In this edition:

• Gratitude for your professionalism and leadership
• Reflecting on Literacy progress this year
• Language Arts adoption moves forward 
• Successfully navigating state testing
• Champions for STEM wrap-up successful year
• Summer projects and "Making an Awesome Unit of 21st Century Learning"

Gratitude for your professionalism and leadership

I have much gratitude for the professionalism and leadership of our teachers and administrators!   As a result I am greatly looking forward to our continued work together with all we have planned for next year!

• We have committed to re-emphasize and improve our PLC team collaboration
• A team of teacher leaders (Dave Sanders, Eric Fuchs, Cassandra Thonstad, and Barb Catts) are currently working to engage our probationary teachers in feedback and collaboratively craft plans for a Mentor Teacher program to support new teachers starting next fall
• 63 teachers from 9 schools will serve on Innovation Teams over the next 2 years
• At least 10 teachers will pursue National Board Certification as a Newberg cohort
• More than 15 teachers are exploring participation in a GFU Reading Endorsement district cohort

It is fantastic so many staff have stepped up to take their professional practice and leadership to the next level!

I hope that each of you join us at our annual Crystal Apple awards on the morning of June 12th to recognize the accomplishment and excellence of many of our staff.

I am proud to serve our district to ensure that every classroom has a high-quality, effective educator supported by strong leadership and staff in order to provide a high-quality, well-rounded and healthy educational experience to ALL students that is engaging, rigorous and culturally relevant.

Make it a great summer!
Stafford

Reflecting on Literacy progress this year

As we wind down the 2014-15 school year and reflect upon the work done this year to support literacy, we can be thankful for the quality professional development done across our district provided by building staff, Dr. Mears and Barb Catts.  The instructional shifts needed to teach Common Core Standards, combined with the format of questions found on Smarter Balanced tests, required that training for staff center around close reading, text-dependent questioning, constructed response, vocabulary, and higher-levels of text analysis and deeper levels of thinking by our students.  I am appreciative of the quality of materials and expertise they have provided our instructional staff.   

Now moving forward, we have established a foundation of literacy in our district to build upon for existing and new teachers coming new to our district in the future.  Using F.A.S.T. and M.A.P. as our universal reading assessments to guide our instruction, we will use our K-8 Literacy Plan and Reading and Writing Planning Frameworks as foundational documents to train all teachers to be teachers of literacy.  Also,, we are looking for opportunities to demonstrate how literacy strategies can be integrated into content area instruction, spreading literacy practices across the curriculum at all levels.  In addition, we are finalizing our plan with GFU to offer teachers with an opportunity to earn a reading endorsement, learning content and strategies  that align with our district NSD Literacy Guidelines.

Finally, I’m excited to see how our new ELA adoption pilots align with our foundational documents, helping us to choose the very best curriculum to support our students--all of our students.

Thank you for the dedication, inspiration and support during this busy year.
Kevin, Barb and Pam

Language Arts adoption moves forward 

Our Language Arts Adoption process continues to move forward with our Innovation Teams.

Adoption teacher teams worked at the end of April to analyze the curricular programs we are considering.  These analyses will be used by Instructional Innovation Teams to help in selection of programs and materials to pilot in the 2015-16 school year.  These pilots will help us evaluate the effectiveness and quality of curricular programs in supporting us to meet the priorities outlined in our district strategic plan, as well as inform our decisions for recommendation to the board of education in the Spring of 2016.

All elementary and secondary teachers of Language Arts standards, as well as our community, will have the opportunity next year to preview each of the curricular programs and give feedback.

Successfully navigating state testing

Staff across the district have done an outstanding job of navigating state testing this year. We are clearly on the home stretch with most schools all done or finishing up with individual students. It has been a challenging year in many aspects of our work and new assessments were no exception. I am very proud of our students and staff who put their best effort into everything they were expected to do.

