January in Review

 

Region 4 hit the ground running in 2014!  Many of our LEAs requested professional development for their mid-year in-service days immediately following the Christmas holidays.  These requests provided opportunities to learn alongside the teachers in the region.  

Gina Riley and Fayette Elementary School teachers examined the Tri-State EQUiP Rubric and explored ways to incorporate more of the CCRS Writing Standards into daily instruction.  

Sherry Corbett, ARI regional, and Meg Rankin,  AMSTI regional, enjoyed a morning of Quality Questioning  and Mathematics practice standards with the Fayette Middle School math teachers.  This ARI/AMSTI collaborative Professional Learning Group (PLG) began last year and is working with teachers to encourage student discourse with high quality questioning at Fayette Middle School!

Region 4 has been honored to support the teachers at Brookwood High School this year.  Brookwood High School principal, Mrs. Laura McBride, and her amazing faculty have implemented Strategic Teaching as a means to really impact daily instruction and the students are reaping the benefits!  Mrs. Karen Davis, introduced the novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, to her senior honors class by sharing the first chapter as a read-aloud.  Our students are never too old for a read-aloud!
 

Working together with our Huntington Place Elementary teacher friends for our team learning has been a great experience for us this year.  Mrs. Andrea Hamner, HPES principal, and her fabulous faculty have been awesome collaborative partners for learning and practice with the ELA Standards.  What a great experience!   

How is Region 4 supporting CCRS implementation?

In our recent RSS/RPT meeting, we revisited the purposes of our work in Region 4:

1.       Responding to specific district needs
2.       Supporting the implementation of the College and Career Ready Standards

We took the opportunity to think through and record the support being offered throughout the region. After reflecting on the support being offered to schools and districts, we took time to analyze how our support we are providing benefits the implementation of the CCRS. This process gave us great insight to see how our efforts across this region are helping build college and career prepared graduates!

Once we had an opportunity to think about the work throughout our region, we took time to closely read portions of the College and Career Ready Standards Implementation-Progress and Capacity Rubric. Individually, we had the opportunity to read the “plan and timeline” section as well as the “professional learning for teachers” section. A powerful activity the groups completed was the opportunity to collaborate with other RPT/RSS members in turning the questions throughout the rubric into “I can” statements. Throughout this collaboration, we discovered several new techniques which can be useful in supporting our LEAs in planning for CCRS implementation support in the districts.

 Just a few examples of our “I can” statements are below:

• “I can support districts in planning for the CCRS implementation.”

• “I can pose questions to gain an understanding about the connections between the support districts are requesting and the districts’ plans for CCRS implementation.”

• “I can encourage all educators to continue to be actively involved in professional learning      opportunities that will, in turn, positively impact student learning."

• “I can be actively involved during CCRS team planning meetings as a resource.”

• “I can continue to build relationships that lead to partnerships with LEAs and schools.”

The big take-away from our January RSS/RPT Region 4 meeting was we must focus our supports around the College and Career Readiness Standards and be proactive in helping LEAs work towards implementing the CCRS in the most timely and effective ways so that classroom instruction is moving all students closer to their goal of being college and career ready!

Our upcoming CCRS quarterly meeting #3 for Region 4 is February 12^th at Hotel Capstone in Tuscaloosa. 

 

A Season to Celebrate

Region 4 has had many wonderful professional development sessions, professional learning groups, and coaching opportunities lately. We continue to grow our knowledge in learning about the Alabama College and Career Readiness Standards. We’ve spent some time focusing on learning more about close reading, understanding the connections between reading and writing standards, collaborating with AMSTI in professional learning groups, and formative assessment. The ARI Region 4 team is excited about our joint efforts with AMSTI in working towards increased levels of student achievement!

Tuscaloosa City PLG

Learning about Formative Assessment

One of our big celebrations was having the opportunity to work closely with a school in Tuscaloosa County as part of our team learning. As a team, we developed a professional development session, “Digging deeper into close reading”. We read an article written by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, Close Reading in Elementary Schools. The article allowed us to deepen our understanding of the close reading process and ways we can plan for multiple readings throughout our instruction. By having the opportunity to apply the close reading routine throughout our planning and execution of instruction, our team and participants could see the benefits of having students read complex text multiple times. If you would like to read the article please click on the link below. 

http://www.americanreading.com/documents/close-reading-in-elementary-schools.pdf 

 Another exciting session we’ve had in our region was our second CCRS quarterly meeting! Throughout this session we learned more about the connections between reading and writing throughout the standards. Participants also had an opportunity to read and reflect on the EQuIP rubric. The EQuIP rubric is just one resource for teachers, coaches, and instructional leaders to analyze and plan for rigor throughout instructional lessons. A link is attached below if you’d like to read more about the EQuIP rubric. 

CCRS Quarterly Meeting #2 Resources and EQuIP Rubrics 

These are just a sample of the great efforts going on in region 4 to support student learning and teacher practice! Before wrapping up this post, we encourage everyone involved in education to make sure they are knowledgeable of the three big shifts involved with the college and career ready standards. Make sure to share these mind shifts with all who are willing to listen! These three shifts are below:

1. Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction and informational texts
2. Reading, writing and speaking grounded in evidence from text, both literary and informational
3. Regular practice with complex text and its academic language

Thanks for reading and we’ll be back soon!