September Staff Dev. Newsletter

I hope that you all have had a wonderful start to your school year. I appreciate the positive energy that you demonstrated during Fall Workshop as well as your excitement for the beginning of the school year. In this newsletter, I will highlight a few things that are upcoming in the 2021-2022 school year.

Thank you to our social studies teachers for revising the alignment of our standards to match the Nebraska social studies standards. Your work in more fully understanding the timeframe and the "ask" of these standards will lead to deeper understanding and learning for our students.

This year we are taking on two content areas for curriculum review- The CTE curriculum with emphasis on Ag and STS, as well as the science curriculum K-12. We are going to begin this review starting on our September PD day. I look forward to working with all teachers in these areas to ensure that we have a curriculum that challenges and inspire each student to consider post-secondary and career opportunities in these fields.

We need to be proud and celebrate our in-person instruction during the 2020-2021 school year. Many districts were not in-person and students across America will struggle for years to come. This does not mean that we were not impacted by the pandemic instructionally. We had a large number of students who were quarantined for lengthy periods missing valuable instruction. Again, you should be proud of how you provided learning opportunities for these students as well. We were also impacted by the social-emotional issues that the pandemic caused for both our students and staff. These issues were most important to deal with as we consider Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

There are bound to be more issues that impact our ability to provide instruction this year, however, our students need us to challenge them, inspire them, and support them through instruction that is rigorous and demanding. I have been reading a book titled, Teach Like a Champion. The strategies they suggest are incorporated in many of our classrooms and I will feature them in this newsletter in the coming months.

We have some fairly major changes in assessment for this school year. At the high school level, we are adding a District ACT test to our testing repertoire. All of our Junior students will take the ACT on October 19th- this testing is funded by ESSER funds granted to districts from the Federal government. This test replaces the "Practice ACT" which was a retired ACT test that took the same amount of time for students to complete. Students will be getting the opportunity to take the "Real" ACT without adding additional testing to the instructional day. Our district will get comprehensive data about how our students did on this assessment and help us identify opportunities for curricular support.

At the Elementary and MIddle level, the state is moving forward with the NSCAS Growth assessment- a combination of the NWEA MAP test and NSCAS. All students will take the traditional NWEA MAP test in the fall, however, the winter and spring tests will be the NSCAS Growth assessment.

Our September PD Day will feature time to learn about our plan with assessment, feedback, and grading. We will also provide CPR training for those of you who need it, curriculum/department work time, and action planning time.

PLC Days- We are going to try a different format for our PLC's during the months of September, October, February, and March. As you know, we meet twice a month for PLC's, during the months above we will meet once as normal, and the second meeting will be during the PLC day. You will still have your normal PLC team during PD Day PLC'S, but we will use this time to extend and apply what we have learned during the professional development session. More information will come about this.