LCHS Friday Focus

Happy Friday! First off a big thank you to Jill Brown for leading our professional development on Wednesday. I think the activities she came up with really helped reinforce the 4 elements of effective lessons CIA presented the week before.  Since we have had two in-services on these elements of effective lessons, Kyle and I are going to make an effort to get into classes at the beginning of the period. So far, most of my walk throughs have occurred after the class has started and is into the lesson. We have now hit the midterm and we have parent/teacher conferences on October 3 and 8. This would be a good time to set up PASS plan meetings with parents. Remember if you do set up a meeting, let Amy Davis know so she can mark that time off on the appointment calendar.  During advisory on Monday we will have a Sophomore meeting in the little theater, followed by a senior meeting to go over graduation. We also have an evacuation drill on Thursday at 2:00 pm. I will be gone ...

Happy Friday and Happy Homecoming! Even though I missed one day, I think the week went pretty smoothly. Midterm is Tuesday next week. Make sure all grades are updated so Beth and Amy can run midterms. I just wanted to take a moment to discuss our PD plan and the direction we are heading. For those of you that were here prior to our Iowa Core Implementation plan in-services, you will remember we spent lots of time doing literacy and differentiated instruction in-services. The idea behind differentiated instruction is to give students what they need. We also started to dabble in the PLC framework. In that framework, we had four questions that we asked ourselves. 1. What do we want all students to learn? 2. How will we know they have learned it? 3. How will respond when learning has not occurred? 4. How will we respond when learning already has occurred?  We have been working on question 1 for quite some time now. We are now pushing to question 2, 3, and 4. The MTSS process will...

Happy Friday!   Not only is it Friday the 13th, but it is also a full moon. I will be gone on Monday at a Perkins meeting in Ankeny. If you need a sub on Monday morning, please call Kyle. When I was going around on Wednesday to the various groups it was good to hear the various conversations taking place on curriculum and the essential learnings. Hopefully we will get our data back from the ISASP soon so we can start to look at that. They may influence us on what we think is essential.  Next week is homecoming, that means the craziness will be in full swing. Please take part in the dress up days, but continue to lead the students in class. Also, please be present in the halls between class to keep the craziness down to a minimum. We will be getting out at 11:42 on Friday. The coronation/pep rally will start at 1:00 followed by the parade. At 5:00 pm there will be a ribbon cutting at the new stadium, followed by the tailgate at 5:30 pm, introduction of royalty at 6:1...

Happy Friday!   I hope everyone had a great week. For only having 4 days this week, it sure felt longer to me. I think it is because we try to jam 5 days worth of work into the 4 days.  I want to reinforce the emphasis on if you see students doing something they shouldn't, please address it right then and there. Quite a few students commented on the lack of consistency on how rules were enforced by the staff. When we turn our back on something we send the message that the behavior is acceptable to the others that observed it. This will only cause an increase in the behaviors we don't want. Once you have addressed the behavior, you can always follow up with an email to Kyle or myself and we can talk with the student as well to reinforce our expectations.  CIA would like to get feedback on how advisory went teaching the social and academic skills in the powerpoint. Please let one of those members know your feedback. CIA members are Sherri Permswaran, Lori Carter, ...