Balancing Act

Balancing Act

There are two important aspects of teaching:  data and curriculum AND building relationships.  This past week has been filled with both!  As you prepared for conferences, you studied your students so that you got to know their strengths and weaknesses, and then used your assessment data to confirm your thinking.  You shared what you knew about your students with their families in an effort to build a collaborative relationship between home and school.

As we all know, the data piece of our job is important.  We will continue to look at data as we go through grade level roll thrus this week to look at current reading progress.  On Friday, we will talk about how to use assessment to gather data, and then how to use our data as we begin to write our SLOs.  Data helps drive what we do every day. But  what is impressive is how you do the other half of your job.  Each of you work diligently to get to know your students and their families, and you are constantly problem solving ways to best meet students' needs.  You are creating personalized interventions, adjusting your schedule to accommodate behaviors, communicating with parents to work together on concerns,  providing opportunities for students to showcase their strengths, setting high expectations and letting kids know you believe in their ability to reach them... going above and beyond to support the needs of your students.  It is through this hard work that you remind your students that you believe in them, and you care deeply about them.

As I walked around during conferences last week, I heard from many parents about how happy they are with all of the teachers at Houlton.  You are good at what you do.  I can't tell you how many times I have been told how lucky I am to work with the Houlton staff.  And I absolutely agree! You make it look easy to find the balance between the business (data and curriculum) and the pleasure (building relationships) of this really exhausting job!

Thanks for all you do... You are masters at a very difficult balancing act!