I want to take a few minutes to give you the big picture. How the work we do in inservice is connected to the work of last year, this summer and how it is connected to the work you do in the classroom.

In schools we struggle with priorities. It often feels that not only is everything important it is also urgent. This is from a brain storm with the principals. They took over 30 initiative and tried to prioritize them on this matrix based on their impact on learning and their urgency. After the first round of brainstorming the majority of the initiatives ended up in the upper right quadrant of being both high impact and urgent.

We face the same problem as teachers. If we focus on some initiatives does it make the others less important? When everything feels urgent how do you prioritize? We know we cannot do it all so how do we decide.

We could have taken any number of paths but the pd committee chose two. We wanted to stay true to our core mission of teaching children and our professional responsibility of continually improving our craft. We also wanted to provide the opportunity for each teacher to pursue a passion that otherwise might get subsumed in the rush of the school year.

First to get at our core mission we used the principles backwards design to focus our work. We wanted to use clear and challenging assessments as a target for developing an aligned written curriculum and a solid measure of our taught curriculum.

SO what does that look like at this stage of our development. We are returning to the performance tasks and building upon the learning we did last year. Last we we used the designing of this tasks a gigantic ice-breaker. This year the work of designing performance tasks is going to be more focused and directed.

Our goal this year is to begin building a bank of common performance tasks, given at agreed upon times and collaboratively assessed. These tasks will form the core of a comprehensive and balance local assessment plan. The longterm goal is to have local assessments drive continuous conversation about and work in curriculum development and best teaching practices.

This summer a team of teachers and administrators began developing a plan for collecting and analyzing data at district, building and classroom level. This year we are going to start collecting data in math as a way to learn how and why we will use data. Longterm we want to incorporate the data from the Performance Tasks you design.

We need these tasks to tells us more than just our students strengths and weakness as mathematicians and writers. We need to learn about our students as innovators, designers, collaborators, artists, musicians or citizens. These skills are arguably more important than any one content skill in isolation. That is why strong performance tasks in the arts are essential for curriculum design and also for communicating to our communities the range of what our students are learning.

The immediate impact of the Performance task work is developing a comprehensive bank of tasks, procedures for scoring them and in some cases collecting data. However I hope that this work will drive conversations and work on our written curriculum. This is where the common performance tasks translates into the curriculum in our classrooms. In the cases of math and science teams are already working on making the connection between performance tasks and the written curriculum.

Making the connection between our performance tasks and the taught curriculum is a long term goal for us. Eventually we want teachers visiting eachothers classrooms to see how their colleagues teach the skills they are assessing in their performance tasks.

The project teams are the second path we wanted to take. They focus on our passions as teachers. As teachers we often know what needs to happen in school or we have big ideas that we want to flesh out, but we rarely have the time and the space to take on this work. The project team time is designed to give you the time and space to do some of this work.

We want to use this second strand of this year's inservice to do some strategic thinking, planning and acting in areas you are passionate about or just areas you feel need attention. The parameters are simple. The work you do should have application across the supervisory union. Try to work with people from other schools. Produce a recommendation, prototype, or plan.

I know people are already thinking about projects that range from elementary science, to music assessments to innovation and creativity. As we engage in this work we do not want to lose sight of how we work together. Over the course of the year the PD committee will give you some guidance around what effective collaboration could look like. The Collaborative Leadership Cohort and many of the facilitators we have trained will also provide support to the groups as they work this year.