Staff Resources

Instructional Foci 2019-20

Teachers will use culturally responsive strategies that value all learners’ backgrounds, identities and abilities and provide access to high achievement for historically disadvantaged and marginalized student populations by:

• Using curricula and pedagogy that academically challenge all students through a lens of equity and honors and reflects the diversity in our student body
• Building strong relationships with students by seeking to understand and celebrate their identities
• Developing restorative approaches to discipline and classroom management and create emotionally safe spaces
• Examining one’s own personal beliefs and interrupting implicit bias
• Leading and participating in school activities that promote a positive and college-going culture

Instructional Focus 2018-19

Teachers will use writing strategies across all subject areas to deepen their understanding of content and check students’ comprehension by

• Planning language objectives
• Teaching sentence expansion techniques
• Increasing vocabulary knowledge
• Providing feedback for effective revision

Instructional Focus 2017-18

Teachers will increase opportunities for student-to-student interaction by:

• increasing the frequency of student-centered discussion
• employing flexible grouping strategies
• giving students access to tools and technologies that foster collaboration (e.g., Google Docs, Google Classroom)

Instructional Focus 2016-17

Teachers will help students build knowledge in the content areas by increasing student access to complex texts across the curriculum using a variety of strategies including:

• close reading
• explicit teaching of academic vocabulary and language objectives
• interdisciplinary connections through content, texts and vocabulary