2015 February PASO Magazine

WILLIAMS from page 24
If you look at good instruction
in classroom, it really gets
back to the key components
about a caring adult, first,
and most importantly, you have
to have a caring adult in the
classroom, which I believe we
have many great and caring
adults.
The second is creating a positive
culture and environment
where students feel that they
can trust and they can be innovative
and value those.
And the third, is the best and
most effective, is the effective
teacher being able to differentiate
instruction based on student
needs on a daily basis which is
going to vary and change based
on your classrooms.
I was talking to new teachers
two days ago, and I said, I don’t
know about you guys but I’ve
delivered what I felt was a great
lesson to a first period class and
it went very well and I prepared
and designed it. Then, in my
fourth period class, I delivered
the same lesson and it was a flop.
I’m thinking, gosh, I thought I
had this down! What I realized
is that I learn differently than
you and you learn differently
than me and how do we really
focus on the student data and
the student need and then deliver
the instruction for that.
You’re going to have your Common
Core line instruction as
you go through, but how we vary
that so we get these kids actively
engaged and making it rigorous,
yet relevant to these students,
is what it has to be. And rigor
will continue to be built in every
organization because we can
always get better as we go.
But making it relevant and
looking at student engagement
portions of it, that’s why it’s
so important for us on goal
2 to be able to recruit and retain
our highly qualified staff but
put our commitment back
in development and getting
feedback instead of putting
our top down and saying this
is what we’re going to be
trained on.
We did a survey Monday to
get feedback from teachers on
areas of focus we can provide
professional development in. So
we went in and took that then
we did a menu of professional
development for the first time
at the high school with the entire
district. So we had key areas
that they would be able to select
to go to that they felt would enhance
their teaching or knowledge.
It was a great model and I
like that.
I’ve been in a top down leadership
organization where it’s
really hard to get buy-in from
top down leadership. But when
you get feedback and you begin
to collaborate on that…you
have higher levels of trust and
enthusiasm and you designate
what people need.
If I feel like I’ve mastered how
to implement and illuminate for
student data, do I need to sit
there for two hours? Because
I’m not going to get a lot out of
it. But if I can go into another
menu item that you have for
training that may give me some
better ideas to collaborate with
other grade level teachers and
enhance my ability to do so…
let’s do that.
PRM: Are student enrollment
numbers still declining?
Implementing any attendance
incentive programs you imagine
to overcome transfers to
Templeton, Charter schools and
such?
WILLIAMS: Yes, one thing
we looked at, and this was part
of the budget pieces, was the
student attendance incentive
program. When I began to look
at it, a baseline expectation for
effective school districts would
be a minimum of 95% attendance
on a daily basis in your
schools. I looked through all
the data on daily attendance,
and employee attendance and
I looked at different arenas of
what we did for incentives for
students and whatnot.
One of our challenges was
kids would go through a whole
year and then we would provide
them incentives but some of
those kids would have already
left that school and gone to a
new school. So, we reshifted
Please see WILLIAMS page 28
Happy New Year!
Plan now for 2015.
26 Paso Robles Magazine, February 2015