August 23, 2020

First day of school for Maya and Dylan on August 17th. Maya is now a freshman and Dylan is going into junior high as a 7th graders. I love how they both don't have shoes on! Haha. Who needs shoes during distance learning?!! I am starting my 10th year at Suisun Valley and Chris is starting his 7th year at VHS. 

Expectations vs. Standards (Good Enough to Repeat)

Expectations should not be confused with standards.  Standards are levels of achievement.  Teachers who practice positive expectations will help their students reach high standards.  It takes just as much energy to achieve positive results as it does to achieve negative results.  So why waste your energy to fail when the same amount of energy can help you and your students achieve.

Key idea:  Expectations of students will greatly influence their achievement in school and in life.

There is absolutely no research correlation between success and family background, race, national origin, financial status, or even educational accomplishments.  There is but one correlation with success, and that it ATTITUDE!

Humans have a success instinct.  They want success. They strive for success. 

Knowing what you can or cannot achieve is called expectation.  An expectation is what you believe will or will not happen.

Classic Research on Expectations

Robert Rosenthal in the 1960’s fed erroneous information to a group of South San Francisco elementary teachers.  In the spring of the preceding year, the students at a school were pretested.  The researches and administrators told the teachers they were special teachers who were to be part of a special experiment.  They were told, “Based on a pretest, we have identified 20 percent of your students who are special.  They will be ‘spurters’ or ‘bloomers’ and are a designated group of students of whom greater intellectual growth is expected.  The names were really selected at random.  The teachers were told to not tell the students or the parents.  “Thus we expect and know that you will do extremely well with these special students.”  Eight months later all students were tests again.  The results showed a significant gain in intellectual growth for the 20 percent who were designated as special.  The teachers were quite surprised to learn that neither the teachers nor the students were “special.”  The expectations, however, made all the difference.

Students tend to learn as little or as much as their teachers expect.  Teachers who set and communicate high expectations to all their students obtain greater academic performance from those students than teachers who set low expectations. This is important when talking about our students from one grade level to another. Be positive!! 

(Taken from The First Days of School:  How to Be an Effective Teacher by Harry and Rosemary Wong

Here’s to high expectations for all students and ourselves!As a No Excuses School we have committed to teaching our VIRTUAL expectations for the first 10 days of school. 

Cal/OSHA General Checklist for Schools and School-Based Programs

ENSURE TEACHER AND STAFF SAFETY

• Ensure staff maintain physical distancing from each other.

• Ensure that all staff use face coverings in accordance with CDPH guidelines and Cal OSHA standards.

• Conduct all staff meetings, professional development training and education, and other activities involving staff with physical distancing measures in place, or virtually, where physical distancing is a challenge.

• Minimize the use of and congregation of adults in staff rooms, break rooms, and other settings.

• Per guidance from Solano Public Health, persons should practice physical distancing, wear face mask and practice good hygiene.

• Implement procedures for daily symptom monitoring for staff. FSUSD will implement a self screening tool for students and staff. The COVID Self Screening Tool will be posted at the entrance of every campus.

The Bargaining Unit teams from the Fairfield-Suisun Unified Teachers Association and the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District reached an agreement with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding. To view the joint letters on negotiations, click here.

 Dear Solano County Educators and School Administrators,

As the school year begins in a way far different than it ever has before, we at the Solano Resource Conservation District are here to let you know that we are still committed to providing environmental education opportunities for your students. Our goal is to support the social-emotional learning process of children and use scientific concepts as the foundation for mathematical and language arts learning, even in a virtual format. We have been collaborating with organizations and agencies across the nation to identify best practices and resources to achieve this goal, and now we need your input to help customize our local efforts.

 

Please complete our brief 2020 virtual learning survey, available at the link below, by August 31. You may also reply to this email and schedule a time to discuss the survey in more detail or respond to the questions over the phone. Your time is greatly appreciated and we look forward to supporting you this school year.

Survey Link: https://forms.gle/DCbCHu7W3HBk1Q3HA

 

Sincerely,
The Solano Resource Conservation District Watershed Education Program