West Milford. Director of Education: ‘We feel very confident that we are prepared to significantly enhance our district distance learning plan’
| 27 Aug 2020 | 12:50
Daniel Novak, the West Milford Director of Education, at this week’s School Board meeting.
Daniel Novak, the West Milford Director of Education, provided the following statement to The Messenger:
We feel very confident that we are prepared to significantly enhance our district distance learning plan.
Throughout May and June, district “Restart” committees met to discuss our spring health-related closing and determine a course of action to improve upon the lessons we learned through that experience.
Committees included parents, teachers, administrators and board of education trustees. In those discussions with participants, and the results received from a parent virtual learning survey, we were able to determine a course of action that reflects the values and expectations from our parents, students, and staff.
This course of action includes detailed scheduling, direct, on-screen instruction, a reasonable expectation for independent work for each level K-12, and a variety of instructional formats that include live lessons with classroom or course teacher, targeted recorded lessons, appropriate video selections that students may refer to for support, and a formative assessment process that determines whether or not a student has mastered the selected learning objective.
Google Meet
To put this simply, our teachers will be teaching whole and small groups via Google Meet and parents can expect required attendance in a format that greatly resembles our existing schedules.
This is a drastic change, in many cases, from our process this past spring and greatly reflects the thoughts, feelings, and expectations from our Restart committee conversations and Parent Survey.
All of this being said, there is no substitute for in person instruction and we are eager to implement the hybrid schedule that we were very proud to present, when we return to school on Oct. 1. At this time, we do not foresee significant changes to the proposed hybrid learning plan considering a delayed start.
- Patricia Keller