CARE to Intervene

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. ~H. Jackson Brown Jr.

As we enter the final and fourth quarter of our school year, it’s good to go back and examine our priorities from our beginnings.  Each year, we create and then address our school improvement plan, which by nature is grounded in student achievement.  This year, we focused on data teams and literacy.  Those two areas of our professional development focus were intended to make us more adept at helping students achieve academically.  As I look at our progress, I am happy to celebrate that we are indeed more focused in our pedagogical approach with our teams analyzing data for success in our selected Power Standards as well as continually embedding of text in our lessons through which we implement close reading and vocabulary study. That implementation of our PD has greater impact than you can imagine.  Research from the RTI Network shares that, “The expectation is that if the Tier 1 program is implemented with a high degree of integrity and by highly trained teachers, then most of the students receiving this instruction will show outcomes upon assessment that indicate a level of proficiency that meets minimal benchmarks for performance in the skill area.”

It’s funny how often we take our professional development and subsequent classroom implementation for granted, as the results of our work are often not noticeable immediately.  The fact is, if all teachers were to continue to stay the course of best practice implementation and focus on strong classroom instruction each day, the results are not additional, but exponential in a student’s learning.  In the recent Phi Delta Kappan article, “Seven ways to kill RTI,” author Brandi Noll shares that, “Thirty minutes of intervention [such as tutoring] can’t make up for poor classroom instruction during the other five to six hours of the school day.”

As we enter the final weeks of school, with our summative assessments on the horizon, it’s imperative that we all stay strong and focused on our classroom instruction and respond appropriately to the data we gather.  Our students count on us to guide them strongly to the finish line.  There are no quick fixes to student achievement.  It takes hard work and focused effort.  Together, we can all provide instruction – and interventions – that will make a difference for a child.

Week 28 – A Look Ahead

This week we have Parent/Teacher Conferences.  Please make sure all guests sign in to the attendance office and are wearing a visitors badge.  Make sure to keep record of your conferences on the form and turn that in to the Mrs. Fry prior to leaving on Friday.

Monday – Safety Assembly at 1:40 (adjusted schedule)

Friday – 3 hour early out (all students and staff)

~Excellence is a journey not a destination.~

All images available CC on Flickr: “Myrtle Station” by Яick Harris’ photostream; “Impatience” by mdezemery’s photostream.

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