Woodland School Principal Kim Sasso is seen discussing the Woodland School’s site strategic plan with the school committee on Tuesday night. (Photo by Greg Fitzpatrick)
SOUTHWICK – Woodland School Principal Kim Sasso gave a presentation to the school committee on Tuesday night about the school’s site strategic plan.
Sasso began the presentation by pointing out the initiatives that have been created for Woodland School, which involves engaged learning, shared educational leadership, assessment for learning and transfer, and a guaranteed and viable curriculum.
Engaged learning includes developing depth of knowledge questions to use during instruction as well as providing faculty with resources and best teaching practices. Shared educational leadership consists of collaborating with teachers to create an administrative walk through for feedback, along with identifying school-wide behavioral expectations and consequences. The assessment for learning and transfer involves creating standards-based formative rubrics and designing learning opportunities that give students the chance to apply new skills to learn. For the final initiative of guaranteed and viable curriculum, the plan includes developing depth of knowledge questions to use during instruction and embed technology and digital literacy standards in each content area.
The Woodland School Principal pointed out that the math workshop model may be one of the most important initiatives in the plan. According to Sasso, it helps the students understand that it’s not a matter of rules and memorization of math facts, it’s understanding the math behind it.
“Show me with pictures, show me with tools,” said Sasso. “They (the students) have to explain it, they can’t just give you a number.”
The math workshop model also requires teachers to challenge the students and not spoon feed the answers.
“Making sense out of the math is really what they’re doing versus us telling them it, they’re making sense out of it themselves,” said Sasso.
The site strategic plan is something that each school in the Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District puts together every year. The plan is created by looking at the state’s standards and then they’re broken up into different units.
“Moving away from a worksheet of doing 20 addition problems on a page, to doing just one and having all of this rich conversation around it and making sense out of it,” said Sasso.
For questions or comments on the plan, contact the school district at 413-569-5391.
