On Tuesday, January 3, the faculty and staff headed back to work at NRMS. It was hard to believe our winter break had come to an end and it was ready to hit the road running, as second semester is always filled with test prep, end of year activities and this year, we add in completing our 100 hours of professional learning for our STEM certification, as well as packing up our classrooms to move into our new building. Needless to say, it's going to be jammed packed with activity!
We were broken up into our Falcon Way houses. It was a nice change to sit with those we don't usually interact with during the day. Our first focus of our time together was to reflect on the past semester of Falcon Way and Reboot our Mindset as we begin the second semester.
Individually we filled out a quick questionnaire about ourselves.
- What did you do or enjoy the most over Christmas break?
- What are your favorite hobbies?
- What are your pet peeves?
- What is one goal you'd like to accomplish during your lifetime?
- Describe yourself using three words.
As members of Courage house, we came together to focus on the celebrations of Falcon Way and areas of improvement. I loved how if we had a concern, we had to have a solution! To share our celebrations with others in the room, we used the web-based program, Mentimeter. Given a code, we we were able to list 3 words or phrases that summarized our celebrations. Below is the wordle that was created by our staff.
Each group was given 2 pieces of chart paper: Concerns --> Suggestions & Brilliant Ideas. I of course encourage our group to focus on the Brilliant Ideas, as this would continue the positive energy. As a house, we loved the PJ fundraiser hosted by Mrs. Cherry's (@feliciacherry) Falcon Way members and the #wheelchairchallenge, hosted by Mrs. Peltier's (@mrspeltierNRMS) Falcon Way members.
Moving onto our Concerns --> Suggestions provided a consistent theme of time and knowing our students amongst our House. Collaboration began and solutions are ready to be implemented when we meet on Monday! I must say I was quite proud of my fellow housemates as they came up with an idea to mix up their classes, allowing for groups to work together on a common goal. As a staff we participated in a gallery walk, looking at each other's ideas. The ideas shared on the posters will be taken into consideration as we move forward with the implementation of Falcon Way!
What I hope that others will take away from this part of our time together are the various instructional strategies we participated in as students, rather than teachers. All provided awesome ways to model being solution seekers, rather than problem finders!
Our ELA teachers shared with us the best reading strategies for all content areas. Led by Kylie Norrel (@knorrell7) & Katherine Harvell (@mrs_harvell), we were given an article Model Behavior: The Mathematics of Juggling We were guided through the processes of reading and analyzing text, as our learners do in their ELA classes.
The one comment that resonated with me, as a math teacher, was when other ELA teachers mentioned that the only reading that happens in math classes is with word problems. This made me cringe knowing there are so many articles out there that pertain to math in the real world (just like the article we worked with today!). I couldn't help but smile towards my teaching partner because of the learning that was about to happen in Room 27 over the next 3 days. It was time to bust the myth of only reading word problems in math!
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What did you take away from your first day back?
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