Winter 2024

Dear Educators,

Welcome 2024!  As we step into the promise of a new year, we hope this message finds you rejuvenated and ready for the exciting journey that lies ahead. January marks not just the beginning of a fresh year but also an opportunity to renew our commitment to fostering a love for leading, teaching, and learning. 🎉

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the significant milestones that have marked our journey this past year: considering our individual and collective professional growth, our personal growth, the meaningful relationships and connections that we have created.  Let’s celebrate our successes and congratulate ourselves for always being willing to grow as skillful leaders and teachers expanding our capacity to improve teaching and learning in our schools. 

Some notable successes that we would like to highlight and bring to your attention:

1. Statewide implementation of a new teacher evaluation system, DTGSS

2. DTGSS credentialing training

        28 cohorts from Spring 2021-Winter 2023

        758 credentialed school leaders 

3. Studying Skillful Teaching (SST) course

       24 cohorts from Spring 2021-Winter 2023

       650 participants

       3 Delaware educators are trained as trainers

4. DTGSS Professional Learning Visits

      Conducted visits to 16 LEAs and 44 schools from September 2023-Winter 2023

      An impressive 94% reported visits as very or extremely helpful.

      Notably, 56% highlighted the debriefs' tips for notetaking as the most beneficial aspect.

 

In this newsletter edition, we'll delve into strategies for notetaking and evidence collection, providing you with essential tips to ensure the feedback is grounded in actual practice, to determine the impact on student learning, to identify what is most useful to bring up in a conversation, to promote meaningful feedback, and to support the summative rating.

We also shine a spotlight on a group of educators from Capital School District who commit to building coherence among systems of support between leadership teams so that time spent in classrooms and feedback to teachers is used more effectively and efficiently.

 

Thank you!

 

This month we celebrate the Capital team! 

Victoir Cahoon, Assistant Superintendent

Cathy Schreiber, Director of Elementary Curriculum, Instruction, & Assessment

Gene Montano, Director of Secondary Curriculum, Instruction, & Assessment

Joseph Evans, Principal, Middle School of Innovation

Sherrie Sudler, Principal, Middle School of Excellence

Shani Benson, Principal, North Dover Elementary School

Jennifer Christman, Principal, East Dover Elementary School

These leaders have cultivated school environments characterized by respect, care, and compassion for self, others, and the school community. They diligently strive to ensure that every student engages with grade-level texts and employs textual evidence in their writing. Purposefully fostering partnerships and collaborative networks between district and building administrators as well as curriculum and instructional specialists, their shared objective is to promote skillful teaching and enhance student learning.  Congratulations, team!

Join us for an insightful interview featuring Wendee Bull from Indian River School District and James Doyle from New Castle County Vo-Tech District as they discuss the impact of the Delaware Teacher Growth and Support System on their learning and teaching practices.

Direct link: https://youtu.be/qtqxNRRYY6k 

Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom: How to Use it Rather than Run From It

By: Jon Saphier, Evelyn Ford-Connors, & Leah Levine

"AI is here to stay, and thoughtfully used, it will be a boon to teaching and learning." In a recent New York Times article (8/24/23), Kevin Roose observed that our starting point should be the assumption that 100% of our students will use AI. We would be naive to think otherwise. With this in mind, we teachers should first dig in to fully understand the tool and its many uses, and then to be thoughtful about incorporating it into our classrooms. We must provide students with clear guidelines while also building in opportunities for us to reflect on what is and is not working, and then to adjust our practices accordingly.

Read more here.  Blog: Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom

From Notes to Insights: Mastering the Art of Analyzing Classroom Evidence

Reflection

How do I analyze the evidence and determine which indicator it aligns? Do I review the evidence line by line and assign tags, or do I identify common themes for a summary?

Recommended strategy for analyzing evidence

The strategy involves identifying themes within the evidence that align with specific descriptors, and subsequently associating these themed descriptors, along with the evidence, to an indicator.

What is the purpose of this type of strategy?

This process serves two purposes: (a) it enhances clarity of the evidence for the teacher, and (b) it contributes to a more objective assessment during the summative evaluation.

 

Additional examples of recommended evidence analysis

What are the steps for executing this strategy?

Review your notes to identify evidence that aligns with descriptors or indicators on the framework.

Reorganize the evidence so that similar notes are grouped together. You can use bullet points and may need to cut/copy and paste evidence.

Craft a sentence or phrase that broadly characterizes the evidence.

Tag the entire 'chunk' of evidence to one of the nine indicators.