001here thank you it's my understanding we don't need one to commence with this meeting so um I'll rise to the pledge thank you good evening everyone um I will hand this meeting over to Dr Solon thank you very much Mr grippo um tonight we have the opportunity to hear from our middle school and a rescheduled and we appreciate their flexibility rescheduled showcase Miss Solano you want to give an introduction sure thank you so as you know we've talked a lot about the bounce forward plan and we've talked a lot about social emotional learning for our students and tonight Dodd is going to bring to life for you a number of examples about how they've been working very hard to do just that and Infuse social emotional learning skills into the everyday life for students so
002I'd like to introduce Mike Woods and his team thank you test Ryan can you hear me thanks so thank you and and good evening um as Marlene said we're going to uh talk a little bit tonight about Mike can that screen go down anymore I just know we have some full slides are we cut off nope we're good uh we're gonna be speaking to you tonight about how social emotional learning um is embedded to the curriculum and also the practices of our classrooms at Dodd Middle School of course we have seen this um very good looking logo uh for the past few years I'm talking about the importance of intertwining complex thinking but also embedding that social emotional learning into our classrooms one of the things that we had done a few years back was
003to also incorporate that language that philosophy into our vision mission and core values when we start talking about in our mission um how we're talking not only about the complexities of academics but also supporting students social emotional needs as well our vision to empower all students with the academic social and emotional skills to lead the World of Tomorrow and then also embedded in that our core beliefs of community collaboration caring consistency and communication when we talk about you know the our five C's our vision and our mission it is important for us to support um our students in the social emotional world because we do believe that that is the stepping stone in order to get to that higher level of complexity everything at the middle school is associated with a standard um all of
004our academic classes are associated to a standard and we also have social emotional uh elements that are also um aligned to uh standard as well we use the uh collaborative for academic social emotional learning Castle uh framework as our standard in which we take a look at the attributes the five attributes of that framework of self-awareness self-management social awareness responsible decision making and relationship skills as we see those words we can tell right away how important those are in life at the middle school we always say that not every student is coming in perfectly knowing all of those attributes but that is the hard work that we do on a daily basis with our students to ensure not only do they have exposure but they are um well aware of where they are in their
005academic realm as well for the past two years we've kind of stepped it up um with our focus on social emotional learning um we've had the author Mike Anderson come in as a consultant to talk about that intrinsic student motivation I think one of the things that we saw post pandemic students who are coming up to us there was that motivation piece that we really had to take a look at especially at the middle school and our first year we did expose 100 of our staff to Mike in something we call collegial collaborations where teachers were able to teach a class in front of their peers with Mike and really take a look at what is going on in the classroom for him to provide some of support some of the supports for us to
006really kind of focus in on how we can utilize social emotional learning you're going to hear a little bit more about that tonight but some of the things that we did take a look at as a resource are the three books that Mike has written regarding Choice regarding the motivation piece and also the language that we're using with students and those were a big resource for us the other resource that we've been using as well are some online resources that Mike and person has put together for us kind of in a a nice they call a live binder on the on the web so that our teachers have 24 7 access to those resources as well one of the things you're going to hear about this evening is something I will say um we had
007a lot of choice that was really utilized as an instructional tool for our students one of the things in which we wanted to replicate since we're preaching choice for our students we also wanted to take a look at professional development for teachers how can we introduce Choice into that process as well so this year we had close to 80 percent of our staff who are participating in some choice-based professional development on a monthly basis they collaborate with Mike Anderson he was just in our building today doing some observations with teachers and teams you know teachers are continuing to talk taking a look at some online online classes some of our teachers take a look at a text-based protocol when he goes through um people are it's almost like a book club I guess it's the
008best way you can describe it and then he also does some observations of teachers and provides some feedback with really targeted feedback towards that social emotional learning he was talking with a few students a few teachers today um I thought it was really interesting how he has a the ability for us to think um in a different way for that provides us with deeper thinking and there was one piece where you know a teacher was saying make sure we do this but make sure we don't do this and don't do this um he flipped that and said you know wanna you know make it clear about what you want out of your students and advertise that more make sure we are doing this make sure we are doing that um to make it a little
