(10-5-2022) English PLC Department Meeting

General Updates
a. Staff should be in the halls during passing periods to help stop students from
wandering the halls and skipping classes.
i. (This has become an increasing problem at Loveland High and other schools
across the district; admin has now asked teachers to help monitor the halls due
to a lack of other hall personnel.)
b. At least 1-2 grades need to be entered per week to keep students/families updated
on student progress.
i. Me - “Can this include a simple Work Habits grade for the week? Or should we
be entering in grades for full Academic assessments at the end of each week?”
ii. Mr. P - “Yes, a Work Habits grade is fine to enter. What we want to avoid is
teachers ‘grade dumping’ at the last minute and having a student who is passing
the class suddenly be failing with two weeks left in the semester. That doesn’t go
over well with parents and doesn’t let students keep up with their grades and
things they can improve on.”
c. No bathroom passes should be issued during the first and last 10 minutes of
class.
d. Tardies are to become absences after 10 minutes on a Monday schedule and 20
minutes during a block schedule.
e. Make sure teachers call home with any students behavior and attendance
concerns.
i. Mr. P - “It is incredibly important that we keep up on this. If a student is having a
chronic problem with behavior or attendance, parents need to be receiving
multiple emails from teachers reiterating this. With multiple sources of contact
from teachers, parents are much more likely to address this behavior with their
students at home, and therefore more likely to solve the issue at its source.”

PLC Reports
f. (My mentor teacher, Cheryl McCahan, has been leading a portion of our English PLC
team in redesigning the department-wide standards for the ‘Language D’ class. This is
her progress report for how her sub-team is doing.)
i. Cheryl McCahan - “We’ve recently gone through and redesigned the four
priority skills for ‘Language D’ into a more student-friendly language. This will
allow us to focus on using more accessible Learning Targets in our classes, and
will help our students understand what skills are expected of them in the class.”
1. “We’ve also altered the department-wide post-assessment for ‘Lang D’ to
better target those four priority skills as well. In particular, we’ve focused
the post-assessment more around the ‘MLA Formatting’ and ‘Words and
Tone’ skills to better support our students' learning writing skills that will
benefit them in college and beyond.”
 2. “We’re also in the planning process of creating more uniform formal skill
assessments to be completed over the semester across the ‘Lang D’
classes. We’ll have more to share on that later.”
3. (The purpose of all of this was to centralize the ‘Power Standards’ they
want to focus on for the ‘Language D’ class across the department so that
all teachers understand and agree on what skills students need to learn,
therefore keeping student learning uniform across the department.)
ii. Mr. P - “Ever since COVID hit, I feel like we’ve kind of fallen apart on our
standards that we've been expecting our ‘Lang D’ kids to be proficient in. I hope
this PLC time has been meaningful for you; I know it has been for me. Continue
to work on these within your PLC sub-teams and we’ll update each other during
next week’s meeting.”

(11/2/2022) English PLC Department Meeting

General Updates
a. Mr. P - “We’re going to start to talk about some changes for next year.”
i. Mr. F - “I’m going to be leaving LHS next year to get my masters for
Administrative Counseling.”
ii. This will cause changes to the DP Program at LHS, as Lee is the only teacher
trained to fill that spot (it’s a part time position in the International
Baccalaureate courseline, which is a specialized position teaching IB students
who are at the end of their High School experience).
b. Updates for Curriculum Night - November, 9th 2022
1. The English department sets up tables displaying the different ‘Pathways’ of
English at LHS to 8th graders - like literacy, myth & sci-fi, creative writing,
honors, etc.
2. Mr. P - “This year, we want to encourage more 8th graders already in the honors
program to stay there rather than going into a different pathway. We need to
stress that the honors class is a sort of combination of all the other pathways, so
it should be interesting to them either way.”
ii. Freshman Course Load
1. Counseling is pushing again to provide options for 9th graders so that they don’t
need to take 8 classes during their first semester.
2. Mr. P - “We’ve had different programs like this before under different names like
Freshman Seminar. There is a good argument that our Freshman might not be
ready for that heavy course load yet, this could help them manage with the
transition to high school.”

Questions:
a. Would we be in favor of having each teacher running a study hall again? This will
decrease sections and increase the number of students per section.
 i. Mrs. C - “So are we just doing this so counseling can come in to meet
with students during study hall?”
ii. Mr. P - “Well I think that we can all see that many of our freshmen are
failing with too many classes.”
iii. Mrs. D - “From what I've seen, freshmen work best with support classes
where they can get one-on-one support from the teacher who can help
with that content area. I’m not sure if a study hall is the right answer, as
when we used to do that it was crazy and didn’t have much guidance. So
I’m still unsure, but I’m all in favor of a support class for all freshmen.”
iv. Mrs. C - “Well, not all freshmen are the same, and some really can take
eight classes. Are we requiring all students to take a study hall class
when they don’t need it?”
b. Would we be in favor of expanding our Unit Recovery options to fill empty seats
with study hall students?
i. Mrs. B - “I’m unsure if I want this, simply because our Unit Recovery
classes might become filled with the more rowdy freshmen who aren’t
actually there to make up grades. I’m worried about how this would affect
our more hard-working Unit Recovery students who really benefit from
these classes.”
ii. Mrs. C - “I’m more open to this idea. I know that I have a small Unit
Recovery class and absolutely have the time during that class to work
one-on-one with more students.”
iii. Mrs. D - “I think that this is more of a question of what is better for kids or
counselors. If they’re worried about kids in the hallways or having too
many off blocks, this is a counselor issue. This isn’t what is best for kids.
I’m open to giving them the option to do a study hall if they’re failing a
class or two, but not as a definite requirement. It should be optional.”
1. Mrs. M - “I agree. If this was required too, then the increased
class sizes would negatively affect most other students. Our
classrooms are small enough; kids can’t work with 40 of them in
the class.”
iv. Summing it all up - We generally agree that we should only serve kids
who have been directly recommended to study hall based on academic
need or parent/counselor/student request, rather than as a requirement
for all freshmen.

