Classroom Visits

A sincere thank you to all of the elementary teachers and principals who have graciously opened their classrooms to my visits over the past two months. As a leader who has come from the secondary schools, it is important to me, that I dive into the teaching and learning happening with our youngest learners as this is a critical time in the development of success criteria and benchmarks as it relates to their growth and achievement.

Starting in November, both Chris Hedstrom and I, will be visiting all new teachers' classrooms across all levels of the district. This will be a time for us to see all of our new hires in action as we continue to focus on our leadership support and retention strategies.

 

Each of you needs to understand how important you are to us and to each learner that is in your care. I hope the professional learning Thursday was impactful and that you take time over the weekend to sharpen the saw.

 

Know thy impact,

Jody Landish

SAIL

What is all this talk about SAIL?

SAIL stands for School Administrators Institute for
Transformational Leadership. Each Waukesha school is currently developing a SAIL team as we will be hosting our district launch on June 23 and 24.

The SAIL process is a statewide school and district improvement framework designed to provide a systemic approach to transform our achievement outcomes. This program has been developed as a collaborative effort between WASDA, AWSA, DPI and UW-Madison.

The SAIL Process includes:

• Each school team will move through a common process leading to a customized local solution.
• Pre-Assessment – Each site Principal will complete a survey to identify trends in student learning data to help identify your current state of performance and SAIL team members will provide key input for finding a local focus.
• Finding Focus – Teams will work through research findings and models in the field to identify the “vital few” practices that schools will invest in to transform the system and its results for students.
• Aligning Initiatives into High Leverage Practices – Teams will learn how to prioritize, organize, and connect the district’s key improvement work so that what otherwise might be viewed as isolated initiatives is intentionally linked in powerful, coherent, and synergistic ways.
• Strategic Implementation and Progress Monitoring – School teams will be given tools to avoid the breakdown that research shows typically occurs between the planning and action stages by developing short- and long-term 100-day implementation plans, with clear tasks of responsibility and transparent means of monitoring milestones of progress and celebrating success.
• Ongoing Support, Data Review, and Coaching – The SAIL district team will provide two years of instruction and facilitation, leveraging various levels of support through a process of gradual release. Support will take the form of ongoing student achievement and leadership practice, data analysis, coaching, and school networking.

Impactful visuals from March Quarterly Benchmark Reviews....much to celebrate!

SummitView Elementary shows their progression of practice, feedback and coaching in relation to Math fluency.

Horning Middle School celebrates increases in Career and College Readiness.

Waukesha ONE team shows connection of Blackboard 9 to core components on the honeycomb to help personalize learning.

Banting Elementary shows the change process as it relates to data around thoughtful logs.

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!