Winter Institute 2022

The School District of Waukesha strives to provide all professional staff with meaningful, engaging, and purposeful professional development opportunities that align to our district goals and priorities. An annual professional development event hosted by the district is the Waukesha One Conference which has evolved into the Winter Institute. This year’s Winter Institute is scheduled for Monday, January 17, 2022. The design of the Winter Institute has shifted to allow time to focus on content area/role-specific professional learning, curriculum development, and intentional instructional planning across our system. 

The Winter Institute will be hosted at two school sites which is a change from years past. The host sites are Waukesha North High School for all secondary teachers (6-12) and Waukesha West High School for all elementary teachers (K-5), special education teachers (K-12) and student services staff. A detailed schedule for the day will be available in early January as well as the SCHED for registering for your assigned sessions. 

Another significant shift for this year’s Winter Institute is the professional learning will only be half of the day and the other half will be instructional planning and staff work time. There are a few exceptions for some professional staff that are engaging in curriculum writing and/or other pre-planned role-specific training such as the NVCI training. The sessions will run 8-11:30 and 12:30-4:00 with a one hour lunch break in between. There will be space available for work time at the host sites or staff can work in their own school buildings. Professional staff are not allowed to work from home on this day. 

Please keep an eye out for an email the week following winter break with additional event details and registration information. Have a relaxing and wonderful winter break! Thank you for all that you do to make a difference in the lives of the students you serve each and every day! 

Leveraging the Coherence Progression as Transformation GPS

The Coherence Progression is a tool for analyzing the current level of coherence for each component of the coherence framework. This comes from Michael Fullan's book titled: Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems. 

play.google.com

Your SAIL team should be using this progression to help identify your strengths and gaps as you identify your selected strategies for improvement during your next 100 day action planning cycle. What components are you celebrating? What components is your team focusing on as you move from emerging to accelerating to mastering?

This comprehensive GPS will enable you and your school to become much more effective and much more likely to become more sustainable with your area of focus. Achieving coherence in a school and a district our size takes a long time and requires constant attention. SAIL teams and all of us must do our part to coalesce our energies into the things that will garner the greatest impact for our students.

Make a difference by being a coherence maker! This will be a true gift for yourself, your colleagues, and our students.

SDW Exceeding Expectations

Off the heels of the public release of the DPI school and district report cards, I want to take a moment to say THANK YOU for all of your hard work! No matter the successes or dips we saw across all of our schools, TOGETHER we collectively achieved our highest district ranking in 5 years!

We celebrate being second only to Appleton with our rating on the DPI district report card when ranked against the ten largest school districts in the state. Our district score is 70.4.

We celebrate the following schools that are significantly exceeding and exceeding expectations:

Significantly Exceeds Expectations

Waukesha Engineering Preparatory Academy 88.4

Rose Glen Elementary 88.3

Banting Elementary 87.4

Meadowbrook Elementary 86.4

Waukesha STEM Academy (K-8) 83.2

Exceeds Expectations

Lowell Elementary 82.7

West High School 81.2

Hillcrest Elementary 79.6

Bethesda Elementary 74.2

Waukesha Academy of Health Professions 70.8

Collectively, we not only work with the colleagues in our respective buildings, but together we do build the district imprint on student learning and success.

As we approach Thanksgiving, we are tired. We must take time for ourselves. We must find gratitude for our friends and family during this upcoming break. We must raise a glass and know that we have accomplished much and yet in the spirit of "getting better at getting better", we always want more for ourselves and especially our students.

Thank you for your dedication, your resilience, and your commitment to educational excellence in the School District of Waukesha!

Celebrating Our Middle School Vertical Literacy Teams' Impact on Student Learning

Secondary Literacy Update:

On Monday, November 8th, all of our literacy professional learning communities across all of our middle schools, came together to share and celebrate our collective impact on student learning. The purpose: 

• To strongly connect the why and how of our teaching to what students are learning.

