Welcome, teachers! Norris is a special place, and today
marks the formal start of your employment with our school district. The Jedi-mind trick you have to master, though,
is the realization that this district will only remain special if you endeavor
to make it so. You have to perpetuate a legacy of great instruction because
we have brought you in to replace people who established and sustained that
over many years – or we brought you in to meet the growth needs of a burgeoning
student population. We need you at your
best. We don't want you to settle in and settle for average outcomes from
yourself or mere proficiency from your students. Strive for more. It is the commitment of classroom teachers
and the combination of compassionate care for every learner coupled with
rigorous academic expectations you uphold that helps us realize our mission.
You should realize – you must realize - that the process
starts with selection and you are not here by accident. We do not make arbitrary hiring
decisions. We have a data-informed
decision-making process for our teacher applicants. We know the characteristics we are
seeking. Teachers here must possess a
dualistic mindset that is equal parts content knowledge and a love of learning
combined with an unwavering compassion for the individual learner. Either of these in isolation is not
enough. A teacher with content expertise
who does not fundamentally care about the individual student is unable to build
relationships that support learning. A
teacher who is compassionate and caring about children but fails to create a
rigorous academic environment is actually doing kids a disservice and will
never reach the outcomes we expect.
We are very fortunate to be blessed with an abundant
applicant field from which to select our candidates. Some of that is geographical proximity to
Lincoln and some of it is that this is simply a great place to work and people
know it. So we have high teacher
retention, low teacher turnover, and that fosters the kind of outcomes we want
because it helps to establish a common language for instruction and a lot of
experiential wisdom. Wisdom I invite you
to lean upon and draw from as you reach out to your new colleagues in the coming
weeks and months. We do vet our teacher
applicants very carefully. I am not saying we subject applicants to the same
level of scrutiny as an FBI background check, but we do make sure that we have
sufficient screeners in place to be able to verify that you possess the
fundamental characteristics of a quality educator: that you have yourself a
zeal and a passion for learning and that you are possessed with a desire to
continue to grow professionally and to do so with an earnest commitment to
collegiality that stems from a compassionate desire to help every learner
thrive.
Our mission is simply stated, but it is also eternally
elusive. We realize it by degrees and by increments, but we can never
truly say "we've arrived." Our mission is that we guarantee quality
learning experiences so that each learner thrives as a
productive and life-long learner. So unless we undertake the most
ambitious longitudinal academic study in the history of educational research,
we'll never really know, will we? But we can have a pretty good idea.
On an elemental level, it starts with classroom teachers who uphold and
uplift the noble spirit and essential humanity of every individual learner.
Norris has a unique and interesting demographic. Like many
districts, we have seen increases over the last five years in the number of
students in our district who are in poverty.
They do not enjoy some of the benefits that affluent families are often privileged
to bestow upon their children which impact out of school learning and may
translate to increased achievement gains in the classroom as well. We have also seen increases in the number of students
in our district whose special education status carries with it very
particularized learning needs as dictated by their IEPs and we must strive to
fulfill those needs. We also have a population of students where on almost any
national assessment instrument administered two-thirds or more of them will
perform in the upper quartile. We have had grade-level achievement indices
where an entire cohort has three-fourths of its students in the top quartile,
which based on a normal curve distribution would only be one-fourth of our students. Think about that! And the thing I want you to understand is
that this awareness of achievement data, this little bit of assessment literacy
about Norris does not mean that your work is done because a substantial number
of students walk in the door day one already proficient. Quite the opposite! What this means instead
is that you have a moral mandate here to differentiate your instruction. Because we are interested first and foremost
in individual student growth and we must surpass minimal standards and mere
proficiency if we embrace that philosophy.
Our mission statement insists that we guarantee quality learning experiences
because we want every individual learner to thrive. So this means we will immediately identify
the students who are not proficient on the state assessments since those are
grade-level standards measures and we will intervene, effectively, and get them
to baseline. Just as importantly, though,
we will use our other assessment data such as the MAP test to ensure that we
know what the next appropriate learning targets and mastery goals are for those
learners who are already at baseline proficiency.
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