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!