This was a week where students had fun while reinforcing their lessons of fairness and acceptance. Cari Land put together another meaningful No Place for Hate Week, with dress reflecting the daily message. Days included "Way Back Wednesday" and "Thankful Thursday", as seen in the pics. Most importantly, all were tied to dressing up and taking action every day. Let's keep lessons learned going Scotties! 
Staff also did some further work related to the Any Given Child creative classroom initiative. Sally Hunter, Kalene Guenther and I traveled over to Maplewood to discuss Year III planning with our McCallum Vertical Team elementary campuses, MindPop, and Greg Goodman of AISD Fine Arts Department. Though this was a tentative campus planning session, we are excited about continuing our meaningful connections with current arts partners, continuing to expand drama based instructional proficiency for our teachers, continuing to build community through out of school activities, and, looking ahead, increasing our capacity in media and visual arts tools and strategies. It's about keeping what we have and moving forward.
Tying into this planning session, nine HP teachers - a combination of grade level, special area, and special education - ended their week at UT's Winship Building for a full day DBI professional development. Katie Dawson, Lara Dossett, and Sarah Coleman of the Drama for Schools department facilitated the day and we came away with some concrete lesson planning accomplished. Much of the morning focused on a lesson around The Paper Bag Princess, with understanding and connections made through such strategies as artifact, narrative pantomime, machine (which was a very cool teacher-created dragon as seen below), scene work, and hot seat. Throughout, teachers explored engaging ways for students to create, analyze, synthesize, and translate/transfer information before, during, and after a lesson. In the afternoon's reflection, I was struck by several things in particular. One, that teachers should purposefully plan those emotional and physical moments in a lesson - high and low moments and when it is most appropriate to insert them. Second, transitions between the varied activities can be powerful teaching tools by themselves. Those transitional moments can be used for student reflection on character motivation, synthesis of information before moving to the next activity, and much more. And finally, how much of what we discussed during the day (all week in fact) connected to a lecture I attended by Dr. Sonia Nieto Wednesday evening. This AISD Educator Quality lecture, Honoring The Lives of All Students: Identity, Culture, and Language, centered around several points (valuing language, valuing culture, honoring families, service learning, and more), with a common thread throughout - the power of high quality teacher professional development. I left Friday's training thinking we accomplished this goal. Teachers built greater understanding of the why behind the what, were provided with a common vocabulary to share with all stakeholders, and most importantly, left with some concrete tools to use in their classrooms come Monday. A good end to a good week.
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| A living dragon in action! |
