Seward
We’re going to have a discussion with staff about this meeting within our learning team groups. We want to define what a student should know when they graduate. We want to have all the constituents involved. We will have learning teams as an ongoing effort.

In the future we’re going to look at personal learning plans within the next 18 months. We’re in a block schedule period right now. We have a debate about using the time within that.

We talked about how to use time differently in the classrooms. If you can get kids to learn on their own, that creates more time.

Valentine
We looked at all nine areas and highlighted a couple we thought we could put into effect right away. The bottom third can definitely use some help but maybe the top third kids are not being challenged enough. I have a couple of daughters who wish they would have gotten more out of high school to be better prepared for college.

We have home room in our schools and we find it helps with the teacher-student relationship. It’s a great place to do some housekeeping. If a kid has a concern they get to air it there.

In the individual personal learning, we look at the needs of our students. I’m going to go home and interview a lot of my students. I’ll ask them what would make them more excited about school. We need more communication. Sometimes we get so busy with going from chapter to chapter that we don’t take enough time to see what’s working. We have school improvement programs and maybe we could have a survey to find out from everyone what would make it more exciting.

We tried to come up with our mission statement Literacy is important. Our kids need to be able to function in society. They’ll end up as criminals or on welfare. We need to prepare this bottom third to be good citizens.

Our assessment innovation still needs focus. I don’t like grades so I hope we can get away from that.

Norfolk
We picked 3 of the 9. We want all our teachers to interview the students.

We can do some of the kinds of process we did here and we want to talk about all kids.

We have an advisor program that we have once a week. We used to have the every day home room so we will consider that but also we want to have mentors and consider having the students choose them.

Madison
We were generic and didn’t pick the top 3.

We’re going to talk to our staff and take them through a mini-version of this whole process. We want to take them through learning groups and communities.

We’ll try to get this done in the next couple months. We’ll schedule a day in November. We’ll develop 5 or 6 learning teams and have them do some research projects.

Elkhorn Valley
We’re focused on learning communities. On Fridays we have an early dismissal to work on things and usually we don’t have that much to work on. Now we do. We’ll have staff communication about best practices. This way we can talk to our staff about how to handle various things. We’ll have an advisory team.

We’ll develop peer-mentor relationships. We want to build relationships and develop a committee to look at our school setting. We want to include a meeting with our kids.

West Boyd We want to have a personal learning plan. In a small school we have the luxury of every teacher knowing every student in the school. We want to make sure the members of the community are involved and the relationships with that are improved.

With the facilitated learning we have an exciting opportunity for teaching of being not just lecturers but facilitators. With staff development we hope to get everyone to buy in to the idea.

We want to focus on the PEPs and we need to integrate it with our entire staff. We want to get the staff comfortable with the programs. Leigh
We talked about some of the things we were doing which are pretty good but we didn’t feel comfortable coming up with plans without the staff.

We’re going to get the input from them and mark it on our sheet here.

From there we will begin our process and look at data. It’s a work in progress for us and see what our staff does with it.

Howells
We’re starting off with a 2 minute warning. We understand that.

We want to target our areas of action. We want to be interdisciplinary and relevant. We want to do innovative assessment. We’re hoping our staff is willing to be collaborative. We look to performance-based and portfolio-based assessments. Some scholarships are based on class rank and we want to be able to answer this.

This is a work in progress and we hope to meet our timelines.

Boone Central
We want to start researching and get the ideas of the staff and the students. We’ve already started on building relationships. We already have some positive contact between teachers and relationships. We’ll ask the teachers for their ideas of building better relationships and we can improve the parent involvement.

Facilitated learning was another hot topic. We want to determine the best practices and try pilot programs so that other teachers can see what works.

Lakeview (wall no board)We’re going to take something back to talk to our staff. We have a home room right now which is not structured. We’d like to take advantage of some of that time and take advantage of the student-advisor relationship.

We’d like to set up coffees for the parents. We also want to have all of our teachers do some classroom innovations, such as having them be facilitators instead of lecturers. I’ve already gotten good support from our administrator. We will also celebrate our teachers for just trying, regardless of whether the experiment is successful or not.

Logan View
We want to implement an advisory period with our learning communities. We listed our brainstorming for these topics, such as teambuilding, social issues and current events. We’d like to present this to the staff and get their input. We want to find out what other schools are doing.

Next spring we’d work on the staff development. We’d like to implement this by next year and evaluate on a quarterly basis to make sure we’re on the right track. We want to involve the students, parents and the community.

Fremont We’ve already done some things with our conferences. We’ve had an advisor-advisee situation in place but it’s not quite where we want it to be. We’ll need some staff development to understand the process. We want to focus on students and think we can hit all three parts of that student gradient.

The tools we will use is the connection with the adults and upgrading our technology program as well as concept based thematic learning. We need to include revisiting our schedule. We want to get counselors involved. South Sioux City
We had a lot of things that other people have said. We will have Student Teacher Academic Research Time (START). We will help them for both academic as well as other practical things. We have 40 minutes built into this and we might as well take advantage of the existing schedule.

Wayne
We decided to go with small steps at first. We already have advisory groups that only meet once or twice a year. We’d like to get reconnected with those kids. We’d like to start meeting monthly. We need a committee to get together to come up with topics. We’d like to bring people in from the community.

We also chose innovative assessment. We want to get the staff resources so they could do this. We want to target getting it to them by November and then in the next semester try something new. We’ll have the results given to our principal and see where to go next.

Pender
We decided on the PEP also. This affects so many other areas. We’re counting on our ESU to help us.

We would like to have help in communicating with our staff.

We’d like to have the staff set priorities. We could set up our mentor program in January. We’d like to have parent teacher conference and have something in place then the staff can meet with those parents. In April or May, we want to see what it could like in the coming year.

Emerson Hubbard
We want to develop more relationships and want to beef up our advisory groups.

We’d like to turn it into our personal educational plan. We’d like to meet more and have more student reflection.

We’ve been delegating and telling them what to do but we’d like to have more input from them.

Wakefield We chose to focus on developing personalization not only among the students but also among the staff and faculty. With the new information we will look at our new demographics and the needs of our students.

We thought we could open up a whole new area of staff development. We will be having a lot more conversations.

Columbus (no board)
We want to implement a block schedule and tried to align the nine points with this. We felt we were hitting on most of the points. With the change if it’s done correctly, you’re able to train your teachers and have more flexibility with their schedules. We put together a timeline. We don’t have enough time to communicate with our kids. We’re going to change that by having longer times with the kids. We found that SSR was a very good aspect of our day. We’re going to use it next year so that we can all transition into personal learning plans. We hope to move from the block scheduling into the personal learning plans.
Wahoo
ESUs, Higher Learning, and State We already have an idea of what you need from us. We need to start planning as a group. We need to figure out what we’re going to do for the people who are here. We’re going to meet as a team and divide and conquer. I heard personal learning plans and need for help. We want a blog for ourselves and take advantage of what InnovationLabs has started for us. We want to thank InnovationLabs for helping us with this in getting started.

We want to add to that and thank all of you for coming. Don’t be afraid to ask. If you need a waiver for something, just ask. You are way ahead of the rest of the state. The commissioner loves to come to this part of the state. He’d love to work with you. We’ll look for money and trying to help with some funding opportunities if we can.