Summer To Do List

 

Our school year ended on Monday and everyone I bump into keeps asking me what I’m going to do all summer. A lot actually! I’ll definitely be enjoying some days at the beach, nights at the drive in, vacations to DisneyWorld, New Jersey, and Bermuda, but there will also be a lot of schoolwork happening…

Professional Development 

• Data Coach Training – About 40 administrators and educators from my district elected to take part in this training sponsored by Research for Better Teaching (RBT) to learn how to “Unleash the Power of Collaborative Inquiry.” We will become data coaches and lead data teams this coming school year.
• Twitter Math Camp ’13 – Woot woot!
• Laying the Foundation Pre-Ap Training – I’ll be attending the Year 3 HS Math Training sponsored by the National Math and Science Initiative.
• How to Learn Math – An online course from Stanford Math Ed Professor Jo Boaler

Books to Read

• Teach Like A Pirate by Dave Burgess
• Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan William
• Invent to Learn by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager

Curriculum to Work On

• STEM Stuff – My team is meeting for a few days to debrief the past year, set up new norms, and most importantly, decide what we liked about the projects we did and what we want to change. The majority of our time will be spent editing project guidelines/rubrics and making new ones.
• Algebra 1 – I’m feeling pretty good about Algebra 1 since I’m teaching it for the 3rd year in a row; however, I’ve signed up for this morning session at TMC13 and know I’ll come back with lots of new ideas to work on! I’m also getting together with a group of teachers from my school in August to create common assessments for each of the eight Algebra 1 units we have.
• Algebra 2 – I’m teaching two college prep sections next year, and haven’t taught it for two years. I need to spend some time organizing those materials to figure out what can be used again and what needs to be changed.

Other Stuff to Work On

• Classroom Posters – I want to print some pretty, inspirational signs to add color and  pizzazz to my room. The only ones I’m keeping from this past year are: 1) Boston University Banner 2) Excellence Surfer Poster 3) Favorite Quote from Howard Thurman

  

  

• Daily Warm Ups – My students do a warm up at the beginning of every class, and I’ve been awful at keeping track of them over the past three years. Some are in word docs, some powerpoint, some I make up 30 seconds before class starts and scribble on the white board. I want to put them all in one place.

• Blogging – I have a lot of posts on my “To Write” list, and this will be forever expanding as I attend the aforementioned PD sessions and read the aforementioned books.