This school year, as a supervisory Union, FWSU’s calendar includes three Early Release Days. One in October, this past Monday – January 20, and a third on March 25. Each of these days allow professional staff time to work together throughout the district in order to build capacity and opportunities for student learning and growth.
This past Monday, Principal Conrad and I had the pleasure of working with both the GEMS and the BFA Fairfax grades 5-8 staff. We had the pleasure of facilitating discussions with staff to further refine our teaching and assessment practice with Transferable Skills. Transferable Skills identify the crosscutting targets for skills that FWSU believes are important to be successful in and beyond school.
As a district, FWSU has agreed upon the following transferable skills across all subjects:
As Our Transferable Skills are woven throughout all of our teaching and learning, it is our purpose to ensure that all students become informed, literate, critical thinkers who demonstrate responsible social and civic behaviors in school and beyond.
Our work is to continually define, refine and differentiate what each of these skills looks like across grade levels; how students demonstrate or struggle with them; as well as how to we can more consistently teach and assess them across grades 5-8. This requires sustained time and effort. These early release times provide essential, deep work time for educators to engage in rigorous and thoughtful conversations in service of greater clarity, coherence, and focus for our work with students.
I can confidently speak for the participants in our session and each of the sessions taking place in Fletcher, Georgia, and Fairfax that this time is productive, essential, and absolutely helps us each to better meet the needs of all learners throughout FWSU. And for that we thank you, our community, for supporting us in continuing to grow opportunities to support our “belief in what is possible.”
Justin Brown is the Principal at BFA Fairfax Middle School is a regular contributor to THE FWSU STORY.
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