Academic Instruction Advisory Team Notes Thursday, August 20, 2020

Our agenda

• Social Emotional Learning sub group report out
• Engagement and Instructional Delivery report out
• Next steps, work products and deadlines

I.    Links to web sites that were posted in the chat.

Google Classroom Cheat Sheet (Author: Kasey Bell)

h ttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1SyB-TUhxaydMa5WYXAZs0ECnVylJSEfV/view?usp=sharing

Teacher Guide book to on-line learning (Michigan Virtual Manual)

h ttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1WQtQr-UMpBfbyOIqFZ6ppnrQ_19dEEqQ/view?usp=sharing

Corwin: Resources for teaching On-line (Corwin a Sage Publishing Company)

h ttps://us.corwin.com/en-us/nam/online-teaching-toolkit

CASEL: is committed to advancing equity and excellence in education through social and emotional learning

https://casel.org/

II.    Social Emotional Learning Sub-Group: Report Out

1. Continued Interest from the team members: How students will be introduced to their new classrooms. The principals from each building took videos of classrooms and other rooms within their building.
2. Continued discussions to include Middle Schoolers with SEL. They will look at topics and how the teachers can incorporate them into the curriculum.
3. Continued discussions will occur around including high school students. One suggestion was homeroom: however, homeroom is a time for “housekeeping” information. One thought: on Wednesday, when teachers are receiving PD, social workers, psychologists, and counselors run a SEL group.
4. Tartan Social Emotional Playbook: This playbook is well-thought out, organized, sections for k-12 teachers, and includes great links, resources and activities for SEL. All members did a fabulous job creating and searching for materials. It was a team effort keeping the children in mind!

What is Social-Emotional Learning?

Social and emotional learning (SEL) enhances students’ capacity to integrate skills, attitudes, and behaviors to deal effectively and ethically with daily tasks and challenges.

There are five core competencies that can be taught in many ways across many settings. Many educators and researchers are also exploring how best to assess these competencies. What are the five Core Competencies?

The SEL Playbook discusses each of the five Core Competencies. There are links to PD: with a column addressing definition and skill for each competency.

The SEL Playbook offers Social Emotional Learning Resources.This section offers activities and strategies that educators may use to provide opportunities for students to continue to develop the five core social emotional competencies. These activities could be used for all grade levels if modified. There are many excellent activities with the document.

The SEL Playbook offers resources such as: websites, articles and social stories.

The SEL Playbook is a useful tool that could be a growing resource.

1. The sub-group will meet one more time to discuss feedback and maybe to add more information to the document.

III.     Engagement and Instructional Delivery Report Out

1. The team is working on two projects.
   1. List of Approved Tools Document: This is a document containing a list of 15 tools available that the district approves for use. Team members are adding advantages and disadvantages of each tool to the document daily. Not all tools have comments added to the advantage and disadvantage section of the document. This is a work in progress. (If we need to combine the MS and HS sheets to condense information that will be done at a later date.)

2. Best Practices Document: Continued information will be added to this document. The team is adding information relating to three categories: Digital Engagement, Feedback, and Communication. Our objective is to think about our thinking by creating learning environments where students are engaged. This document is not completed. Team members are adding information daily. The team will continue to work on the document next week at our weekly meeting.

1. Questions and Comments:
   1. Are there plans for peer groups at the elementary grade level? Yes, when we planned out the master schedule we scheduled a share time. Principals, social workers, even teachers could make connections with students. This could look like a greet, special area lessons, or activity that encourage teacher to student connections and student to student connections.
   2. As the year unfolds will be reach out and offer ongoing feedback opportunities. These opportunities will be in the form of a survey. This survey will encourage communication: what is working or what challenges are we facing.
   3. The two committees will continue work throughout the school A suggestion was to add a monthly meeting to add more information to the documents.
   4. PD will be available to staff focused on virtual learning.