PLP Professional Development
Over the past few weeks I have been working on my professional development opportunities and have had several exciting things happen. The first is a blog post that I wrote for the PLP Pathways site. It was about the Flyin Ryan Hawks Foundation partnership that I started for my team this year where students created their core values videos to launch our PLP work this year. The blog post can be found here:
Use the link to see the full blog post.
I was also asked by Penny Bishop and James Nagle of the Middle Grades Collaborative to work with them on viewing a new platform for Vermont middle schools to use to host PLPsites and allow a scope and sequence for teachers to use when implementing PLPs. This is a new project that they are undertaking working with a software producer to create. I am excited to get into this and think about what this will look like at all types of middle schools, including my experience teaching a very rural, impoverished community before coming to PAML. It is always my goal when reaching out to schools to try and help teachers who can be so isolated at these types of school to get the resources that they need.
Additionally I have been asked by a teacher from South Burlington to give a presentation at PAML for the PLP committee at their school about what we have done here as a school to implement PLPs. I am hoping that this meeting can take place, as it is always important to share out what we have learned and to hear what other schools are doing.
We also have a very exciting chance for our students to present at the Beyond Bullying conference in March sponsored by VAMLE. Our students have been asked to develop a workshop for other students about digital citizenship. I think this is a great leadership opportunity for our students!
Learning Scales and Student Reflection
Since last month I have been thinking about how to get students to use the learning scales to track evidence of learning. I have created two learning scales that the students are using. One for our unit on immigration where students are showing evidence of a graduation standards over the course of the unit. Students are using the scale and reflecting several times through out the unit: before, in the process and after. Here is the learning scale:
We had also been noticing that students have not been meeting the expectation for writing reading summaries on their weekly book blogs so we have created a learning scale for this and are going to have students look at it this Friday before writing their blog post about their reading. Here is that learning scale:
