What an exciting SIP meeting yesterday. After we celebrate successes, each committee head shares the progress their committee is making toward our school improvement goals.
The community involvement committee, led by Jill Laubenstein, is on quite a roll. A group of twenty or more parents have met twice already since our last school improvement meeting. Parents are excited about their participation and finally feel like their getting a voice. I am most impressed with how there is a nice balance in their conversations about what they think we should be doing to help them AND what they would like to be doing to help us. Our parents want to work with our staff to develop groups (grief, divorce, etc) like we do for our students and eventually run these group independently without the need for RHS staff involvement. They also developed a subcommittee to provide feedback about parent issues on our school website – Scott will be starting a blog. Hurray, more blogs. The parents are also looking for us to provide more positive feedback about activities in the classrooms and student learning.
The RTI committee is prepared to present Tier 2 and 3 interventions to the administration, and the discipline committee is beginning to identify their Natural Helpers.
The Reading and Literacy Committee continues to provide outstanding opportunities to our students. We are all looking forward to our resident author’s visit this Thursday and Friday at Ridgewood and Saturday at the Eisenhower Library. Many students have rewad Simone Elkeles’ Leaving Paradise and absolutely LOVED it.
The technology committee, led by Sam Lewis, submitted their tech plan to the state. We can all get excited about the new technology coming our way – more laptops, here they come! We also continue to discuss the concept of an intranet to better meet our communication and data collection needs. The team also discussed to the use of blogs and wiki’s to facilitate better communication amongst the staff, students, and parents. These use high tech communications methods were also thrown around as professional development tools.
It is becoming very clear that we need to offer other professional development opportunities outside of the regular school day. There is simply too much professional development to fit it in our after school meetings on Wednesday afternoons. The results of the professional development surveys are coming back in and it appears that the opportunities for CPDU’s are an incentive for after school or before school professional development opportunities. There is also a concern that teachers are being given so many more things to do in their classroom without a clear the vision. Well, in my eyes, the vision is simple. We need to improve reading and in turn make AYP. I believe that before any and all professional development, we should ask, “How will this better able me to help students become better readers?” or “How can this better able me to help students meet or exceed standards?” I think if these essential questions are asked, we can see that the professional development provided at Ridgewood is not scattered, but rather quite focused. Since I’ve been here, I don’t know of any professional development that has not focused on reading.
Overall, we are making great strides already toward achieving the activities outlined in the school improvement plan. I think we need to keep our vision clear and our end goal in mind. We want to improve reading and make AYP.
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Introducing RAFT
16 years ago