• To celebrate our collective expertise and successes across buildings and professional learning communities. 

• To see and feel our impact on students and each other.

Here are some ideas and student work examples that were shared:

Grade-Level Priority Standards:

Instructional Impact on Student Learning:

Student Work Examples:

If you are interested in seeing all of the teams' ideas that follow the same format, as shown above, check them out by clicking here. A huge thank-you to Natalie Guevara, a Partnerships in Comprehensive Literacy lead teacher at Les Paul Middle School, for helping lead the work with our entire middle school team. Natalie, your bravery as a teacher, Marine, and facilitator of our curriculum-creating student panel gives everyone around you energy and empowerment. Thank you.

Instructional Planning

As a district one of our focus areas this school year is planning and preparation to ensure equitable outcomes for all students. This focus area aligns with the WI Educator Effectiveness System which uses the Danielson Framework for Teaching for professional growth and development for educators. The first domain of the Danielson Framework for Teaching is Planning and Preparation. Our Planning and Preparation Adult Learning Framework focuses on two components within the planning and preparation domain; Demonstrating Knowledge of Students (1b) and Designing Coherent Instruction (1e). These two components are essential to intentionally planning instruction to meet the needs of all learners. 

When lesson planning it is important to plan for the “edges”. This means that you plan for your learners that are disengaged in learning and not achieving at the same level as their grade level peers. This may include students with learning or behavioral disabilities, English language learners, and/or students of color. Including supports and scaffolds, different cultural heritages, and student interests in your lesson planning will not only benefit underperforming students but also students who are performing at or above grade level. Intentionally planning for a few can have a huge impact on the overall achievement of the class. 

Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) is the instructional framework that is expected to be used when designing coherent instruction. Daily lesson plans following the GRR framework include focused instruction, guided instruction, collaborative learning, and independent learning. Designing coherent instruction involves aligning learning activities to instructional outcomes. Intentionally selecting WICOR strategies that enhance student's learning experience. Creating data-driven small groups and using formative assessments regularly in daily instruction to guide instructional decisions. Also, being mindful that the pacing and structure of the lesson allows time for students to process their learning and engage in discussion, critical thinking, and reflection. Designing coherent instruction is a high-leverage practice that leads to significant gains in student achievement.

An analogy I once read compared lesson plans to a road map. For both you need a final destination or end point. Without that you're just on a road to nowhere and taking your students/passengers along for the ride. Planning and preparation are key if we want to see achievement gaps close and not widen. As educators it is our responsibility to demonstrate knowledge of and design coherent instruction for each and every student that enters our classrooms. If we want equitable outcomes for all students it starts with intentional planning and preparation.

Ways to accelerate learning that work!

Leading the Rebound, is a book by Fisher and Frey that has practical ways to help students accelerate learning. The following is a list of recommendations found in the Visible Learning research:

1. Student mental mindset: Explain the value and importance of the learning, increase students' ownership of their learning, and explore the habits of minds and mindsets.

2. Metacognition and self-regulation: Create reflection assignments, teach students about planning, monitoring, and adjusting their learning, and use practice tests.

3. Student fear and mistrust: Focus on teacher credibility, restructure feedback, and create a safe climate for learning and making mistakes.

4. Insufficient background knowledge: Use initial assessments, provide lessons background knowledge and key vocabulary in advance, and use interactive videos....in Blackboard, my add:-)

5. Misconceptions: Use advance organizers, recognize common misconceptions for students, and invite students to justify their responses to their thinking.

6. Ineffective learning strategies: Teach study skills, model effective strategies with think-alouds, and use spaced practice.

7. Transfer of learning: Plan appropriate tasks, model application in different contexts, and tailor feedback to include processing of the task.

8. Constraints of selective attention: Increase teacher clarity, use breaks and reorientation strategies, teach students to avoid multitasking, especially with media.

9. Constraints of mental effort and working memory: Organize information and chunk it, use both visual and auditory cues, and use retrieval practice.

