In our Friday Bulletin I often share activities and events that are happening on campus, but this week I want to share some of the work going on behind the scenes that parents and families don’t see, and probably don’t hear about from students, but it has a big impact on our children’s overall school experience.  Grading.

This week Assistant Principal Nieman and I joined other district leaders for a conference in San Diego about grading.  It’s a complicated topic with many areas to address, and for the past four years our Davidson staff has been doing a lot of work when kids aren’t in school ensuring that what we are teaching is important and aligned to the grade level standards, and supports the learning goals of future grades, our teachers have defined exactly what master means, and designed student facing rubrics that your children have, and will be seeing more of, to help them clearly understand the learning goals, and finally our teams have been aligning their assessments across the grades, and making sure that those assessments test our students on the material they were expected to learn, and we focused on teaching during the unit of study.

Moving forward the Davidson staff is going to look at some of our grading practices.  Some of our focus will be improving clarity for families, and areas of subjectivity that we can eliminate in our grading process. It’s ongoing work that we know isn’t flashy or fun to talk about, but an important part of the work our teachers and staff do at Davidson to provide the best possible experience for our students and families.

October 27 to 30: Spirit Week

November 7th: Principal Coffee

November 11th Veteran’s Day NO SCHOOL

November 13 PTO Meeting and Fall Band Concert

November 14: School Tour

November 24th to 28th: Thanksgiving Break NO SCHOOL

December 5: Principal Coffee

December 12: School Tour

December 17th: Steel Pans concert

December 18: Orchestra Concert

December 19: Spirit Assembly

December 22 to January 6th: Winter Break