009bit more of a positive spin to make sure that we're we're hitting um all the pieces that we need to so what I am going to do is I'm going to be handing off to our few of our staff first I like to publicly thank them for coming up and presenting this um I think it's it's great for them to talk um I think it would be even better if you ever had a chance to go in and visit their classrooms to see some of the things that they're describing because it truly is magical um I'm first going to introduce Tom Toscano he's one of our Math teachers to talk a little bit about building that autonomy through some choices that he provides in assessment oh hi so um one of the main ways I've
010tried to Foster social emotional learning in my math classes is by building autonomy through choice um two main issues I feel like I've been grappling with for a while is getting students to own their learning and also how to combat the Stress and Anxiety they feel while taking tests um so through a lot of PD trial and error um some research it kind of both came together and I thought there must be a better way for us to assess our students um so looking at all our social emotional work trying to help them build self-management strategies and practice responsible decision making I had to make the test theirs if they choose the way that they assess then maybe that assessment will be theirs because it really um hit me that we're never going to get
011them to own their own learning if it's not theirs and if it's ours so how I did this was I created four very different testing options um that I'll share some of them and some feedback the students gave um these are all Common Core aligned assessments they all get at every um learning Target every standard every skill we want students to master um but in very different ways so the first was the typical quiz you've we've all probably taken in our math classes very straightforward you're solving you're simplifying and a lot of students actually picked this choice because of the Comfort level with it not just it's how it's always assessed so they didn't want to take necessarily a risk the first time but that feeling of I can go back and change my answers
012I can bounce around they felt um more comfortable you know let me attack the easy section first and go through that um the next was a fill in the blank table um this really grabbed the kids that are really great with spatial reasoning and the visual Learners and again some of this the student Reflections this is all copy and paste um grammar errors and misspellings um as you can see but I I thought it was really powerful that kids could identify I'm a visual learner so I want to solve something this way um two other options we looked at was a kahoot for those of you that don't know it's a multiple choice kind of game setup and I did want to put some fun in there because I do think that that is a
013a big motivating factor for students but they gave some great feedback the one I like the most is they identify that gave them instant feedback how often we assess on something and you don't know whether it's right or wrong until the next day the next week they got feedback on problem one when they went to do problem two they got feedback on problem two so they could either rethink their thought process maybe try something different um so I thought that was that was really powerful when originally making this I thought that was kind of the lower tier dok option but they really a lot of them went with that and last um is a heat map uh if any of you are familiar with they showed a lot in baseball where batters do much better
014off when a pitch is thrown in this area the idea is that the red are some of the harder problems the blue um is where they cool things off so students had choice in this Choice assessment so there was 32 questions that were only asked to complete 10 to 15 and they really based what problems they solved off of how did I do on the problem before that so I thought that problem was easy they try to move towards red um they thought they weren't really sure what to do you know kind of worked their way back down through blue so that one was really the they had the choice between the four assessments and they had a lot and that one was Choice within the choice um so this was something you know this
015was really a trial and error for me trying new things and the feedback was some of the most this is just eight examples some of the most powerful I've gotten in my career um I had kids afterwards being like so we're going to test like this again right you're already looking forward to the next test like yeah like you know this is math right like no one wants to take a math test they were like they were um excited they felt you know like said they they really felt like they were showing their best learning it wasn't about here's a test let me avoid errors it was here's a product of my learning um here's what I know so this was kind of done like I said research PD trial and error a little under
016a year ago and we've almost not given a normal assessment since then because it's been such powerful feedback from the students so that idea that you know social emotional learning isn't you know it can also be foster it should be excuse me fostering kids environment where they feel like they can be successful and they feel like they have ownership in their learning so that's just kind of how I've looked at the social emotional lens and I will pass it off to my colleague Maria talk a little bit about language [Music] folks foreign malali I'm a language arts teacher at Dodd 7th grade and thanks for having me tonight I want to talk a little bit about SEL language day to day while I do teach language arts and um we do have some teachers tonight
