Monday Marzano Madness MMM

The faculty and leadership of Myakka River Elementary will be fully engaged in monthly, structured, grade level professional learning activities that focus on instructional practices to increase student engagement. Admin will provide coaching and feedback to faculty during frequent walk-throughs about instructional practices focused on student engagement.

Charlotte county public schools adopted the Marzano elements 5 years ago to provide a framework for best instructional practices in the classroom.  Recently, Kristina and I attended a refresher Marzano professional development offered to all administrators.  Through this PD, I was re-certified and Kristina was certified with inter-rater reliability of the Marzano feedback tool.  The Marzano elements have not changed and we would like to revisit these elements in an effort to focus on instructional practices that will increase student engagement and therefore increase student achievement.  We understand the importance of providing you with expectations and will provide you with a reminder of what we will be looking for when we visit your classrooms.  Our role is to clearly communicate expectations and provide support so that all of you can be successful. 

After attending this morning’s principal meeting, reflecting on last week’s PPC meeting, and having several discussions with Kristina, we have decided that we want to postpone coming into your classrooms for formal observations until after the Winter Holidays.  We apologize for any inconvenience or added stress this may have caused, but we want to provide you with this time to review the expectations.  We know that there are several of you who already have observations scheduled, and we would be happy to visit your classrooms during that time to collect data using the CCPS expectations tool.  Please let us know if you would still like us to come in during that time.  We will need to reschedule the formal evaluation starting in January.   Our goal is to offer information related to these expectations through our Monday Morning Messages and Wednesday Morning Meetings.  We want to give you enough information so that you will be successful and comfortable when we come in for your formal observations.  We will continue to do frequent walk-throughs and will collect information and provide you with feedback.  If we are able to score any of the elements during these walk-throughs we will begin to collect that information on the CCPS google form.  This way, when we do come in for your formal observations, you will not have to worry about hitting all of the elements, since we hope to have several scored before that time.  During your preconference appointment, we can use this time to look at the elements that we have already scored and make a plan for how we will meet the additional elements or increase your current rating.  Please keep in mind that this process for continuous improvement is an ongoing process and not intended to be done with only one observation.  Similar to your classrooms, we want to provide you with a safe learning environment where you are comfortable expanding your skill sets.  We hope to minimize the threats as well as provide ample amounts of reinforcing feedback as you perform closer and closer to the expected levels of performance. 

To help us dig deeper into the CCPS expectations tool, we have purchased several additional resources from Marzano that we will pull information from to share with all of you.  If you would like to look at the resources in more depth, we will have them available to check out from our office for anyone who is interested.  We encourage you to look at the specific element rubrics that include the teacher and student evidence and desired effect of these elements.  This will help you gain a deeper understanding of what the expectations are in relation to these elements.  We want you to pay close attention to the applying rating of the elements.  The difference between the developing and applying rating is the monitoring component of the desired effect of the majority of the class.  This means that there is evidence that 51% of your students are meeting the desired effect of the element.  Our role in this process is to report what we see and hear in the classroom.  We may prompt discussions by asking questions that will require you to reflect on instructional practices that were taking place during our visits.   Please understand that ultimately it is up to you, the individual teacher, to grow as an instructional leader.  Your emphasis on Domain 1, classroom strategies and behaviors, will have the most direct effect on student performance.  We are here to support you and coach you along the way.