If we all can address these cognitive challenges, imagine how much more our students will be able to do!

EMLSS Project Team Updates

What is EMLSS? Equitable Multi-Level Systems of Supports! Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

This week, our district team met for our monthly meeting as we are committed to ensuring a system where highly-trained educators utilize evidence-based resources, materials and supports to help each and every student reach academic excellence.

With our Instructional Coaching group, we are already starting to see an impact in our coaching training plan, our coaching profile and our coaching structures! The work of the Coaching Project Team has helped springboard a basic and consistent level of training guarantees through our partnership with AWSA. We are starting to use DPI's coaching practice profile that clearly outlines expectations for all coaches in our system. Lastly, our PCL coaching structure has a tight framework for time allocations spent by our coaches to ensure impact. As we all know, busyness does not equate to impact.

November 8th is our next meeting where we will continue to deepen our learning around Wisconsin's DPI framework and how we are strengthening they key system features in Waukesha. December 8th will lead us to our second data delve of the year as we dig into our MAP literacy data, paying attention to our Theory of Action "So That, Thereby"statement:

SO THAT...growth is accelerated for students scoring beneath the 25th percentile on MAP in reading, THEREBY...increasing the number of students projected to be proficient on the Forward as measured by the MAP assessment.

Thank you to all of our EMLSS members for their impactful work!

Proactive Planning Commitments

Summer Institute 2021 was the start of this unusual school year.  One constant we can count on is that ‘There is No Average’, and the variability in learning that students bring to school is more evident than ever.  The Proactive Planning work we did in August was a snapshot of work on the theme of meeting student needs - each and every student.

We have been teaching for six weeks now - as you build relationships with each and every learner, you have gained some insight into the assets of your students and some barriers they might be experiencing in accessing learning in your class.  Relationships take time to build.  As collaboration is underway in your building, perhaps there are colleagues or teams of teachers you work with to serve this student who share an investment in this work.  Parent-teacher conferences will provide valuable insight about a student’s strengths and needs from their family’s perspective.  October presents a great opportunity to continue building collaborative teams and to capitalize on the strengths of the teams who work together to serve learners.

Proactive Planning involves reflection on a regular basis to check if you know what you need to know to give your students the best strategies for success.  

This week, take time to reflect on the commitment you made as the Proactive Planning sessions concluded during Summer Institute. 

In your reflection, ask yourself: 

How satisfied are you with the progress you have made in honoring your commitment?  

Is your Summer Institute commitment still your intention? Has it changed?

What can you celebrate, where do you want to focus next?

~Written by Patty Hovel

Elementary Social Studies Update

 The Elementary Social Studies Curriculum Development Team 

has started monthly curriculum development!

Teams spent time digging into the Social Studies Standards for the skills students need to acquire and the purpose for which they are learning the skills.  From these skills and purposes, the team has finalized the 2022 Social Studies Learning Targets.  The Targets represent the value that is placed upon student's ability to engage in the Arc of Inquiry that is the foundation of Social Studies Learning.  The 2022 targets are listed below.

As this team engaged in studying the Arc of Inquiry and the Standards, they compared and contrasted them with the instructional framework of elementary Social Studies: Engage: Investigate: Report: Take Action.  The IMPACT Resource we have adopted will guide you to facilitate instruction through a framework that prepares students for inquiry, argument and action within an integrated content approach. The targets are as follows:

The Targets (known as dimensions) and their alignment to the instructional framework are represented below:

If you have read this far, FANTASTIC! Also know that we have begun the process of determine the scope and sequence so that we can start developing our unit plans.  Our goal is to determine three Social Studies Units per grade level that will support teachers to teach 6 week units opposite Science in grades K-5, one unit per Trimester (El programa dual utiliza los estudios sociales para el desarrollo del lenguaje inglés y será dirigido para enseñar a diario)

Unit Planners are under development with the goal to have Unit 1 complete this fall!

