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!