracked once the student takes the beginning of year assessment.  This will allow for further differentiation across classrooms and grade levels.  These assessments will also be used within the zone’s student growth portion of their evaluation model.

    POWER Zone Performance Surveys

    POWER Zone is asking students, parents, and staff to take 2 surveys at the beginning of this year in order to measure the effectiveness of their three main zone initiatives of ensuring a safe, collaborative, and learning focused environment for our staff and students, ensuring they offer curriculum and learning opportunities that are engaging, rigorous, and individualized, and finally ensuring they have the most effective educators possible in each and every classroom.  The Level 1 High Reliability Schools Certification process offered through Marzano Research will serve as a framework to measure how successful each stakeholder group believes POWER Zone is in implementing strategies to meet these initiatives.

     

    Upcoming/Other Activity


    Two main focuses of the POWER Zone this year are to track feedback from their High Reliability School and Performance Dashboard surveys.  Both surveys will serve as major components of their overall community feedback process.
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  • Report of the POWER Zone Leader, April 2015: 

    Values: Climb with Care and Confidence * Create a Loyalty Effect * The Most Important Person in the World * Family First * Serving our Community
    Mission: Purposeful Risk * Ownership of Learning * Whole Child/Student Concept * Engaging Inquiry * Respectful Relationships

    Current and Ongoing Activity
    Primary Literacy
    Middle of the year benchmarking data is currently being reviewed by all POWER Zone elementary schools with a particular focus on DIBELS growth across and within proficiency bands. Meaning, the zone is looking closely at not just how many students are moving across proficiency levels (At Risk, Some Risk, Low Risk) but also within proficiency levels. This lets educators know how students are performing even if they remained within the same band at the mid year mark. A student may have been At Risk in the beginning of the year and remain in the At Risk category mid year. However, if the student is decreasing his/her proficiency gap between benchmarking sections this student may still be making adequate growth and catch up progress.

    Curriculum Pathway Work
    Sherry Kyle has completed standards prioritization work at across all content areas at VRHS and SMS and in the areas of Reading, Writing, and Communicating at OES, RVES, and SES. Every educator has read the standards for understanding and collaborated with both building and zone personnel over what is essential for our students to understand and be able to do within each standard. Next steps are to pair some resources acquired through Flippen’s C3 (Common Core Curriculum) training with the standards work that has already been completed. These resources will help teachers define appropriate levels of rigor for each standard and require some deeper forethought in preplanning questioning, pre assessments, and post assessments of student learning.

    Growth Based Evaluation Tool

    After receiving some confirming information from Flippen’s C3 training the zone has decided to begin to target their evaluation “look fors” to the ten Marzano instructional strategies that are proven to have the greatest positive effects on student achievement. These strategies all align to specific elements with the Marzano evaluation tool, which allows for a natural and fluid progression into these focuses rather than it seeming like just one more new initiative.

    Upcoming/Other Activity
    POWER Zone Accountability Plan
    The second week of January the accountability dashboard plan the zone has been working on this year will be messaged out to staff and parents for collaborative feedback. The zone aims to develop a plan that is community created and supported that will include external measures such as our state standardized assessment data, local measures to include grade level/department common assessments and qualitative survey data such as our District Climate Survey, and teacher discretion which includes classroom based assessments and teacher observation.
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  • Evaluation and Instruction: POWER Zone began the year on July 28th with day one of a two day training on the Marzano evaluation tool. The first day of training focused on the first few design questions and related elements within our instructional model. Day two will occur on September 26th and include training on the remaining design questions and elements within the model. This training is intended to further increase educator effectiveness across all licensed staff in the zone. iObservation Fidelity, a training and element norming resource for our administrators, will begin to be facilitated by Sherry Kyle, Zone Operations Administrator, in the month of August. This training is intended to increase scoring validity and reliability amongst our administrators across schools and the zone.
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