Students are working on "tools" this week.
Writing day.. always Wednesday was based on picking tools and writing about them. Classification, description, and function.
One student was putting together a group of three item tools that held water. One of the item included his favorite item.. toilet. We thought together and came up with wash basin, and bathtub.
One girl in the class thought of items put in hair as tools. She included hairbrush, comb and scrunchy.
Overall it was a good writing day.. it took a lot more hands on than I figured to get them to think in the areas of classification, description, and function.
The district is pushing out more administration observations complete with a "coaching" form. I ask our administration what part of the form constituted "coaching." She was a little taken back by the comment and only said that it was coming down directly from the superintendent.
We are also being required to have available lesson plans. Our concern is with the new requirements built into them that looks largely like the Madelyn Hunter stuff of the 90's ... 5 step lesson plans.
With so much of our curriculum structured with pacing schedules and curriculum requirements.. it amounts to more than 90 extra hours a year to produce these products.
So we have been designing some strategies at the union to shore up our members reaction to these new developments in our working conditions.
So we shall see what we shall see.
Pat
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mentor coaching! This is the reaction of the administration to help poor teachers, b/c it's easier than finding new ones, especially if they can find other teachers to actually do the "work" of it... and there are always teachers who are willing to tell other teachers what to do ... with their best interests at heart, of course. ::laugh::: and yet, how many peers do you have, 'trick? How many speech therapists are there? How many have as many years of experience as you do? I always laugh when I hear about peer coaching, or peer evaluations. Heck, that's what the administration gets the big bucks for! I do like this new teacher2teacher time that the administration has carved out of our schedules at my work. It allows me to meet with teachers when they actually have time that is set aside to meet. For example, yesterday I was able to go through an IEP with a teacher and highlight the information that was important to helping her kiddo learn in her classroom. She had never read an IEP before (::Laugh::: bunch of junk anyway). ...but I have FIVE of these kids, she whined. I just looked at her. No need to tell her I had forty-four. You never win on numbers.
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