Summer Break Is Short this year
Now that summer school is completed there are only two weeks to begin purposeful planning to ensure this school year goes smoother than the last. I spent the last morning in summer school reviewing the professional development resources in my school's library to check out for this upcoming school year (these are separate from the teacher's book club). I found 6 of the seven books in the school library and the last book was given by the school district to all teachers interested.
Today I am going to establish the goal of reading each book in my reading list and establish/create my bullet journal tracking pages.
1. The Speed of Trust (Stephen M.R. Covey) - Scholars often do not try to learn if there is no established trust between the staff and scholars.
Goal - Focus my behaviors to support building trust in my classroom.
2. Conversations About Race (Published by Solution Tree Press with a collection of authors) - Bias exist in the human race as a survival process and taking the time to identify the bias an individual presents to the world is a step towards building a stronger community.
Goal - identify bias which might be unintentionally impacting my classroom environment.
3. Team Up , Speak Up, Fire Up! (Published by ASCD) - My classroom continues to have a diverse student body and all stakeholders should have more effective ways to support the academic learning process for all.
Goal - to gain a fresh perspective in supporting my English Language Learners
4. How to Design Questions and Tasks To Assess Student Thinking (Susan M, Brookhart) - Now days scholars have to demonstrate content mastery on higher level thinking questions and teachers who understand the intent behind the various type of questions will be able to guide scholars to this higher level of thinking.
Goal - broaden my understanding on the skill levels needed to complete each type of question and try to find ways to incorporate this knowledge in my unit/lesson planning.
5. Whole Child, Whole Life (Stephen Malia Krauss) - 10 proven practices to help children thrive as our scholars deal with the uncertainty and disruptions they face in their mental health.
Goal - Obtain a better understanding of the challenges the youth face in the modern world
6. Teach for Authentic Engagement (Lauren Porosoff) - Too often scholars just come to school daily to complete tasks they do not believe they will need to use in the real world and this can result in low engagement with the learning process.
Goal - gain strategies to help scholars become more engaged with the learning process.
7. A handbook for Classroom Instruction that Works (published by ASCD) - provides explanations and examples on strategies which can improve scholar achievement.
Goal - find and choose str4ageies which will work in my classroom to support my scholars learning processes.
Now in reality there is no way to read all these books in two weeks while doing other lesson planning tasks and or home repair task. However, this does seem to be a good collection of professional development books which may help me in being more purposeful in my lesson planning and implementation.
If you have any other books this blogger or my readers should add to this list please do comment below.
Remember to grow your academic garden each day.
Cathy Denison
Science Teacher and Crafter.
Comments
Post a Comment