Madison Middle School

By barsotti_p 　https://blogs.4j.lane.edu/madisonstaff/2023/01/13/january-13th-2023/

Dear Madison Staff,

MADISON INFORMATION     

• PASS Update – for those of you who are supporting students on the PASS program, kudos for getting a strong start! This week was a really busy week. We noticed a decline in the number of marks that teachers are inputting, so I wanted to just pump everyone up about it and ask you to really commit to making sure that we have enough data points to ensure that we’re getting an accurate picture of the student’s day, which happens when teachers and supervision staff are consistent about marking students in each time block of the student’s day. 
      

DISTRICT INFORMATION        

• Repeat: School Choice Season is Coming: January brings the school choice season.  We will hold our evening event on Tuesday, January 17 at 6:30 and morning event on the 18th at 10 am. Last year, we had one parent total for our presentations. If you’d like to join, parents love to meet and hear from teachers and staff about how awesome Madison is, but feel ZERO pressure to do it.  Gina and I will be there to sing how awesome Madison is for the students. 
                  

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PROFESSIONAL LEARNING AND OTHER INFORMATION   

• Repeat: Teaching Perseverance: One thing we’ve heard from many staff members is that kids are giving up much sooner or not even starting tasks they perceive to be hard or not worth their time. We’re going to talk on Tuesday about a perseverance challenge.
  • Linked here is a blog post from Angie Olson at Lucky Little Learners on teaching students what perseverance is along with a list of books that demonstrate people persevering even when things are hard.
    
  • Linked here is a blog post from Engaging Literacy on the books she uses for specific mini lessons centered around perseverance including goal setting, making a plan, learning to fail, and working through your fears. 
  • And here’s a list of 20 more books about persistence and perseverance. 
         
• Be Good People – SEL Resources: This site I learned about from Erin Gaston, from a collaboration of school districts in Minnesota, has a plethora of lessons and activities around all kinds of SEL topics. It includes lessons at all 3 tiers, so I intend to spend some time digging into the tier 2 and 3 lessons to use with kids. It’s meant to work as a curriculum, so the slides aren’t editable or copyable, but they seem to be well written, organized, and easy to use.
      

Looking Ahead:

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Peter and Gina