017who will talk specifically about SEL in their classrooms I want to focus my talking points tonight about how my work with Mike Anderson our PD and our training and our coaching has led me personally to change a bit of my own language day to day and as I reflect on some of my training and coaching with Mike Anderson and getting ready for tonight I saw really three main themes when it comes to Everyday language with our students language that's more inclusive uh language that incorporates a growth mindset and I notice in my reading a language that gives formative feedback so when it comes to inclusive language um what I've learned through the reading is using language that is student based versus the teacher so removing that pronoun I for my language has been something that's
018I'm gradually removing from day to day so not necessarily I posted this on classroom um I I will show you this and let's take a look at this creation of mine it's more about the students and everyone has access to the notes versus I posted in classroom day after day after day they tend to tune that out um because it's teacher focused versus student Focus so using language like everyone has access so it feels like they have that ownership um finding that language where students can freely discuss in a safe environment where they can check in with friends before they raise their hand or feel like taking a chance because kids are reluctant they have that anxiety so let's brainstorm with a friend to do that check-in then they might be more likely to participate
019in the discussion so I try to use language that is much more inclusive with growth mindset I try to use language that focuses more on the process than the product so instead of using language like uh you know great first paragraph I might say wow you've been adding more sensory details to your writing so focusing more on the process of the writing versus the product that they're producing um again is there another strategy you can try versus focusing on what's wrong focusing on what strategy can we try next again using more growth mindset language um when I think about formative feedback that is communication about their goals students should feel like uh they know where they are in the learning process it should be descriptive it should be specific and non-judgmental so I feel like
020kids would understand where they fall in the range of their learning Target so trying to use language like yes that's right now let's look at this paragraph So they feel like okay I'm on a roll now now but I'm I'm up for this new challenge um when they are getting formative feedback they know there's time this feedback isn't a surprise it's not at the end of The Learning Target so when you're using that kind of language like there's plenty of time still to revise that gives them that ease that lesson of the anxiety because they know oh I'm in the learning process I'm not just getting feedback at the end when it's when it's all over it should not be a surprise at the summative because they've been getting that language all along so um
021I just wanted to give you a little sense of how our coaching and our work at Dodd has changed language in our classrooms particularly mine and in my personal experience and you know I want to thank you for having me tonight and at this time I'd like to introduce Kelly Mahoney um who will describe um 8th grade ELA and some work she's been doing in her classroom thanks so much hi everybody thank you Maria for that I think this connects really well because like Maria just mentioned um less focus on language here and more focus on what the curriculum and kind of self-reflection looks like in terms of assignments and relationship building is kind of what I'm going to be sharing with you today so I'm going to probably be saying we a lot when
022I say that I mean myself and my mentor Carly brandom who's unfortunately not here with us today but that's the we that I'm referring to as to try to avoid any confusion so the first thing first piece I want to talk to you about today is how we've used social emotional learning in the ELA classroom in terms of our self-reflection so I'm a strong believer of having frequent and consistent opportunities for self-reflection not only is it important for 13 and 14 year olds to think about their own thinking and their choices and all that it's just important for humans to do that so not only does that help us to build relationships between um students because we can ask them just how their day is going and asking them to reflect on like how their
023weekend was and things like that that helps us kind of to understand them more as people but we could also use it to help them kind of think about their progress and attitude toward units individual lessons individual assignments so something that we specifically try to use one piece of it that's less of a written self-reflection is this blob tree so this blob tree was shared during my new teacher orientation at Cheshire and it's just something that's so wonderful we've Incorporated it a lot into our classroom so I'm sure all of you are very familiar with the mood meter I know the elementary schools utilize that a ton to get some insight on how students are doing in terms of day-to-day feeling as well as what they're doing in the classroom this blob tree I feel
024allows us to add a little bit more Nuance to that so as you can see there's a bunch of little blob guys up in that nice tree so we have of and everything from facial expressions to body language as well as the placement itself on the tree so depending on whatever we're using that for it can really kind of show us through either a written or a verbal explanation the mindset of a student so for instance I guess in the classroom if someone is placing themselves up on the right corner at 21 I might take that as the placement on the tree telling me that their progress is really great so they're feeling good about the content itself but maybe they're feeling a little bit isolated and not super connected to the other students in
