DYK: A good gauge of a male lion’s age is the darkness of his mane. The darker the mane, the older the lion.
I believe there are fantastic things going on in TCAPS and I think we're about ready to reach the tipping point with our work on the blueprint and with student achievement. Communicating more, with a larger group, about issues that impact us all should help us to leverage our early success and to make dramatic improvements in a relatively short period of time.
As I start my second year in the Curriculum department, I am acknowledging that I have a ton of work to do, a lot of growing to do as a leader and in my communication with all of you. I will work hard to communicate clearly and regularly with you to help us move to a common understanding of the initiatives going on within the district.
I'm excited to welcome our outstanding TCAPS teachers to the blog this week! Free Parking is a weekly blog designed to communicate what is going on in the District, the Curriculum Department, and in the Blueprint. It's also a way to have a little fun and celebrate the great things and the great people in TCAPS. Free Parking comes out on Friday afternoons (sometimes a little later Friday evening, depending on the day) and will be sent via a link to your tcaps.net email address.
ARTICLES OF THE WEEK:
Michigan's ESSA plan review
Michigan Takes Another Step Forward to Begin Implementing Federal ESSA Plan
MASSP Alert: Title II-A Funding at Risk
President Trump's budget proposes eliminating this important funding stream completely. The House Appropriations Committee has advanced a budget bill that does the same. We are asking MASSP members and other educators to sign our petition and show their support for maintaining Title II-A funding and send the following message to federal lawmakers:
THANKS AND APPRECIATION:
- Special thanks to the 20 educators who joined us for the MI-Excel Blueprint this week in Lansing! Thanks for your thinking, your communication, and ideas!
- Thanks Julie Gorter for managing my calendar and my life! If you didn't know what you were signing up for in April, you certainly do now :) Thanks for all of your help, couldn't do it without you!
- Thanks to the team at EMS for your work in selecting your next Assistant Principal!
- Thanks to Grant Chandler, Penny Brockway, Kathy Mohney, and the rest of the MI-Excel team for a great institute and for the tremendous ongoing support they provide us in the blueprint!
- Thank you to all extended day, summer camp, and preschool managers and assistants!
- Thanks to all curriculum writers and reviewers! Your work has been challenging and impressive. Thank you for taking this on to help us all grow and better meet the challenges we all face daily in public schools. Thanks!
- Please welcome Mr. Kirk Ranney as the new Assistant Principal at East Middle School! Kirk has worked as a math interventionist at Cherry Knoll and Central Grade since joining TCAPS and has been an active member of our math leadership team. Congratulations Kirk!
- Principals: Do not sign up for the ISD Marzano day on 8/15 and 8/22. We are setting up separate training for our new assistant principals and principals directly with the ISD. Stay tuned, but make sure your folks are with us for Admin. Team on 8/15.
- Congratulations Shelagh Fehrenbach as the new math interventionist at Traverse Heights.
- New to TCAPS Teacher Training: August 9
- Wired TC: August 14
- First Day Back for Principals: August 15
- Administrative Team Meeting: August 15 (8:30am - 12:30pm)
- First Joint Principals Meeting: August 17 (10:30am - 4:30pm)
- Thirlby Kick-Off: August 28 (7:30am - 9:00am)
- Teacher Work Days: August 28 - Thirlby Kick-off, August 29 & 30 PD days, August 31 Teacher Work Day - 2 hour staff meeting (more PD info to come in next week's blog)
- First Day of School: September 5
THIS WEEK IN THE BLUEPRINT:
The Instructional Infrastructure system is centered on implementing and supporting a vision of high quality, ambitious subject specific instruction to impact student/teacher performance in schools. While this work was initially crafted to benefit schools targeted for turnaround, TCAPS has adopted this approach as a way to help systematically improve across all subject areas, at every grade level, and for every child.
Part of installing the instructional infrastructure system will be to develop a process to implement a district-level system for curriculum and assessment. In TCAPS, curriculum is defined as a series of instructional units which indicate instructional targets, content, applicable standards, and a plan for collecting evidence of student learning as outlined in the UbD document templates. The district may collect and share exemplary lesson plans for each unit, but this element is not required and is not considered part of the district-approved document.
On June 13, Grant Chandler and Kathy Mohney from MI-Excel met with TCAPS teachers and curriculum leaders to train them in the work of writing curricular units. This work is heavy lifting and the writers are busy this summer completing as many as possible. Our goal would be to have as many as possible written in ELA and mathematics to start the school year and to complete the remaining units as soon as possible thereafter. TCAPS has joined a State-wide curriculum consortium which allows us the ability to share information and content with other districts who have done, or are currently doing, similar work across the State. The overall intention of this work is to align the scope & sequence across the district and to give you back some of your weekends...you no longer have to create your own curriculum! With that time, think of the great things you could do!!
The district describes and communicates explicit high quality subject specific instructional practices that are aligned with the district’s specific student-learning targets and evidence collection plan. This creates a shared understanding of the quality of instruction that we aspire to deliver in every classroom every day for every child.
With the district’s approval and adoption of high quality subject-specific instruction as well as curricular documents (per grade level and/or course) that identify rigorous learning targets and an evidence collection plan to measure and document student performance of these learning targets, the district will be able to effectively identify instructional strengths and weaknesses to determine how to best utilize coaching, professional learning, professional learning communities, and mentoring, to improve teachers’ and principals' instructional performance and to better support the district’s collective responsibility for dramatic increases in student performance in a short amount of time. Principals and BAN members will share more information with you as we start off the school year, but I wanted to give you some preliminary information now, with more updates and information coming in the near future.
Thanks again for all that you do for TCAPS. I look forward to seeing you all again soon at the kickoff at Thirlby. Have a wonderful weekend!
Chris
Follow me on Twitter: @ChrisParker10
THE WEEK IN #PHOTOS:
#greatgroup
#mi-excellearning
#stillstuffedfromallthatpizza
#admiringlindaforward
#anybodyseenthatboxofbooks?