iii. Common Plan Periods

1. Mr. P - “There is an argument here that giving departments a Common
Plan period restricts the amounts and types of classes that kids can take.
This is ultimately going to be a department decision. What do we think
about keeping this Common Plan time?”
a. They all unanimously agree that yes, they benefited professionally
from this Common Plan time as a department.
 iv. Career Development for Students
1. At LHS, counselors take turns pulling groups of students from class to
work with them in the Auditorium on possible career paths for them going
forward. They’re going to continue doing this in November of this year.

v. Updates and Announcements

1. Staff still need to be in the halls during passing periods.
2. At least 1-2 grades need to be entered per week to keep students/families
updated on student progress.
3. No bathroom passes should be issued during the first and last 10 minutes
of class.
4. Tardies are to become absences after 10 minutes on a Monday schedule
and 20 minutes during a block schedule.
5. Make sure teachers call home with any students behavior and attendance
concerns.

PLC Reports
a. Mr. P - “We need to start planning for Reading/Writing B and S/L A classes for the next
year.”
i. This is the teachers planning for the common skills, common assessments, etc.
that they’re all going to focus on as a department for this next semester. Different
teachers are leading different groups for planning each class, like
Reading/Writing A, Language D, etc.
ii. “Next Wednesday will be the deadline to finish up with Reading/Writing A and
Language D planning.”
1. (My mentor teacher, Cheryl McCahan, is a part of the Lang A planning
team).

Language A PLC Planning

● My mentor teacher, Cheryl McCahan, is the leader of the Lang A planning team.
Immediately after the initial PLC meeting, they started another meeting with this
planning team.
● They’re creating a PLC Worksheet together to present to the school admins, detailing
the common skills and assessments for all classes in the department.
● They’re also working on building the post-assessment for Language A, which is a
multiple choice and SCR assignment that all Language A students across all teachers
will complete.
○ The PLC is meeting today to go over the questions they created, editing them
together to see how they’re hitting the skills that were assessed over the course
of that class.
○ This goes down even to the diction level - they work as a group to cut out
unspecific questions, edit questions to be more specifically targeted towards that
specific skill, etc.
 ■ Here is an example of them editing the multiple choice answers to a
question to be more objective regarding the tone of the passage:

(12/1/2022) English PLC Department Meeting

General Notes
● This shorter meeting today is department-wide, meaning that teachers from multiple
other departments are taking part in it. The focus today is on how we can start
incorporating more Global Contexts and relevant current events into what we’re
teaching.
○ Essentially, how can we tie our content into more relevant and interesting current
real-world contexts for our students? These are the six Global Concepts:
■ Identities and relationships
■ Orientation in time and space
■ Personal and cultural expression
■ Scientific and technical innovation
■ Globalization and sustainability
■ Fairness and development
● Teachers were each given a worksheet explaining the characteristics of these Global
Concepts in more detail, and were instructed to look for elements of these that they’re
already doing in their own teaching. As I still don’t have a large body of experience with
my own content yet, I instead opted to work with another English teacher, Mr. H, on
what these ideas already look like in his own classroom:
○ Mr. H - “So generally, I like to center things around themes in my classroom, and
then try to connect these themes outward into more global concepts. An example
 of a theme might be something like ‘how can propaganda be helpful and
harmful?’”
○ “What I would then do with this is ask students this question at the beginning of a
unit, without much additional context, and see how they fare. Then, I’ll keep
trying whatever content I’m teaching, be it a book or articles or whatever, back to
this guiding question. Along the way, I’ll also keep having students look at
events where this theme can be seen in real life, such as propaganda being used
in war or on social media, to continue exposing them to this global context and
helping them draw personal connections between the theme in the book we’re
studying and real life.”
■ “I’ll especially take the time to ask them personal questions to help form
these connections. If our theme is something like ‘Internal conflict in
Hamlet’, I might ask: “Have you faced internal conflict like Hamlet? Do
you have family, gender, or other struggles?”
■ After all of this, I’ll return back to that original guiding question we
opened up the unit with. Now that these students have studied the
content context as well as the real life context of these universal themes,
they should be able to put together a more detailed answer to the overall
question. By looking at their answers before and after all of this exposure,
you’re able to test for growth.
■ This is a diagram of Mr. H shared with me detailing this process: