Thursday, May 20, 2010

Classroom 10 . . .



I have asked Dawn Wakeley to guest blog about the process for bringing additional clarity to our Classroom 10 work. The information will be shared in more detail at tomorrow morning's meetings.

What does Classroom 10 look and sound like in the daily work of our teachers, students, and administrators?

We have had a team of principals and teachers working together to bring clarity to that question by revising the Tahoma Teaching Standards to align with the characteristics of Classroom 10. We are still in rough draft form but want to invite all staff to take a look at the work in progress on SharePoint. We welcome your input on what’s clear, what’s not and any suggestions you might have. During the Friday morning inservice, building principals and teacher leaders will update staff on the work and demonstrate how to access the SharePoint site and provide input through the discussion tool.

The work on the site is truly in rough draft form. During our meetings we broke into teams of 5-7 principals and teachers. For each characteristic, two teams worked independently to create descriptors. The work of both of those teams is reflected on SharePoint and has not yet been synthesized together. We wanted staff to see this rough draft work and have a chance to offer input before synthesizing and polishing. We have identified a small writing team of principals and teachers who will work during the week of June 21st and take their work back to the larger team. We will finalize the language and be ready for roll-out of the new standards to staff in August.

Aligning all the various pieces in our system to fully support the implementation of Classroom 10 is exciting work. Staff will notice that the revised teaching standards have a significantly different look. The team decided that describing Classroom 10 through the lens of teacher behaviors, student behaviors, and instructional practices would support a level of clarity and shared understanding not found in our current document. Over time, we imagine a digital view of the standards document that includes hyperlinks to supporting documents and videos where staff can see snippets of classroom practice or teachers describing their work with a particular characteristic. We are very interested in ideas staff might have that support creating a clear picture of the expectations with Classroom 10.
Please share your good ideas with us!

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