Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to Winston Middle School --

We hope our efforts in planning, teaching, scoring, and improving student achievement and teacher performance provide key resources for your work. Please use the comment box below to let us know how you liked our web site, sample performance tasks, and how we might improve them.

Sincerely,

Eldon J. Thomas, Principal

Winston Middle School

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Mission

We support and carry out the mission of the Baltimore City Public School System:

The mission of the Baltimore City Public School System, in concert with students, families, and the broader community, is to prepare all students to be responsible citizens and afford them the opportunity to acquire skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary to make informed decisions that lead to meaningful and productive lives.

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Our priorities for 1999-2000 are student achievement, attendance, staff development, and compliance with local, state, and federal managerial procedures and guidelines:

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT - Implement continuous and intense performance-based instruction, writing across the curriculum, interdisciplinary teaching, and use of rubrics and technology in all areas.

ATTENDANCE - Continue to reduce the number of students with 20 or more absences for the year, increase the attendance of the eighth grade, and decrease absences in the problematic months of December, January, February, and June.

STAFF DEVELOPMENT - Provide focused and personalized training to meet the diverse needs of staff and deliver training in writing across the curiculum, performance-based instruction, Dimensions of Learning, the development and use of rubrics in the content areas, reading/writing in content areas, and integrating technology into classroom instruction.

COMPLIANCE WITH ALL LOCAL, STATE, AND FEDERAL MANAGERIAL PROCEDURES AND POLICIES Ensure the IEP process is implemented accurately, provide apprpriate training to special educators to ensure the proper provision of services mandated by students' IEPs, and provide opportunities for special educators as well as general educators who hold the provisional certificate to seek certification.

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Performance Tasks

We are part of the Baltimore City Public School System, Northeast Area, 1999-2000 Staff Development Program entitled "Better Teaching, Better Learning." The program offers our teachers monthly opportunities to plan, teach, assess, and act on the results of performance-based lessons and assessments to help improve student performance on classroom and MSPAP performance assessments. The performance-based lessons are developed with the help of TaskBuilder™-- an interactive software program to help teachers improve their productivity and student achievement.

The program is delivered through a team approach involving our principal, one Teacher Leader, and classroom teachers from grades 6, 7, and 8. Our monthly meetings are supported by a WORKFORCE 2000, INC. consultant.

The program consists of a month-by-month, site-specific implementation strategy through training, practice, and coaching sessions. After a monthly coaching session our teachers teach their performance-based lessons to their students and discuss the results during the next month's meeting. Samples of the performance tasks and results are provided below for your review. Each task represents growth from our current levels of school performance to our vision of high performance on basic skills, rigorous content, and higher order thinking skills. Please consider them as "works in progress" and adopt or adapt them to your classroom. And please send us your comments for making our tasks better.

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Comments:

Please enter your comments or questions about our approach and sample performance tasks in the text block below. We appreciate your feedback.

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Link to other schools in the TaskBuilder Network

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