Just around the corner

Phew. I have a couple of days rest between visitors and I finally have the chance to hop online and catch up on all the posts I've missed!  I have truly enjoyed my slightly hectic summer so far and it is nice to be forced to not think about school and work!  Instead, I have enjoyed the beauty of Washington!

As soon as my guests left, my mind switched back to school.  I have taken on a lot of additional responsibilities this year, aside from the typical "back-to-school stuff," and I am beginning to realize that August/school is just around the corner!  I was reading this list of 21 Things that Will be Obsolete by 2020 and I started to get even more anxious! Number 15 is Paid/Outsourced Professional Development.  My district has taken the leap toward trusting teachers to run professional development for the district and guess whose team was asked to be the first guinea pigs!  I truly view it as an honor that the district I work for trusts my skills and the skills of my teammates to ask us to lead a professional development day for all 3-5th grade elementary teachers in the district.  I was so excited when we started talking about the possibility in April.  Now, now that the date is set and is less than a month away, I am beginning to question my common sense!  I can't believe that I agreed to lead a workshop on August 21st- less than a week before school starts!!  You know, despite the stress that I will certainly feel, I am still very flattered that I get this opportunity and I just hope that my peers treat me and my team well!  We are leading a day on interventions and how to use data to form your intervention.  It should be a productive day with plenty of time for teachers to work with their own data.  I know that no matter how fantastic we will still get negative reviews, but I will need to brush them off and know that I did my best and my team and I have the best interests of the students at heart!

Expect an update sometime this week on A Courage to Teach.  I am almost finished and it has been a fantastic read.  It is one of those books that you read slowly so that you can stop and reflect/remember the amazing words on the page! Looking forward to sharing my thoughts with you.

Pyramid Response to Intervention

On Friday I had the privilege of attending a RTI workshop led by Austin Buffum.  It was a very engaging presentation that encouraged a TON of discussion and reflection on your schools RTI practices or non-practices.

Here are some of the ideas that I came away with:

• The 4 C's of RTI- Collective responsibility, Concentrated Instruction, Convergent assessment, Certain access.
• RTI is not separate or in addition to the work that I am already doing as a part of a Professional Learning Community- RTI works hand in hand with PLC's especially in regards to: How do we respond when a student does not learn and What do we do when a student already knows it?
• I can not control what experiences my students have outside of school- but I can control the experiences they have inside of school- I need to take responsibility for ensuring that all students will learn.
• RTI is built around the identified essential skills- it is not something that you have to do for every single standard.

The biggest a-ha for me was to target the cause and not the symptom.  I heard an analogy once that went something like this: Two doctors were hiking next to a river when they saw a body float by.  Immediately they pulled the body out of the river and began CPR when another body floated past.  Again, they went into the river and pulled out the body attempting to help when a third body floated past.  One of the doctors jumped back into the river and the second doctor started running up river.  The doctor in the river got mad and yelled for the second doctor to stay and help.  The second doctor replied that he was helping, he was going up river to see what was causing all of these people to be put in the river!  I think that story completely applies to me as an educator.  So often I feel the pressure of meeting state standards and passing our state assessment that instead of giving the time to dig deep and find out why my students are struggling- I am just throwing interventions at them hoping that one will stick.  It is important for me to remember to dig deep and figure out the cause of their misconceptions/misunderstandings and then develop an intervention that is intentional.