Please see your building social studies representative for more information on their experience.  We will meet again on October 28th!

September SAIL Status Check

 

As the last days of September are upon us, how is your school doing on the status checks within your 100 day SAIL plans?

When you look at your Adult Learning Practices (ALF's), have you added as measured by statements so you can truly measure this over time?

What components of the Coherence Progression are you working towards? Are these outlined in your monthly milestones? 

How is your school different one month in because of your SAIL work?

Training in the School District of Waukesha

This week our EMLSS project teams continued their work. Our team working on training in the district reviewed our vision statement as well as our common definition for training.

SDW Training VISION: In the School District of Waukesha training will equip new and experienced staff with knowledge, strategies, and skills that will build a foundation to empower our educators to disrupt inequities and improve outcomes for all students.

Training in the School District of Waukesha educates staff on theory, instructional strategies, and evidenced-based practices that address the needs of all our students with a priority on our marginalized students. Training will use consistent adult learning practices and be aligned to district goals, while being flexible enough to support a diversity of needs, roles, and building priorities.  

The team is heavy into developing a checklist for high quality professional development. Think about all the professional development that has happened over the last month. How can we ensure it is high quality for you?

Creating a guidance document when designing professional development would be helpful and impactful. More to come on what this might look like for future professional development offerings not only by the district, but by each of you in your schools on a monthly basis.

Elementary Social Studies APPROVED!

 We are excited to announce 

that the Waukesha School Board has approved the adoption of the 

McGraw Hill IMPACT 

Elementary Social Studies Resource for Elementary Students in grades K-5

The curriculum writing team is made up of representatives from around each of our elementary schools and includes colleagues who are enthusiastically piloting resources this year.  

Our representatives will be aligning the resources to the Wisconsin Social Studies Standards, and determining units of study that are supported by the resource.  Our goal is to have determined the units of study K-5, and completed a deep analysis of the shift in standards by November 2021.  Through the winter months our team will focus on building the units, aligning the literacy skills and focusing on preparation for Spring and Summer Work to complete the curriculum design process and professional development plan.

Your representative will update your site monthly on the advances that we make and how to access additional information and supports.

We look forward to bringing out students an amazing opportunity to learn and grow!

AVMR Training Opportunities for 2021-2022

 Welcome back to the new school year!  In the School District of Waukesha, we have been training teachers in Add+VantageMR since 2015.  During that time, many teachers have experienced the value of learning more about numeracy development in students and how to better facilitate learning.  Last year, we only offered courses virtually in the spring. We will continue to offer the training virtually this school year as well due to the shortage of substitutes.  

All AVMR courses will be held from 4:15 - 6:45pm.  The virtual set up for all of the AVMR classes is both synchronous and asynchronous.  Since we will not be having any classes during the day with subs filling your positions, we will be able to offer a stipend for any teacher who participates in the courses! 

 

Below you will also find a list of proposed TDPs centered around AVMR.  Please sign up now  to indicate your interest on the Google Form by next Friday (September 24th). If there are not at least 5 people interested in a training or course, it will be canceled.  

 

AVMR Trainings:

AVMR Course 1 involves teachers learning about Add+VantageMR assessments and focusing on a continuum of learning in relation to the Learning Framework in Number.  Teachers learn to use a series of three assessments to develop a profile of number knowledge for children: number words and numerals, structuring, and addition and subtraction.  The profile then assists teachers in making informed instructional decisions to advance students' knowledge and skills.

   

Fall AVMR Course 1 4:15 - 6:45		Spring AVMR Course 1 4:15 - 6:45
Monday, October 4th		Thursday, January 20th
Thursday, October 7th		Thursday, January 27th
Thursday, October 14th		Monday, January 31st
Monday, October 18th		Thursday, February 3rd
Monday, October 25th		Monday, February 7th
Thursday, November 4th		Monday, February 21st
Thursday, November 11th		Thursday, February 24th
Thursday, November 18th		Thursday, March 3rd

 

AMVR Course 2 is a continuation of the numeracy continuum of learning in regards to the Learning Framework in Number.  You will learn about place value and multiplication/division assessments that can be administered to your neediest students to know exactly where they are in their numeracy development so you can make instructional decisions that will help to move the students along in their learning. To sign up for this course, you need to have completed AVMR Course 1.