025the classroom so while they're making great progress maybe we need to do a little bit more in terms of getting them to feel connected with us whereas my orange friend number four down there looks pretty happy to be there but um maybe for the placement on the tree if that's I'm asking the students to reflect their progress in a lesson I might be a little bit worried about that guy down there um and I think for our purpose is today to kind of connect a little bit further I'm going to feel like I'm number six and all my fellow presenters up here and number seven kind of just trying to help us along um also because I can't really see any of their um you know hands my hands are a little sweaty right now
026a little nervous um can't really tell heartbeat from that image but you know I'll go with the six and seven for us today moving into a little bit more of the writing curriculum what we really focused on during the summer curriculum writing for both 7th and 8th grade was this idea of implementing different topics and writing um assignments where students could really feel passionate about what they were doing as well as really seeing a genuine view of themselves and what they were investing so much time in in the classroom so what you see over on the left is a bar graph at the beginning of the year Carly and I had our students take a core values quiz themselves so I know it's a little hard to see but it ranges from everything from Fitness
027to contribution flexibility humility Justice love mindfulness all these different things that we're asking students to think about what matters to them so what passions do they have what things do they seek out in friends families what values do they really feel very strongly about and something that I wanted to bring up because it really struck me when we were looking at this um data afterward was the top three I have little stars next to um two of them didn't surprise me at all two being fun and three being humor so 13 and 14 year olds I totally expect them to want to come to class and laugh and you know have a good time with the different lessons that we're doing but the third one that really kind of made an impact on me was
028trust so if you see at the very bottom there trust is one of the longest bars meaning over the 200 students that we surveyed they want to feel trusted they want to feel like they can trust other people be able to take risks in the classroom be able to you know find people that they're comfortable and safe around so that really struck me just because you know I sometimes forget how real of a human quality that is when I'm with younger people all the time but they really have the same sort of needs and desires as I think we all could probably relate to in this room so I know you're probably like wow that's great one day you're at a core values quiz how does that matter so if you take a look at
029the right hand side this is a facing assignment where we ask them to really try to apply those core values to two specific genres of writing so you see in informative and argument debate so I have different prompting questions under each of those that gets them to think about their passions and interests in the lens of that specific writing genre so for informative it could be anything from what information do you feel like you want to share with others to if I asked a kid like talk for three minutes straight without top without stopping like what are you an expert on that could clearly become an essay so those became you know essays about how to spot fake sneakers so someone who wants to be like an authenticator when they grow up all the way
030to someone like compiling a bunch of their grandmother's recipes and and things like that so clearly the passion and interest that they had came through in the informative as well as we just finished up with the argument one so one of the ones on the bottom that I have the prompting question is what is an unpopular opinion you have um I just read like probably one of the best essays ever where it was a student it kind of came from his debate long debate with his father about what what Star Wars film was the best in the franchise so it was this awesome thing where he used box office data and expert testimonies and things like that on why he believed Revenge of the Sith was the winner of of that franchise so it really
031was very cool to see this year the work that we put in at the summer curriculum come through in these students really feeling connected and engaged with the different things that they were spending so much time in the classroom doing so from self-reflection to clearly trying to get their passions and their voice and their ideas down on paper that's kind of what it's looked like in eighth grade ELA at Dodd and now I'd like to pass it along to my lovely colleagues Jess and Christina to finish us up hi everyone my name is Jess Tressel I am one of the school counselors at the middle school and this is Christina Esposito one of the English teachers in seventh grade um and we teamed up this year to really pilot a program around executive functioning you
032know we had some wonderful presenters up here today talking about the fabulous things they're doing but all of those things require executive functioning skills um and we were talking at the end of last year and we noticed that there's some deficits in our this age group with those skills which is developmentally appropriate but doesn't mean we can't help Foster those so what are executive functioning skills they are it's the management system of our brain it's what helps us plan organize and execute tasks it's really what we use every single day to get our goals accomplished some of the skills involved in executive functioning are time management organization planning task initiative emotional regulation all of the things that could be very challenging for middle school students but not impossible so what we decided to do is
