For the 2015-2016 school year teachers are working collaboratively on creating instructional roadmaps and developing SLO's (student learning objectives.) These are to ensure that instruction in the buildings are focusing on the same standards for each course. During the time teachers are instructing, using that roadmap as a guide, they are also collecting data about students. This helps drive the instruction to better move our students forward through the standards. Teachers spend Wednesday afternoons looking over data and making decisions on where their instruction needs to go. Some students might need more support, while others need something more challenging. The time we have on Wednesday afternoon is very valuable to our students as well as teachers.
PLC WORK
Every Wednesday, excluding weeks with holidays, our staff here at Southwest Middle school, and also staff around the district will meet with their Professional Learning Communities. The purpose of these meetings is for collaboration among faculty to impove student achievement. This time will be spent digging deep into student data to help teachers guide their instruction throughout the year. Teachers will be working aside other teachers who teach the same content area, and also working with smaller groups among grade levels.
Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum
One of our focuses of the PLC groups is to come up with a guaranteed and viable curriculum. This would mean that no matter where your student went to school, they would be taught the same learning essentials as other students at other RCAS schools. In order to do this teachers must first look over the Common Core State Standards that were newly adopted. At first we have to come to a consensus on which standards we see are essential that our students learn. We look for leverage (skills students can use across the curriculum), endurance (skills needed for the rest of their lives), and readiness (preparing for the next school year) when choosing these power standards. For each grade level content area power standards will be chosen, and then broken down to find the learning targets. These are the specific skills we want our students to be able to do.