May 11

DAILY FOCUS QUESTIONS for LEADERS

What did you learn today?

Whom did you nurture today?

What difficult issue did you confront today?

What is your most important challenge right now?

What did you do today to make progress on your most important challenge?

(taken from Douglas Reeves,  The Learning Leader)

(consider posting these questions as reflection tools for the end of each day!)

1.  . Nicki’s schedule  Mon – Thursday – GOPS, Fri – Math Conference (maybe!)

2. A HUGE thank you for the engaging Education Week activities.  It felt like a week of celebrating learning. Your additional time, effort, leadership and coordination is recognized and appreciated! These types of celebrations truly do make a difference on students and families and their sense of belonging.  Thank you.

3. Early Years:  This week several of us attended an Early Years session and learned more about the new provincial report card for Kindergarten – which will be called a Communication of Learning. This document unfortunately will not be ready to be implemented until the 2016-2017 school year. I am exploring making some minor adjustments to our current report card templates (these will not require additional training to occur). The revised K Program Document should be ready by August. This document is very similar to the Draft K Program Document however it is reorganized around the Four Frames:  Belonging and Contributing, Self-Regulation and Well-Being, Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviour and Problem Solving and Innovating.  Further to this, each Overall Expectation now has a list of related Conceptual Understandings which help educators to relate the Overall Expectation to the real world. We will begin learning about these pieces next year, however I do have copies of the materials for you and for your K teams as they may wish to review this material.

Upcoming Dates

May 9 – all PLC/Inquiry Release Time completed (unless you have spoken with me)

May 11 – Inquiry Learning Fair Abstracts Due to the Google Doc (emailed to you on April 25) POSTPONED

May 13 – Primary Math Inquiry

May 14 – Junior Math Inquiry

May 14 (evening) and May 15 – Supporting Math Conference (Marion Small)

May 18 – Victoria Day Holiday

May 25 – Leaders Learning Fair (principals and Vice principals)

May 26 – Inquiry Learning Fair

May 26 – Director’s Update

June 4 – Thursday AM Catch Up Teleconference 1:00-3:00

June 1-5 – SGDSB EQAO Window – No PD to take place this week

Reminders – TTFM coming soon,

June 29 and 30 – Leaders Meetings – Victoria Park – Thunder Bay