As our school site continues on our journey of evaluating our grading practices (see my previous blog post for more details), I am excited to share more interactive resources that can be used for professional development at your site! In the previous blog post, I shared an activity that challenged teachers to evaluate their grading practices through a self-assessment. Now that teachers have gone through this process, it is important to begin the hard work of trying to brainstorm and establish common goals. To start this process, our school site leadership team met and determined three areas of importance when establishing common grading practices:

• Grading Scale
  • Example: 0-100, A-F, 4 Point Scale, Etc.
• Late Work
  • Example: Is late work allowed? What’s your policy?
• Categories & Weights
  • Example: What is more important – the task or learning? Do you weight your grades?

As a school site, our goal is to try to create common goals for grading practices across our PLC’s and, in some areas, on a schoolwide level. We are trying to start small by focusing on these three areas and PLC’s and, hopefully, growing them over time. As an example, starting with PLC’s or departments is already a huge task. Trying to establish all of these goals on a sitewide level could be a much larger task that may take some time. Overall, our goal is to allow our leadership team to help guide the focus of these conversations and where they hope that we should go as we deep dive into our grading practices.

To help us understand our common goals across PLC’s, we developed two activities that I will share below. As mentioned above, we are starting in PLC’s and that is how I will reference our process. However, you could certainly replace PLC’s with department, grade level, or even schoolwide. It is totally up to you and your site to decide what is best!

1.) Brainstorming Common Goals

In this activity, PLC’s will meet together to simply start brainstorming and thinking about these three categories and where they hope to go in the future. Think of it like a brain dump. There is no need to have all your questions answered or decisions made. Simply take the time to have a discussion with your PLC and record your thoughts. After the PLC’s record their thoughts and ideas, challenge them to view the other slides (based on subject area) to view other ideas and/or add comments and questions.

We have already completed this activity with our PLC’s and I absolutely loved the conversations that we observed and the ideas that were recorded. I was so impressed with the time and deep-dive our teachers took into evaluating their grading practices and attempting to start the process of establishing common goals.

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2.) Establishing Common Goals

After PLC’s have had the opportunity to brainstorm, challenge them to begin the hard work of narrowing their focus and establishing common goals. This is the real meat and potatoes of creating cohesive grading process across PLC’s (or departments, grade level, etc).

In this activity, you will once again see our three focus areas. Each slide represents one focus area and asks several questions to help PLC’s narrow down their common goals for their grading practices. By the end of this activity, the goal is for PLC’s to have a strong idea of what their PLC-wide focus will be for grading.

If you choose to make a copy of this activity and want to include all of your PLC’s, simply make a copy of the three slides multiple times and assign certain slides to certain PLC’s.

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I am going to be 100% transparent that this is a huge undertaking for our school site and the end goals are still being determined as we go through this process. Hopefully, if you find yourself in similar conversations at your school site, these activities can help frame and guide your conversations.

As always, drop any comments and/or questions below!

I’m going to be honest. This post is literally popped into my brain about 5 minutes ago. It wasn’t pre-planned. It wasn’t carefully lined out. It wasn’t something I have been thinking about for weeks.

Instead, this post is completely spontaneous and unfiltered. So, let’s see how this goes.

Times are a little crazy right now. I think we all know this. COVID-19 is ruling our lives and our minds at the moment. It’s the only thing that everyone is talking about. It’s dictating how we think, shop and interact with other humans. It’s making people paranoid and afraid. People are panicked and living in a state of fear. I’m not saying that it isn’t unwarranted, it’s just simply a fact.

And about five minutes ago, I started thinking…The kids are watching us. 

I’m not just talking about my students or my own children, I am talking about all of our students and all of our children. I’m not just talking about myself or other educators, I am talking about all adults. I’m talking about the entire country – the entire world.

All of the kids are watching us right now. They are watching how we react in these times, whether we are calm or panicked. They are watching how we treat each other, whether it is with kindness or selfishness. They are watching how we behavior on social media, whether it is with obsession or reflection.

The kids are watching everything that is happening right now because it is such a monumental moment in history. It’s a situation that most adults have never experienced. Yet, our students, our kids, are experiencing it during a very formative age. This means that the behaviors and attitudes that we model right now can have a lifetime impact on the kids that are around us.

We have to be the examples to them. We have to show them how to be calm in the storm. We have to show them how to treat others with kindness. We have to show them how to carefully reflect and make wise choices. We have to show them that we are all in this together. We have to teach them to be good humans.

