December is a crazy month to plan anything involving Catholic teachers--between the awful weather, the concerts and the Advent activities at school...whew! However, the team project team manged to meet on Thursday the 18th.
Once again, I drove to Formosa for a day of hard, but rewarding work with Cheryl and Francine.
We began with a lovely recap of all we had successfully managed to do so far. Not only did we hold 3 full day PD sessions for our teachers, but it went smoothly and was FUN! In addition we managed to type up and "publish" the anchors for the writing tasks.
Next, we clarified the upcoming timelines. You see, we foolishly have to do this whole process 2 MORE TIMES before we submit our project to the ministry. That's a total of 6 more PD sessions to plan. Yikes! Then we have to type it all up and get it "publication" worthy. Did I say: Yikes?
However, we dove right in. As usual Cheryl had our minutes from our last meeting, our critical path, and our paperwork all ready to role. Our "to do" was long so we prioritized. Then we split up for a few hours.
Cheryl wrote our letters to each principal and teacher, giving them a heads up about upcoming dates and timelines. I revised the rubric with input from Francine. The teachers had given us some positive and negative feedback about the rubric during our last PD sessions. I wanted to be sure to incorporate their input into a new rubric. Francine wrote various school board officials about our wants, needs, desires and hopes for February's PD sessions. She also helped us to keep the Board writing plan in focus and to re-think a few mistakes we made last time.
In the afternoon, we had to write the prompts for each grade for the February tasks. This actually went much smoother than last time. I guess these things just get easier with experience. This time around we chose not to send out packages to each teacher and principal. Instead we created PDF files and emailed them to each person. MUCH, MUCH quicker!
Last but not least, we began to look at what we really wanted to accomplish during the teaching portions of the PD session. These are the things that give teachers a break from marking student work in their teams, but still provide good learning experiences. What Ministry documents, monographs and videos did we feel our French Immersion teachers would learn from? Did we want to practise marking running records? (I got out-voted on that one!). Did we need to look at the Norms for Moderation again? Did we want to divide the groups up the same? Did we want to look at Carmel Crevola's focus sheets? Did we want to show our teachers the new benchmarks that the Board has decided on? You see, all these things are critical and time-consuming. Honestly, there was so much we could have put into our PD sessions, but we have to remain focused on teacher moderation and building a solid final resource.
All in all, it was a busy but fun day. Lots of amazing food too! We had lovely snacks regularly delivered by children (Christmas presents for Cheryl or Francine), hot chocolate delivered by Student council (part of their fundraiser for a third world school), leftovers reheated in a microwave for lunch, many cups of tea, and even some homemade fudge delivered by a Mom. Gotta love rural Catholic schools!
Oh..one more thing before I go...In Grey and Bruce Counties, Feb is notorious for "snow days". These are days when roads are closed and school are closed too. One year we had 8 snow days! Of course our next PD sessions are in Feb. Anyways, the entire day we kept thinking and saying "Well, if there's a snow day..." or "What if there's a snow day...." or "That timeline might be short if we get two snow days..." It's too funny! I bet the Ministry of Ed people in Toronto never have to think about snow days when they plan PD!
Thanks Cheryl and Francine for another great day.
