PLC Meeting MInutes 9-13-10

(I'm sorry, I forgot to take attendance at this meeting. -MM)

We opened by discussing the Trust article in our PLC notebook. We feel that respect for each other is a strength for our team & for the faculty in general. We acknowledge that everyone is at different competency levels but we are all working to improve. We feel that personal regard is a particular strength for us as a staff. We feel that our staff does have integrity.

We each received a golden egg and we had to write a commitment to the 4 vital signs from the article, or select one. These eggs will be placed on a bulletin board having to do with our “Soaring to Success Takes Teamwork” theme.

SIOP training will be held on the 28^th, but specialists will not have it at that time. Rosie will schedule a separate training for us. Specialists will not have PLC's on the 27^th or the 28^th.

Reminder: We need to pick a grade level and start to record data to develop our data centers.

Ms. Morning presented an overview of Classroom Walk-Throughs. Specials will be part of CWT's this year. Make sure you have an EQ posted (Ms. Muzzy's board is a good example of how to do this for our setting) and if possible, the SCOS objective number it relates to.

CWT's are “snapshots.” Teachers get a grade level report, but we will get a “department” report. In CWT's, information that is being sought are trends and areas for improvement. This also helps to determine what professional development is needed. CWT's are not teacher evaluation tools, but part of the cycle for continuous improvement. When administrators do a classroom walkthrough, they will look for learning objectives & EQ's; they will determine whether the lesson objective is evident to students & if we are followign the SCOS. The essential question should be in kid-friendly language.

We received a copy of the standard CWT checklist – this is not the version used by WSFCS, but it's similar enough to get the idea.

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If there are errors or omissions in these minutes, please leave a comment here or email Ms. McKenzie so that they can be corrected. Thanks!

PLC Meeting Minutes 8-31-2010

Attending: Morning-Cain, Henderson, Crim, Phillips, Burkhead, Muzzy, Farthing, McKenzie, Land (arrived late)

We discussed our schedule. 3^rd grade specials were moved back to 10:50 – 11:30 because of conflicts with their lunch schedule. 1^st grade specials will dismiss at 2:40. We need to have 4^th grade lined up at 10:30 though teachers may arrive at 10:35 on PLC days.

For duty-free lunch: classroom teachers will drop the students off in the cafeteria; they may have to wait in the cafeteria for us to finish our 3^rd grade classes.

We will keep the same mission statement and norms as last year.

We reviewed the purpose of PLC's: 1) collaboration and 2) data evaluation

Specialists will have to have a way to collect and show data that demonstrates learning this year. Like classroom teachers, we will have a data center, but we can make it our own; we don't have to call it a data center. We need to analyze our student work and display it. We need to start gathering evidence that our students are learning. We reviewed examples of data centers. We can start off by picking a particular grade level and then expand to collect data on more grades. Data centers can be maintained by specialists instead of the students and can be updated quarterly. Data can be taken by a checklist or by some other method we determine. We can use something like the CFA Data Analysis Form that's behind the purple tab in our PLC notebook, or we can determine our own. Ms. Crim does not need to worry about this. For the rest of us, data centers need to be up by the first week of October.

After the holiday break, we will elect a new PLC chair, a new reporter, and a new timekeeper.

Behind the purple tab in our PLC notebook, on the last page, there is an article called “Trust” – we need to review it for next week and identify the 4 indicators (Respect, competence, personal regard, integrity) look like in our PLC & in the school as a whole.

When planning our lesson, we continue to be focused on these questions:

We are still focused on 4 questions when planning:

What do we want our students to know, understand & be able to do?

How will we know they have learned it?

How will we respond when they have not learned or when they have learned?

Teachers may include the utilization of specialists when doing action planning (for difficult areas of instruction/differentiating instruction. We will need to collaborate with classroom teachers to develop activities for such plans.

We will not have to schedule an additional meeting besides PLC's due to scheduling difficulties , but we will always meet on Tuesdays.

We need to identify 10 – 12 Essential Objectives/Topics (combined of all grade levels) for this semester & email this to Ms. Morning-Cain before the first week of October. List objective numbers & summary of each objective.

We need to each establish a classroom mission statement which will apply to grades K-5. The school's mission statement needs to be posted in our room. We need to have a feedback tool (plus delta's issue bin/parking lot).

We discussed Race to the Top. We (specialists) are going to have to get in the mindset that we will have accountability assessments for our classes. The state is going to develop the form of accountability.

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If there are errors or omissions in these minutes, please leave a comment or email Ms. McKenzie so she can correct them.