I challenge you, as I have challenged myself, to reflect on what our kids are seeing through their eyes as they live through this situation. Because, quite frankly, they are watching everything we do.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. And, please, stay kind to one another.

Is anyone else looking around asking, “What the heck just happened?” Maybe it’s just me – but, man, it’s been a weird week. I’m not going to get into the conversation about COVID-19 and my personal beliefs or thoughts. At this point, none of that matters. It just doesn’t. What matters now is asking an important question. A question that has guided a lot of my thoughts this year:

Now what?

There’s so many things in our lives, or in education specifically, that can cause a lot of complications or frustrations. On a small level, it could be the day-to-day interactions with students that are unmotivated in the classroom. Or, it could be on a larger level where our country is slowly being shut down due to COVID-19. Either way, in these situations, people tend to want to talk about what is happening – what’s right, what’s wrong, personal beliefs and opinions, etc. It’s not bad to have those conversations. However, those conversations don’t matter if it doesn’t lead you to a solution.

So, here is the problem: Schools around the country are being shut down due to COVID-19.

Now what?

For some schools, there may be a short period of time where there is a “wait and see” how this plays out. However, if schools are shut down for a longer period of time…now what?

In response to my now what question in regards to school closures due to COVID-19, I have created a “Remote Learning Strategies” guidebook to support educators in structuring and organizing curriculum and learning activities for students. It’s still growing and developing but the foundation is there.

In this guidebook, I have shared the following:

• Top 5 Strategies for Remote Learning
• Tech Resources
• Helpful Websites & articles

It’s a simple guidebook with easy-to-implement ideas for all ages. There is definitely a tech focus that will be a great support to school districts that are 1-1 but you will also find some helpful articles for non-tech activities.

The best part, as always, this resource is FREE for you to use and modify for your school and/or district! Click on the image below to access to the curriculum and/or click on the view/copy links below:

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If you have any additional resources that would be beneficial to add to this document, please reply in the comments below, message me on Twitter, or send me an email at meagan.elaine.kelly@gmail and I would love to add your resources to this document.

Take care and stay healthy!

Years ago, I read a book called How Full Is Your Bucket while I was attending graduate school for my administrative services credential. Although it wasn’t technically an “education” book, it was probably one of my favorite books of my master’s degree program. In this book, the author talked about the “magic ratio” of positive and negative moments that make up a person’s day. Essentially, the ratio is a 5:1 where it takes five positive moments to combat the one negative moment. Five to one…This means that four positive moments are outweighed by one negative moment in the day. It means that only at five positive moments do we break even with the one negative moment.

The magic ratio has been weighing heavily on my heart and mind this week.

I absolutely love my job but, I would be lying if I didn’t say that there were a lot of negative moments in my role as a Vice Principal of discipline. It’s just a simple fact that I don’t always get to see the students at their best moments. Although this is a fact, I have found that I love this role and forming relationships with some of our most struggling students. It’s amazing to see the progress that some of our students are making as we go throughout the year. Yet, it can be easy to fall into the trap of the magic ratio and allowing that 5:1 ratio to dictate the outcome of my day.

I remember thinking this way in the classroom, too. Perhaps it was reviewing the results of an assessment and seeing that 30 of my students performed well, while 5 of my students  struggled. It could have been the times where I reviewed a note from a substitute to find that four class periods were amazing but one class was disrespectful or off-task. The 5:1 ratio still held true in these situations. I couldn’t focus on the positive and all of the amazing things that happened that day. I could only focus on the negatives.

While there is a lot of research to support the idea of the magic ratio for positive and negative emotions, I’ve decided that I want to actively break that ratio into nonexistence. I want to be more mindful of focusing on the positives, rather than negatives – because guess what? There are a lot more positives in the day than negatives and those should carry the most weight.

While I have been thinking about this a lot lately, I was surprised to find that this was apparently on the minds of many people in our district. In fact, our district leadership meeting this week focused on this very idea, specifically on how we can create lasting positive change in our schools and lives. To help us start to develop sustainable and lasting change, our district leadership was taken through a series of videos and activities. These activities were short and simple ways to create more positivity…which has inspired me to create an activity for you to share with your students or staff, too!

Based upon some of my reflections, plus our amazing district leadership meeting, I created a HyperDoc that could be used with either staff or students to inspire positive thinking and change on your campus. Again, I have to reiterate that a majority of these activities were completely stolen from my own district, so major props to them for bringing great PD to us!