 

Fall AVMR Course 2 4:15 - 6:45		Spring AVMR Course 2 4:15 - 6:45
Wednesday, October 6th		Thursday, February 24th
Monday, October 11th		Wednesday, March 2nd
Wednesday, October 20th		Thursday, March 10th
Wednesday, October 27th		Wednesday, March 16th
Wednesday, November 3rd		Thursday, March 31st
Wednesday, November 10th		Thursday, April 7th
Wednesday, November 17th		Monday, April 11th
Monday, November 22nd		Thursday, April 21st

 

AVMR Fractions Course 

Developing Fractions Knowledge by Amy Hackenberg, Anderson Norton, and Robert Wright serves as the course text and provides a detailed and comprehensive guide to classroom and intervention teaching of fractions.  This course combines online learning with team meetings. The teaching approach for this course relies heavily on working with students and then observing and documenting students' mathematical activity and thinking.  Instructional sequences take into account detailed information about students' current levels of knowledge, as well as how students reorganize their ways of working with whole numbers in order to meaningfully work with fractions. It is highly recommended that you have completed AVMR Course 1 and 2 before signing up for this course, but not required.

Fall AVMR Fractions 4:15 - 6:45		Spring AVMR Fractions 4:15 - 6:45
Thursday, September 30		Wednesday, January 19th
Thursday, October 7th		Wednesday, January 26th
Thursday, October 14th		Wednesday, February 2nd
Thursday, October 21st		Wednesday, February 9th
Monday, October 25th		Wednesday, February 16th
Monday, November 1st		Wednesday, February 23rd
Monday, November 15th		Wednesday, March 9th
Wednesday, December 1st		Wednesday, March 30th
Wednesday, December 8th		Wednesday, April 6th
Wednesday, December 15th		Wednesday, April 13th

TDP AVMR Courses:

The following TDP courses will be offered that connect to AVMR, if there is enough interest.  Again sign up now so the classes are not canceled! 

Month	Title	Description
October	AVMR 1 Revisited	Did you complete Add+VantageMR Course 1 and end up with more questions once you got back to your classroom? This course will review the information learned in AVMR and provide the time to further develop your understanding. We will take time to ask questions, share ideas with each other, and look at resources with activities to do with students. We will focus on Number Words and Numerals, Structuring and Addition/Subtraction.
November	AVMR 2 Revisited	When learning something new, it is often hard to remember all of the key concepts. This course will review the information learned in AVMR Course 2 and provide the time to further develop your understanding. We will take time to ask questions, share ideas with each other, and look at resources with activities to do with students. We will focus on Place Value and Multiplication and Division, as well as information in the red book.
January	Connecting AVMR Course 1 to Grade Kinder and First Grade  Universal Instruction	How do we best incorporate our learning from AVMR into our universal classroom content?  Learn how to integrate AVMR 1 topics into your grade level units for Kindergarten and 1st grade.
February	Connecting AVMR Course 2 to First, Second, and Third Grade Universal Instruction	How do we best incorporate our learning from AVMR into our universal classroom content?  Learn how to integrate AVMR 2 topics into your grade level units for first, second, and third grade.
March	Differentiation of Advantage MR Games and Activities	How do you meet the needs of all students? One way is take a game or activity and consider how it can be tweaked for the different levels and constructs. That is exactly what we will do in this course! We will look at several games across the various AVMR areas and discuss how they could be differentiated for our students.

If you are interested in participating in any of these learning opportunities, please fill out

this Google Form and indicate your choices now.