It's the start of the 2024-2025 school year and our school has some new goals. It's not to say that we scrapped the old ones, just revamped how we are attacking them - taking a new direction. This year there is more of a focus on integrating all of the methodologies we've been using instead of taking each one as its own entity.
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As a school we have been focusing on SIOP - Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol - as a way to support students who are learning English. This method has 8 strategies that are broken down into steps, and as a seasoned teacher the steps are familiar and SIOP gives them a way for me to organize them and be intentional about using them.
Around the same time we started using SIOP the school became involved with Capturing Kid's Hearts (CKH) as a way to build relationships with each other as well as students. CKH started their trainings with us but quickly realized we are not the typical in-person or asynchronous environment and they have done an amazing job tweaking their strategies to fit our model. The basis of CKH is the EXCEL model, where E is Engage, X is eXplore, C is Communicate, E is Empower, and L is Launch.
Over the summer the school coordinator for the curriculum and instruction took her ideas - plus the research of Hattie and Marzano - and melded it into the EXCEL model. She tried to show her work to assistant principals and everyone quickly realized it is a LOT of information, so they backed off and decided to focus on just the Engage part of the model for this year.
So, our goal... How do we get students engaged with our classes? ...with staff? ...with content? The coordinator has done an amazing job breaking down the Engage model into 13 or so smaller pieces of research-based strategies. Each TOSA (Teacher-on-special-assignment, basically instructional coaches at this point) has agreed to facilitate a session on 2 or 3 of these strategies throughout the school year. The coordinator has also taken on 1 or 2.
We are working closely with our new EdTech team to integrate whatever technology will be best to support each strategy as well. It feels like a lot at this point because we are just getting started, but today was my first day to facilitate the first session I chose and it went well. About 25 staff members attended my sessions and left me some good feedback for the next go 'round.
Here we are, new year, new goals, and it's off to a great start!