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(The easiest way to share this with staff for them to create their own link is by sharing the “copy” link above.)

As I move forward, I am hoping to put more of these “five actions” into, well, action in my own life on a daily basis. I do believe that it help defeat the magic ratio and bring more positivity to myself and those around me. There are so many positive things to focus on in our lives and in our careers – we just have to be more mindful about it!

How do you support your staff or students in creating and developing a positive mindset? Share in the comments below!

I’ve been sitting on this post for three months or so. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to write it or not because I often worry about how things will be read. Will my message be received the way I intend? Will I come off too harsh? Too hypocritical? Too egotistical? Too much of a know-it-all? I’ve gone back and forth on it. But, here we are. The words are on my screen and I’m going to give it a go.

Some of my friends may have noticed that I’ve taken a bit of a social media break in the last few months. It certainly timed up with when I started my new job but that wasn’t really the reason. I’m definitely busier than I used to but, again, that’s not the reason that I’ve stepped back from social media. It’s an entirely different reason.

I became discouraged with Twitter a few months ago. As the new year was getting ready to start, I watched as many teachers shared their ideas. They were excited for the new year. Excited to try new things. Excited to meet their students. Yet, there was an entirely different group of people that existed on Twitter. There was a group of educators that were consistently and harshly ripping into these other educators. Sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. I watched as people responded to posts with negativity and judgment. I watched as people wrote about their child’s teacher and/or other educators that they know and how they felt that their ideas were simple and worthless. I watched as this amazing professional ripped into each other because they didn’t think other people’s ideas were good enough.

And it broke my heart.

Education is an incredibly difficult career. Whether you are a teacher, administrator, instructional coach, or classified staff – it’s a tough career. The last thing that we need to do is break each other down.

As these thoughts were going through my mind, I remember seeing a poster that was left in my office when I moved into it. At the bottom of the poster the words, “Dude. Be Nice.” were written on it. It was completely random and entirely fitting that I saw these words at nearly the same time. This poster, and these three words, have inspired my three challenges for you this year. These are three, simple challenges to uplift and strengthen one another – and I hope you take them seriously.

Dude. Be Nice

Our world could use a little more niceness. Scratch that – our world could use a lot more niceness. People are tough on one another and it rarely comes from a place of trying to help each other grow. Don’t get me wrong, some people come off critical but they are really trying to challenge others to grow. Unfortunately, I truly believe that these situations are rare.

As you talk with others, think about the way that your words would sound to you if you were on the receiving end of it. If someone isn’t teaching to the caliber that you feel is appropriate, you can still be nice and help them grow. In fact, it will actually create a better rapport between you and the other educators because they will see you as someone that they can trust. Someone they can come to without fear of judgment and criticism. Someone that they can come to for constructive feedback – but someone that still has their back.

Every time I finish working with students in the discipline office I tell them, “Now, go be a nice human.” They usually get a chuckle out of it but I mean every word. It’s my challenge to you, too. Be a nice human.

Dude. Be Transparent.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly aware of the lack of transparency in education. Everyone wants to appear perfect. They want to look as if they have it all together.

News flash: No one is that perfect and no one has it all together. If anything, a lack of transparency is death to effective collaboration and growth.

A lack of transparency creates a lack of trust. Without trust, people will not be willing to take risks, share openly and grow together. It’s incredibly important that educators understand that we are all in this together. It’s important that they understand that we all make mistakes. It’s important they understand that we all have so much to learn. And yes, it’s important that they all understand that we are not perfect.

My challenge to you is to share transparently, trust one another and grow together.

Dude. Be Encouraging.

Years ago, my husband and I took the “love languages” test and my love language was “words of affirmation”. A few years later, I realized that there was actually a “professional” (or work) version of this book. I didn’t bother reading it because I knew it would come out the same. Words of affirmation have always meant the world to me.

I would imagine that a large number of educators thrive on words of affirmation and encouragement. It doesn’t take much. A simple compliment on an awesome lesson that was observed or even a simple “thank you” for something that was done. Words are more powerful than we think and I truly believe they can be a powerful voice in our schools.

As you go through your week, my challenge to you is to encourage the people that you work with on a daily basis. Give encouragement for those that are finding success – but definitely for those that are struggling, too. It doesn’t have to be much. Just something to let them know that you are in this with them.

If you had to pick your “Dude. Be _________” statement – what would it be? Share in the comments below!