033we teamed up and created an executive functioning eye block so an iblock is what Dodd calls a study hall so at this age these kids still need structure during that time we can't just say you have 45 minutes use it as you wish they really need a balance so um what we did is I teamed up with Christina and I started coming in about once a month to teach a lesson around these skills so maybe one month was dedicated to time management the next month was dedicated to task initiative and then from there Christina would almost work as a coach every day after that working with the kids to really perfect that skill and I would come in and help out from time to time and we found it to be a really wonderful experience
034that we hope to grow to the other eyeblocks that exist at um Dodd you know during this time we want to provide them as many opportunities as they can to use these skills because we don't want their brains to really prune out this skill level we want to Foster it so that they can continue to grow into high school with this in adulthood we use these skills every day um so I don't want to go too far and steal what you're going to say but um go ahead so in my eye block what does this look like we started with what we call kind of the basic so self-awareness if you're not aware of your behaviors that you have struggle organizing or prioritizing or picking out which assignment to do we gotta start there so
035Justin I started with recognizing behaviors and habits and then systems of organization and learning how to prioritize from there they graduated to focus techniques so 12 and 13 year olds always like I can't focus I'm like yeah I get that dude so we brainstormed every Technique we could think of to help kids focus and then they created their own personalized list that they've taped in their lockers Focus control sorry Focus strategies also coincide with impulse control if any of you have ever raised a 12 year old not that I have yet you might understand especially 12 year old boys impulse control they want to do things throw things if there's a ball they have to go catch it in a classroom so next up are ink pulse control strategies and they are still working on
036those but getting so much better we continually work on growth mindset and attitude that I can do it attitude it's okay to make mistakes and how to help yourself um the beauty of all of this is there's that choice Factor there so what you know organization looks different for all of us so allowing them to explore those options and see what works best for them and also learn from each other there's that Community feel the the kids in this eye block um have really leaned on each other so maybe one who's really strong with organization and the other one who's not they're teamed up cleaning out the other person's Locker their team up helping them organize their folders and there's a lot more power coming from up here versus us um so that's been pretty
037cool to watch yes and the first thing we do in this eyeblock that I forgot to mention sit down take a minute and then you each student contributes a task or an item to the list of things they have to do that week so often people in French together will rely on each other because there's french chests coming up this just happened with the Spanish test today on Thursday students are like oh my gosh I'm so glad you said that can you help me with that and I'm happy to report they got AIDS so I found this so powerful in this eye black I started transferring it into my classroom so during the first marking period quarter one I had management Mondays the kids learned to love them so the first 10 or 20 minutes
038of class we worked on a specific scale and implemented it over time daily into the classroom so we have anchor charts in my room the most helpful one were those Focus techniques what's going on do you need to clear your space X Out of all the tabs you have going on are you thirsty and didn't realize it do you need to dim the lights do you need to sit over there today because you're just so distracted or do you need to sit next to a buddy who can help you so every day we pick a focus strategy we go for it and it's a lot of trial and error too because kids aren't entirely sure what works for them yet so we wanted to create that safe space where they can figure out what works
039and apply it daily the results these are quotes from real kids my favorite is the one about snacks and food so since the beginning of the year I'm less shy and more focused listening to music and the sex helped to feel more at home and relaxing I got a lot of work done in your eye black the next one's pretty cool too I've learned how to organize all my thoughts and what work I have to do it keeps me on track so I don't have as much late work as I did before this helps control their anxiety so they're not constantly trying to do Spanish without social studies and then they go home and they're like wait what's going on so the amount of late we're coming in has significantly decreased and I've personally seen
040incredible progress from some of these students from the beginning of the year to now where they used to have late assignments all the time not a singlely assignment out of order thing it's pretty amazing and then what I'm seeing is just happier children that are more confident and are okay saying hey I'm struggling with this area it's normalized um so there's not this fear of saying you know I am not I'm ill-equipped it's saying I know that this is normal for everybody which just builds their confidence and overall they're just happier which is nice to see thank you and as you can see there's some really great things um going on now what we have to do is then look forward how can we grow this um I will say and and found out today
041that um our PE staff uh has been invited to write a blog post for uh Mike Anderson um so that you know that'll get out nationally um we had our one of our reading teachers also uh Mike asked to write a blog post as well we did have one of our presenters tonight who wrote a blog post I'm not gonna give out who it is because he's very shy um but um I think some of the things that we are we're really looking forward to is really diving more into the work I know Christina has given some uh anecdotal um you know data about you know kids improving those types of things but some of the things we want to take a look at is identify more measures and how can we measure this um
