September 3rd, 2019

Welcome to the September edition of the PL Lighthouse! 
This monthly email blast and webpage has been designed to serve much like a lighthouse, to serve as a way forward and help in navigating through the busy school year. Nothing else speaks of safety in the face of adversity and challenge quite like the lighthouse. 

Design Studio [September 26th]
Our first design studio of the year is Thursday, September 26th from 8:30AM-4:00 PM and will be held at Linius D. Wright Admin Building at 9400 North Central Expressway.  This workshop is required for Principals + PL Quarterbacks at existing and year 1 schools. We strongly suggest that you bring others on your leadership team to help ensure that PL implementation is distributed across all leaders on campus. If you have any questions or concerns please reach out to Kristen as soon as possible. 

• [ACTION ITEM]: Please submit team members attending no later than Tuesday, September 10th at 5PM by adding names + contact information to the spreadsheet here. We'll use this list to send out final communication to attendees Tuesday, September 17th. If you have any questions about who should attend from your campus, please reach out or join the PL monthly office hours to ask. 
• [ACTION ITEM]: Forward the design studio calendar invite to team members attending. 
• We will not be providing lunch for this workshop, so please plan to bring your lunch and/or know you'll have some time to leave for lunch during design studio. 

PL Rubric with Updated TEI Alignment 
During the August PL QB Huddle, quarterbacks dove into the new [TEI] Teacher Performance Rubric to revisit alignment to our PL Coaching and Development Rubric. Click here to review the current draft of updated alignment [original notes here]. You have until Tuesday, September 10th to share any feedback via Google comments before we'll publish the next iteration of the rubric. We'll share the updated PL Rubric with revised alignment and update all resources on the PL Toolbox no later than September 26th. We will also be reprinting the PL Coaching Guides to every campus leader and hope to have these back from production in October. 

Individual Campus Bios 
Help us keep the Dallas ISD Personalized Learning Website and the PL Toolbox updated with the most accurate information about each one of our campuses.

For existing, pilot, and year 1 campuses, please complete the template assignment in the PL Cohort Google Classroom to help update/write campus bios for the 2019-2020 school year by September 27th. 
PL QBs, this is assignment is under QB Huddles and is only accessible to you. If you want to share with others on your team, you'll need to share the individual template as they won't see it in Google Classroom.  See below for what this assignment looks like:

We're on the Search for all Google Certified Educators!
We're looking for all teachers and leaders who have earned their Level 1 and Level 2 Google certifications! Please encourage your staff to complete the quick form at www.thepltoolbox.com/googlecert to let us know which certification[s] he/she has earned so far. TOP SECRET:We're planning to surprise all educators the first week in October in their classroom [or office] with some Google swag to help recognize their dedication to learning. We will also be awarding the campus with the highest percentage of staff certified with the first Google Guru at September's design studio. 

iNACOL Conference 
October 28-31st is the annual iNACOL conference in Palm Springs, CA! Learn more about the conference at www.inacol.org/symposium. If you're interested in attending and/or sending team members to the conference, add name[s] on the conference travel document here by September 12th. In years past we've registered everyone from the district as one group so that we receive the group discount [for groups of 5 or more] and then each campus pays separately for those attending. 

If you're a PL QB and interested in attending, your campus is in good standing, and your principal approves- this is a conference/trip that we'll cover registration and travel costs for you to attend. Add your name to the conference document linked above and we'll reach out to confirm you're eligible. 

Edcamp Rescheduled 
The edcamp originally scheduled for Saturday, September 7th has been rescheduled to later in the fall due to low registration. More information to be shared at September's design studio.