Louis Pizitz Middle (Vestavia Hills City) Instructional Round

May 3- Louis Pizitz Middle (Vestavia Hills City)
Grades: 6-8
# Students: 1,114
Demographics: 9% African American, 8% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 79% White
F/R lunch: 7%
Registration: 8:15 a.m.
Begin: 8:30 a.m.
End: 2:30 p.m.
What can participants expect to see when they visit?
Since the fall of 2014, Pizitz Middle School teachers have been working on incorporating the tenets of Ron Berger’s Leaders of Their Own Learning into their classrooms. Small groups of teachers from Pizitz have been participating in the Powerful Conversations Network for the last several years learning how to use learning targets as a powerful self-assessing tool. Pizitz Middle School teacher leaders have been bringing back the learning to their colleagues and student-owned learning using learning targets has been the focus of the school for the last year.
One of the challenges has been to move the learning targets from words on the board to actionable statements for students. Additionally, teaching students the meta-cognitive skill of self-assessment has also provided to be challenging. Even though much progress has been made toward the goal, much work is still ahead for us.