Hello Gardner Community,

Today, all of the LADS’ teachers are using this day without students to professionally develop and learn how to better support students. Together, we will learn about a new math data protocol, reading and writing toolkits, student engagement, design thinking, checking for understanding, and so much more! This is also a day when teachers get together with teachers from other schools and share best practices. We always feel refreshed after such a day of recharging and get excited to apply what we learned. I hope your day off from school will also be as refreshing.

Teacher Walkthroughs

Speaking of professionally developing, I must brag for a paragraph or two. This week, after a couple of years of prepping, a team of amazing GB teachers conducted “Teacher Walkthroughs.” A group of nine teachers and myself divided into the roles of the observers and the observed. We met several times leading up to our big day to prep and talk about the “why,” the “how,” the “when,” and everything else we could think of to make the team feel comfortable. We agreed on a protocol and a focus for the walkthroughs (student engagement), I ordered a handful of substitute teachers for those teachers who were going to observe, and with clipboards in hand- away we went!

Observations are a professional development tool that our GB teachers have embraced and are excited about practicing. We have wondered about how to use them with each other (rather than just for administrators to evaluate), talked about if we could really do this, and now GB teachers have actually experienced the value of seeing excellent teaching first-hand...or having their first-rate teaching validated by their peers. We walked through primary to 6th-grade classrooms and saw ELA and Math lessons. This takes trust, professionalism, growth mindset, and definitely a sense of humor! As a group, we came together after the walkthroughs and reflected on the process and what we saw. I cannot say enough what this did for us as a team and how much we are looking forward to doing it again and broadening it to our entire teaching staff. I share this with you because I want you to know how hard our teachers work, how passionate they are about their craft of teaching, and how much they want to do what is best for our students. I am so very honored to work with this team of educators.

Happy Friday,

Nadia Oskolkoff

https://www.gardnerbullis.org/

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