Personalized Learning Elements

What is this honeycomb I keep hearing about from The Institute for Personalized Learning?
Here is the website link: http://institute4pl.org/ and the Twitter handle: @Institute4PL.

As we strive for a cohesive system that will allow each learner to be met at his/her personal learning level each day, we need to look at how the learning and teaching elements below help guide our work. How are we becoming more learner centered and future focused in how we think, make decisions, and act? Everything we do must have a purpose and relate directly to the future of each individual learner. Cultivating customized learning paths forces all of us to be intentional about creating self-directed, life-long learners.

The School District of Waukesha and every organization is perfectly designed to get the results we are getting.
What is your commitment to these learner-centered practices?
How are you aligning your classroom practices and strategies with these personalized learning elements?

I encourage you to invest in your learners voice so they see purpose and value in their learning. We all know that if we are to change the current outcomes of our system, we must find better ways for learners to engage in and find meaning as they progress toward deeper learning. Involve them in this process.

Let yourself be reminded of our moral obligation and that is to provide learner-focused schools and classrooms for each and every learner!

Coherence in the New Year

As we came back to re-entry in 2016, many were talking about New Years goals, while others had already broke theirs. With the change of a new calendar year, comes new hopes for many as well as a sense of reflection for others.

We continue to build capacity and a commitment to action when it comes to student learning and achievement. I repeatedly hear across our district about literacy practices and personalized learning opportunities that drive student learning. When we all have a deeply understood sense of what needs to be done, and we can clearly see our part in achieving that purpose, coherence emerges and powerful things happen.

Coherence has to do with making sense, sticking together and connecting. Whether it be an exercise partner or a PLC team, it takes a shared depth of understanding about the purpose and nature of the work. We have great individuals in the School District of Waukesha. This is important, but cultures are even more important. I am proud to work as part of our school district culture that allows each of us to be mutually influential, whether it is highlighted in our upcoming WaukeshaONE conference, our recent Youth Summit, or our weekly PLC's...we have a culture of leaders at every level that are committed to focused action to support improved student outcomes.

Cultivating collaborative cultures is at the heart of system transformation. Thank you for deepening your own professional learning and challenging one another to do the same. Thank you for being responsible for our system priorities and goals. It is making a difference for our students and I have no doubt that our mid-year data will allow us to celebrate some pretty remarkable learning gains.

Student Driven Learning

The Les Paul Media Center was filled today with teachers and students for the inaugural SDW Youth Summit. From engaging activators to deep conversations around personalized learning, ideal learning environments and lesson/unit planning.....the students were driving the day!


Each teacher agreed to turn over the keys of the lesson or unit planning to the students! Students were co-designers of the classroom planning and helped develop future learning experiences for their own classmates. There was positive ownership, commitment and excitement for learning that was amazing to see!
This is what school is about!

Eighty-five of our SDW learners....

Connected learning with their interests, talents and passions....
Actively participated in the design of their learning....
Became responsible for their own learning that included voice and choice on how they learn...
Identified goals for their learning plan...and
Had fun being the central driver of their learning!

Thank you to everyone who participated is this fabulous day!

Effective School Leadership

Our December quarterly benchmark meetings are complete. What a great week of focused leadership and a strong deployment of the SDW improvement planning process (SAIL). After each site presentation, it was clear that everyone is working hard to "keep the main thing, the main thing."
Our main thing is maximizing student achievement.

Crafting your school into a purposeful community is a necessary condition for an effective leadership team. Each of our unique schools have much to celebrate!
How are you able to build a purposeful community as one that has the collective efficacy and capacity to develop sustainable goals that matter to everyone?

Are your Vision and Goals (L1), now a part of your embedded community?

Have the High Leverage Practices (L2) in your school improvement plan been clearly communicated and can teachers articulate what those are? The good news is that these high leverage practices are tighter and more common across our PreK-12 system than they have ever been. It is also great to see that the coordinator and department focus, compliment site goals and school improvement work.

How are we Cultivating Learning (L3) so that each teacher's collective actions around these practices can enhance the academic achievement of all our students? Professional collaboration is becoming a major component of successful school improvement efforts. Schools with strong PLC's and those that have established an ongoing culture of learning and support are reaping the benefits.

