REMINDER - All coaches and SSF's have a UDL session on November 30th and December 1st at Division Office. 
For information on the UDL session for coaches and SSF's go to http://wrsdstudentservices.weebly.com/student-support-facilitators.html
Upcoming Math workshop days:
Grade 4,5,6 Math teachers with Trevor Calkins December 5-9th
Grade 4 - south@ Lochearn December 5th - 8:30-3:00
Grade 5 - south @ Lochearn December 6th - 8:30-3:00
Grade 6 - south @ Leslieville December 7th - 8:30-3:00
Grade 4 - north @ Aurora December 8th - 8:30-3:00
Grade 5/6 - north @ Aurora December 9th - 8:30-3:00
Grade 7,8,9 Math teachers grade level meetings
Grade 9 - Dec. 16 @ Division
Grade 8 - Dec. 20 @ Division
Grade 7 - Dec. 21 @ Division

Education trends: The end of the weekly spelling test
http://www.dailypress.com/news/education/dp-nws-spelling-tests-banned-20111114,0,4523242,full.story

Co-Teaching is a marriage......
http://bcove.me/649i4xui

Congratulations to Nicole Marrin and Kim Wedman on having their articles published. Nicole's is "Allowing Authentic Engagement" and is in the Canadian Teacher Magazine, November/December 2011 edition. Kim's is "Lochearn C.A.R.E.S." and is in The CASS Connection, Fall 2011 edition. Great to have published authors in our midst!

Avoid Learning Community Burnout

Teacher professional learning communities are often launched with great excitement and initiative only to lose steam due to time constraints and lack of direction. Anne Jolly, author of A Facilitator’s Guide to Professional Learning Teams, offers these tips to help teachers reinvigorate and sustain learning teams:

• GET A FIRM HANDLE ON YOUR TEAM'S PURPOSE and revisit it frequently. Your team needs a clear roadmap and destination if you plan to arrive somewhere.
• BUILD IN OPPORTUNITIES FOR SUCCESS. Set short term, doable benchmarks that your team can achieve. Frequently ask yourselves, “What have we accomplished as a result of this collaborative venture?” Look for ways teachers have changed and students have changed.
• KEEP NEGATIVE ENERGY AT BAY. Gain consensus on meeting rules and be sure one of them reads, “We will be positive during our meeting!” Call attention to that rule at the beginning of each meeting to suppress negativity that can drag the team down.
• RELAX AND EXPERIMENT. Give yourselves permission to try new teaching strategies and be unsuccessful. (Oddly, we often learn much more from our failures than from our successes.) Make “It’s OK!” cards for all team members to signify that it’s alright not to succeed at first, as long as you keep working.
• DEVELOP A CONCRETE PRODUCT that demonstrates what your team is accomplishing. Create a rubric, matrix, lesson plan, or a video of team members using a particular strategy the team is working on. Share it school-wide.
• TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND REFLECT. At the end of each meeting, ask yourselves, “What did we accomplish with today’s meeting?” If team members can’t answer that, then rethink what’s happening at the meetings. Then decide, “What do we want to accomplish at the next meeting?”
• ALWAYS MAKE A DECISION AS A TEAM before leaving the meeting. Even if the decision is to not use a particular strategy you’re considering, you’ve at least made a decision. If team members leave without making a decision of some sort, the meeting will not seem as valuable.

"What is clear is that the challenges we face are real, and they rush at us with headlong speed. Unless we are willing to be left behind, standing still is not an option. Nor is standing by".— Campus 2020 Thinking Ahead: The Report, pg. 91
What is a good report card?
http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_194704_irish.pdf

Grade Books Should Be Reflection Tools........
The truth about grading is that few grade books are reviewed or evaluated for standards-based grading. Administrators don't see their relationship to grade books and teaching, but instead look at grade books as mere symbols of the school days. Teachers go along with this charade and maintain that the grade book is not a reflection tool, but more a legal document to use in a rare court case as evidence in a wayward student's criminal case. Administrators, in turn, collect grade books, secure them in a safe place, and move on to other duties, like setting up a classroom for what they think is more meaningful PD.
At West Adams we designed a simple PD activity, based on the enormous amount of guiding information about assessment and instruction, to quickly engage our teachers in analyzing their grading practices. The anecdotal results were simply phenomenal.

Getting Started
We began the PD by anonymously looking at other teachers' grade books. We simply printed out one-pagers from Engrade and Easy Grade Pro, cut off the teachers' and students' names, and passed them out among the group.
We then set up the following group guidelines: Do not judge, but be inquisitive and questioning. Avoid talking about what your grading philosophy is or what you do better than the sample shown.  For more information click on the link
http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol7/703-enciso.aspx

Thoughts on teaching Math   -   Dan Meyer
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FBlvKWEvKSi8

"May you never forget what is worth remembering, nor ever remember what is best forgotten”


"I am addicted to learning and it is through respectful, challenging educational dialogue that I see the most growth."
Chris Wejr
When I read this quote I was reminded how important it is to have people in my professional learning network  challenge me and the team I work with to be better. When someone disagrees, it is important to  listen… reflect… respond.
How about you - are you open to being challenged in your thinking?

Thank-you to the 80 people who responded to our October 28th Professional Learning Day survey.
64% of the respondents agree that it was a good day for sharing
60% of the respondents agree that they will continue to connect with their colleagues before February 17th
59% of the respondents agree that they will use ideas learned in the next two weeks
56% of the respondents agree that they uncatered lunch provided an opportunity to socialize with colleagues

Assessment
Differentiated Assessment Blog Post
http://ideas.education.alberta.ca/engage/blog/2011/11/2/differentiated-assessment

Please take a minute to read the reflection of teacher Amanda Barrett under the Smart Learning tab on this weebly

ASSESSMENT
Paul Black tells us that when the cook tastes the soup it is formative assessment and when the customer tastes the soup it is summative assessment.

An assessment activity can help learning if it provides information to be used as feedback,by teachers, and by their [students] in assessing themselves and each other, to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes ‘formative assessment’ when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs. (Black et al. 2002)

A frequent misunderstanding is that any assessment by teachers, and in particular the use of a weekly test to produce a record of marks, constitutes formative assessment. It does not.

Unless some learning action follows from the outcomes, such practice is merely frequent summative assessment: the key feature, interaction through feedback, is missing. 

http://www.mantleoftheexpert.com/studying/articles/Paul%20Black2007.pdf

SMART LEARNING
"Smart Learning is about gifted education for all students" 
"It is not a magic bullet, it just another way of engaging students." - Susan Close