How great was it to have everyone back after Passover Break! Super great! A school without students is just a building…it is good to be back and headed towards the home stretch! The final quarter of school has begun…
And so,
I would like to begin my annual series of “Transparency Files” blog posts which begins with my own evaluation, soon moves to reveal the results of this year’s Parent Survey, follows with a discussion on this year’s standardized testing results and concludes with a conversation about next year’s faculty and schedule.
We are in that “evaluation” time of year! As Head of the Day School, I have the responsibility for performing the evaluation of staff and faculty each year. [As Head of Academy, I have the responsibility for performing evaluation of school heads each November.] Fittingly, they have an opportunity to do the same of me. Our annual Faculty Survey presents current teachers and staff with the opportunity to provide anonymous feedback of my performance as head of school. Please know that it is sent unedited to the Head Support & Evaluation Committee as part of their data collection for my evaluation.
If you want to see context, I invite you begin with last year’s blog post. This year’s self-evaluation is based on new goals for this year. You will not find a complete laundry list of my day to day responsibilities. Nor will you find my goals as Head of Academy. (I intend to reflect on my second year as Head of Galinsky Academy in an upcoming post.) Here, then, are selected components from my self-evaluation for the 2013-2014 MJGDS academic year:
Extend dedicated science instruction throughout the lower school of MJGDS.
Building upon one of our major accomplishments from last year was ensuring our students in the lower school (K-5) had the requisite amount of science instruction according national standards for science education. This year we hired our first-ever, full-time K-8 Science Instructor! Mrs. Jaffa has ably stepped into the shoes left behind by our long-time Middle School Science Teacher, Mrs. Burkhart, while beginning to create her own unique identity. And she has significantly raised the bar in our Lower School, ensuring that love of science begins at the youngest grades. “Science” is the “S” in “STEM” and we are pleased that it is becoming one of our strengths.
Whack-A-Haman
Our work with Jewish Interactive was a huge success! Students researched and gathered the Jewish content to be included in their game, developed a curriculum and learning objectives, scripted an instructional game design, and developed characters and graphics. Every step of the process was supported and guided by the team and educators at MJGDS and the Jewish Interactive team. We see this is an exciting new direction which ties together so much of what excites us about education – student ownership of learning, Jewish and General Studies integration, differentiated instruction, gaming theory, etc.
We hit our goal of over 1,000 downloads and are now dreaming new dreams!
Habits of Kindness
“Community of Kindness” made a great slogan and a lousy call to action. We all recognized the need to be more “kind” and to ensure that our community acted with increased “kindness” to all…but what exactly do you do?
The first strategic decision was to pull the initiative in-house (last year we worked in partnership with Jewish Family & Community Services) and give the position to a full-time employee with knowledge, experience and relationships that transcend the academy, and so we named Stephanie Teitelbaum as our Galinsky Academy Community of Kindness Coordinator.
To further answer that question and to provide us with a common vision, language and set of behaviors we turned to a well-researched set of habits, seven of them to be exact.
With a huge assist from Andrea Hernandez, who had been quietly encouraging this for at least five years, we went ahead and adopted and adapted The Leader in Me.
We began at Faculty Pre-Planning when we held a joint session of DuBow Preschool and Martin J. Gottlieb Day School Faculty introducing the big idea and how we plan to proceed. Teachers of similar ages and grades were led through brainstorming activities on how to incorporate the first two habits as it is our plan, beginning in September, to focus each month on one habit. [The Bernard and Alice Selevan Religious School and Makom Hebrew High came on board as they opened up.] We began introducing the “habit of the month” at assemblies led by our middle school students. Activities were grade and age appropriate and included stories, lessons and resources. Parents were able to find evidence of how the habits came to life on school websites, classroom blogs, and student blogfolios.
Student Advisory
This year at MJGDS, we implemented a new Advisory Program. Each student in Grades 4-8 was assigned a teacher or staff member to assist the student in achieving his/her academic and personal goals. The advisor is an advocate to address personal, spiritual, social, and academic issues for each child.
What are the benefits of a student advisor?
Advisory offers emotional support for students. Social networks at this age can be extremely difficult for children. The advisor will supply support in challenging social and academic situations. The advisor will also provide a system to help new students acclimate to our school.
The advisor is someone the student knows s/he can trust and talk to about his/her progress in school. Advisors will help promote self-esteem and security. The advisor will become an additional contact person for parents, increasing their involvement, which is linked to student achievement at all levels. Each advisor is responsible for particular students, and each student will report concerns to their assigned advisor.
Homework
We went through a thorough revision of our homework vision, philosophy, guidelines and are continuing an implementation conversation to ensure that what homework we do give is authentic, meaningful, and of appropriate length of time.
Those are just some highlights…as has been my custom, you will also get an honest look at my shortcomings when I incorporate data from the Faculty and Parent Surveys in upcoming posts. Additionally, I will be sharing the unedited version of my self-evaluation as well as the unedited version of their evaluation of me on our faculty ning. Hopefully it will spark further opportunities for conversation and growth.