Ensuring Excellence (L4) is something we have all tried to do with fidelity over time. I think we can all acknowledge though, that the sense of urgency around ensuring excellence has never been more important than it is now. Our learners need this. Our schools have clear, focused processes for ensuring excellence. I think we are also learning that less is more when it comes to digging in and really focusing and monitoring the vital few.

Data and Communication (L5) focuses on specific feedback as it relates to each schools' L4 data. There is a clearer readiness level to move into an attention to equity, subgroup populations, and taking student achievement and moving this focus to the next level in our data analysis and communication efforts.

Thank you for your focus on maximizing student achievement and trusting one another on our journey to continuous improvement! Every day you come to school, you impact a life!

Feedback

We receive an onslaught of feedback everyday, whether we recognize it or not, and yet the question I ask is, does it impact our performance or behavior? With so much attention being paid to those giving feedback, it is actually the receivers who are in control of how much of the feedback they absorb and whether they choose to make any changes once the feedback has been given.

Feedback really happens any time you get information about yourself. The ability to accept feedback well is a learned skill that anyone can develop. When we are able to receive feedback well, our relationships are better, our self-esteem is more secure, and we learn a lot more.

So how would you gauge your readiness level to receive feedback? In turn, how do you think your students are prepared to receive feedback and in what ways do you provide this for them?
How often is this feedback given by you or by others?

As we enter into December and focus on the season upon us in which we are reminded of giving and receiving, remember that when it comes to feedback, it is equally important to reflect upon the ways in which you distribute your feedback and yet maybe most importantly, what you do when the gift of feedback is given to you.

Teacher Leadership

Strong teacher leaders are essential to improving our schools, and key to taking our system from good to great! Teacher leaders step up to additional responsibilities that positively shape and help grow their schools, either officially recognized or informally.
Teacher leaders are critical to school improvement!

According to Goddard and Hoy (2004), the collective efficacy of the teachers in a school is a better predictor of student success in schools than is the socioeconomic status of the students. Is your Principal a champion for the belief that having your staff operate as a cohesive group can effect substantive change? Do you look across the hallway at your colleagues and truly believe that they act and function as a teammate and that collectively when you work together, you can change the world?

I have again had the privilege to be in and out of several of our schools this week. I am especially proud to say that I ventured into elementary land at 4 different sites!


Strong teacher leaders are working hard every day to improve the lives and academic trajectory of our students. Although the professional commitment starts with you as an individual, it is the trust and collective capacity of all of us that is needed to move that achievement dial. Maybe most importantly, it takes all of us to affirm the positive focus we see, so that our own levels of self-efficacy can increase and in turn our students will feel the confidence and support they need to be successful learners.

Learning: Search the Twitter hashtag #21daysSDW

sbrownehr.com

Feedback is a focus during our next #21daysSDW and so is conferring. What if you changed your feedback loop to include your learners? Have you asked them what they think? Have you asked them to make their thinking visible through writing, discussion, questioning, or the ever so familiar emoticons?

In the book, Make One Change, Dan Rothstein argues that we should be teaching the skill of question formulation to all students. We should do it to promote excellence and we should do it to promote equity.
Both are achievable.

Learning how to ask questions leads to improved learning outcomes, greater student engagement, and more ownership of the learning process. This book asks us to make one simple change in our regular, purposeful practice and planning; to deliberately teach students how to ask their own questions.

The rigorous process of learning to develop and ask questions offers students the invaluable opportunity to become independent thinkers and self-directed learners. This also pushes our practices as teachers, from the proficient category according to Danielson's component 3b: Questioning and Discussion Techniques, to the distinguished category. As the teacher, you are leading a process in which your students will be thinking and working by asking their own questions, rather than responding to the ones that you ask. Students do the formulating of many questions, initiate topics, and make unsolicited contributions.



Teaching students to formulate their own questions, empowers them to be responsible for their own learning and also helps them refine a skill that has direct practical application in their daily lives. We can take action today to improve the quality of feedback and discussion in every classroom by teaching all students how to ask their own questions. Students will improve their discovery, engagement, and achievement!