September 8, 2023
Welcome to the Holbrook Herald Newsletter! For those of you new to our building, I will generally use this weekly column each Friday throughout the school year to inform Holbrook families about our school and our programs. I encourage you to read this message each week to stay up-to-speed with all things Holbrook.
Holbrook as a High-Performing & Improving School
High performing and improving schools have clear and specific student achievement goals, including goals to reduce achievement gaps linked to poverty and minority status. The goals are typically specified in terms of performance on state assessments.
In an effort to become a high performing and improving school, Holbrook organizes teachers into collaborative teams (grade level teams). Teacher teams work with student data—usually short-cycle or formative assessment data - to:
*Plan standards-based curriculum units;
*Teach those units simultaneously;
*Debrief on how successful the units were; and
*Make changes when student performance does not meet expectations.
This collaborative teamwork makes instruction “public” over time by identifying a set of instructional strategies that work. Over time all teachers are expected to use the instructional strategies that have been demonstrated to improve student learning and achievement.
Holbrook will exhibit multiple forms of leadership. Teachers lead by coordinating collaborative teams and through instructional coaching. The principal leads by structuring the school to foster instructional improvement. The district leads by ensuring that Holbrook has the resources to deploy the strategies outlined above with a focus on aggressive student performance goals, improving instructional practice, and taking responsibility for student achievement results.
IXL Parent Overview Video
Please click here to watch this short video to learn more about an important instructional tool that our teachers and students will be using throughout this year to improve our ELA and Math proficiencies.
