Ahhhh, the dismissal bell tolls early on this sunny, bright fall Friday. “What will I do on such a beautiful afternoon,” asks a Fairbury Public School teacher? This is a new question being asked these days in Fairbury, as this is the initial year of our “early outs” on Friday afternoons. Starting this year, we dismiss each Friday at 1:35pm to allow us the opportunity for staff development time for our faculty.
What is being accomplished during this time? As a k-12 staff, we are learning and working to improve our craft…the art of teaching! Teaching is not easy, teaching is not exact and teaching is definitely not for the “faint of heart!” We are working through Charlotte Danielson’s A Framework for Teaching. It is important to recognize that great teaching is what we want for all of our students and that great teaching is a very complex endeavor.
We are focusing our learning on the “Essential 8” components of great teaching:
- Setting Instructional Outcomes
- Designing Coherent Instruction
- Establishing a Culture for Learning
- Managing Student Behavior
- Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques
- Engaging Students in Learning
- Reflecting on Teaching
- Communicating with Families
In addition to learning and working on these components, we are using our Professional Development time to look at our assessment data to improve our focus for instruction and the development of Student Learning Objectives (SLO’s). Too often educators do not use the data that we have available to help inform our instruction. We want change that notion and use the different forms of data (MAP testing, NeSA testing, ACT results, classroom data, etc.) to guide us on where we need to spend our time instructing.
So, as you can see, we are very busy on Friday afternoons!