042how can we measure this growth um we're taking a look at um as they had said we're piloting this executive functioning iblock I know the high school has a has an organizational EFI block and it's something that we like to expand for all of our eye blocks as well um we're continuing to embed those Castle standards into practices we're doing some work to prepare for curriculum writing Institute as it will be a part of our process um going forward so that concludes our presentation we'd like to field any questions that you may have all the children getting access because actually the executive functioning portion it seems like it's a small group versus everybody I just need that clarified yeah and actually in the in the beginning of the school year we have a lot of
043organizational elements that we do the first few days a lot of people are are introduced to their students what is the routine of the class what are the expectations of the class that is something I do want to take a look at for next year and see if we can kind of expand some of this I think we've learned a lot from Mike Anderson we're learning a lot more about executive functioning um so we're going to be taking a look at that through PD and implementing it into next year as well hi I want to address my comments to Colin Tom did I get it right I don't usually um in the math thing because I was never a math student um I really really appreciate that and I I just want everybody to know
044to put together four very different kinds of tests every time you're going to do an assessment on whatever material that you need to assess is just an enormous amount of work and I want to applaud you for doing that and because those assessments clearly you've got really good responses from them students it made it fun for them because they because that's first of all it's so much fun so my question is do you think that the second time they do it they'll choose the same or will they bounce around and try to do different things so this turned into I did it a second day I didn't just assess this over one day if they pushed the two days so kids could have different options um I definitely wanted to give them try something different
045and it and that's kind of been where we've more morph this into the assessments almost take usually two days because we spend the first half of the first day talking about the choices talking about what's a good choice what's a good choice for you um and kids can absolutely change their choice I misclicked two out of four times did I just stopped doing it absolutely like you can you can move around in do that kind of thing and one thing I didn't say from this I met who was I the reason I wanted to give them multiple cracks at it too was kids really had an opportunity to not give the same product 28 kids gave 28 different no here's my learning on the topic so I think that alone made them feel much better
046about it this problem isn't worth five points they could ask me a question on the test and I would answer it all right now go do five problems like this and show me you can do you mean I can ask a question on a test and you'll answer it yeah sure we have all these other ways where you can show that um it was a lot of work and I appreciate you seeing that I'm certainly not alone um I think this has kind of most of the people in this room yeah it goes into putting together but this is this is I don't say it's caught fire a little bit in the department where the department is everyone has tried Choice assessment this year I have a couple teachers I work with two that have
047fully gone in on it um with me on the last couple months so it's I agree to want to create like there's four of us creating different ones so it's really um become a great collaborative effort College and given all the kids kind of the option to have this as well thank you and I do think I just want to point out one of the fascinating things with Tom especially when I uh saw kids taking the assessment of the heat map not every student is in the lower left hand corner trying to take the easiest you know questions they are challenging themselves so that intrinsic motivation through Choice one of the things that Mike Anderson has really brought to us you do see kids making them you know challenging themselves in that process so that's
048really fascinating to see as well I know I would have taken every blue question but that's just me any other questions the fourth row down it looks a little more molded in um that was a starting point so I did give them a starting point that I wanted that because I wanted to make sure they hit all the standards so they they could definitely have worked their way bottom left if they didn't feel great about it but we had it all in the same kind of basis and uh just abort's information Community Information this was uh made it really possible through our use of the federal funding the Art Festival is part of the plan that bounce forward where we talked about you know using the resources that we have to support the growth of
049our entire staff because if we hired in this case a math coach that could have been with us for a year that's great they could have been packed it maybe a hundred kids for that year but these assessments you see across 300 students in perpetuity so we got much better bang for our buck there and you can hear the pride in our teacher's voice about the growth they've made their real pros and continuous Learners and they see how this growth supports their students so it's really exciting to see that come to fruition thank you very much we appreciate it [Music] thank you yes oops I'm sorry I thought it was going to sneak my Channel well thank you for that great uh presentation this evening um uh seeing their businesses concluded uh we will motion
050to adjourn so move in okay all in favor great meeting is adjourned thank you