Sometimes the way forward is not clear, especially when there is so much change all around us. I believe with continued hard work we will begin to develop our capacity to make appropriate use of the data from MAP and FAST.  I also believe that as we continue to develop our ability to provide instruction that meets the depth of learning embedded in the state standards our students will increase their confidence when taking the Smarter Balanced tests. None of this will come quickly or easily as we can continue to grow in our practice. I look forward to taking what we have learned from our experiences this year to begin working with principals and school test coordinators to determine how district and state assessments will be organized for next year.

As you know, the state test scores are no longer immediate due to the portions of the test that need to be scored against a rubric. We anticipate being able to communicate school results to staff once everyone returns in late August and individual student results to families sometime in August or September.

Thank you again to everyone for your hard work.
Don 

Champions for STEM wrap-up successful year

I’d like to offer a huge THANK YOU to the Champions for STEM leadership team for wrapping up a wonderful first year of collaboration and planning.  We continued to work on our K-12 STEM Action Plan and experienced a simulation called the “Change Game.”  It was a powerful experience to see just how many variables affect the change process.  Throughout the year, the team experienced the practices of STEM (from NGSS and Common Core), learned about the nature of curriculum and conceptual flow, experienced some sense-making instructional strategies, and developed as leaders.  It has been a pleasure to serve with you!
Andy

Some upcoming opportunities for those who are interested:

• Registration is now open for a wide variety of energizing and engaging STEM professional development courses being offered this summer through a partnership between Portland area school districts, the Portland Metro STEM Partnership, and Portland State University.  All courses are open to everyone, and include many grant sponsored tuition rates! ​See the Elementary Course Flyer and Secondary Course Flyer for the full array of offerings.  The Elementary NGSS course is free!!!
   
• Oregon’s STEM Investment Council has prepared a draft of their Strategic Plan to change Oregon STEM education.  Feedback on this draft will be solicited for the next two weeks through June 1, 2015. We encourage you to download and read the draft document prior to beginning the survey and providing your feedback. When you are ready, the survey can be accessed here: http://dialog.fuseinsight.com/topic/start/STEMOregon_1_3K/intro

• ​MATH TEACHERS -- your help is needed.  There are two opportunities to engage with other educators that require immediate application.  One is working with Education NW as a trainer in CCSS Math.  The other is to participate with Formative Assessment Insights in a 5-month professional learning cadre around the latest in formative assessment in math.  For more information on each opportunity, click here.

• Discovery Education is hosting a Math Academy on June 18th for the Portland area.  This is a free day of professional development that will focus on best practices for Math instruction, and the integration of digital media into classrooms.  For more detailed information and to RSVP, just click here.

Summer projects and "Making an Awesome Unit of 21st Century Learning"

We’re offering a workshop on June 15th on teaching with technology, or as I like to call it The June Institute for Making an Awesome Unit of 21st Century Learning. It will take place in the morning on June 15th and be available for 30 teachers. These details should be finalized soon. Whether you’re interested in getting a jumpstart on planning for being part of an innovation team or just want to spend some quality time with other teachers learning more about our digital conversion plans and the Newberg way for teaching with technology, we’d love to have you come to this before spending a long summer away from the district. If you’re interested in being part of this, please send an email to neffl@newberg.k12.or.us.

Other than that, we’re busy gearing up for a summer of big projects — from testing LMS options that we’ll pilot next year to hundreds of software updates, a new employee (we’ll tell you more about that soon, hopefully), and lots and lots of new devices showing up and getting ready to be deployed for next year.

Before we move on entirely to next year, there have been a lot of changes this year, and we want to highlight two to make sure that you’re aware of them:

• Instead of calling the tech department, we have a help desk system to more efficiently help solve tech problems. Emailing helpdesk@newberg.k12.or.us is all you have to do to get tech support now.
• Now, instead of leaving your computer if you switch buildings over the summer you can bring your laptop with you to your new site.

There will be more, additional end of year info before too long that shows up on the tech blog, our FAQ site, and in your email — including details like what you have to do to keep your laptop over the summer and when and how grades need to be entered into Synergy. Exciting stuff.

Luke