Board of Education 5-5-22

001a little bit about sue she is one of the winniest volleyball coaches in the state of connecticut uh she is also our boys volleyball coach as well so the girls alone she has over 500 wins in the boys participated in eight state uh tournaments for the girls four of those were state championships three uh she participated in three for the boys uh two were state championships one was a runner-up as well um she's earned multiple head um coach of the year awards throughout her her career so so far she's been inducted into the connecticut women's hall of fame which i'll get to she also has close to 60 athletes over her years that have played or are playing in college volleyball so that's just a testament to their love of the sport and their continuation

002of it the greatest thing about sue as well is not only is our kids successful on the court but they're successful in the classroom because her volleyball teams tend to rank fairly high with overall gpas so that's a testament to her as a teacher and a coach so congratulate justin well respected throughout the state of connecticut uh with all of our volleyball coaches and this past year sue on behalf of the board of education i'd like to award you this recognition for the introduction to the connecticut women's volleyball hall of fame [Applause] you know people that know me know that i'm never what i would say is what i said when i got this award at the state level is um you know i mean 30 i mean i coached eight years before here so

003over 30 years of coaching you know those these accolades that i get are just a testament to the players i've had the coaches i've had um the parents who have supported the program the administration who supported us um you know it's it's never a one-person show when you you know when you get these awards it's there's a lot of people that lift you up and i've had a lot of people have lifted me up over the years so i really do appreciate this thank you [Applause] thank you [Applause] before we get into the showcase uh are there any members of the audience that wishes to address the board is there are none i think they're all people there's a lot of people here that's quiet you can't afford good stuff so high school showcase sure

004thank you so this is sort of the culmination of the showcases this year we started with elementary middle and high school and this is our attempt to showcase for you the common thread through the curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade and what i really hope you come away with tonight after this third session is to really see the process and how this process goes from teachers sitting down and really puzzling over a list of standards a volume of standards and unpacking them and parsing them and collaborating to see what they mean and uh having a common understanding of what exactly needs to be taught to students and the level of complexity that goes into that to make it come alive for the students that we have here in cheshire public schools so i will now

005turn it over to dr reed and her team who have prepared a lovely presentation for you this evening so welcome to our high school uh showcase presentation highlighting the curriculum writing institute i would like to welcome tonight we have lisa bernabe the nap department chair leslie pair the business department chair terry morneau business teacher and mike kelly business teacher we considered also sharing having the world language department share we actually could have every department chair but we'd be here until about midnight tonight um so we really focused on the business and math experience because they were very connected and related to one another and we thought it was a good example to share out for the importance of the cwi um before i hand it over i just want to say we had about 17

006to 20 high school teachers participate last summer we hope to have more this summer and the general consensus was that um the importance of this it was probably the best professional development the teachers experienced they said and the importance they saw was that the curriculum was really a living document that continually needs to be enhanced and improved upon in order to increase student learning so having said that i will hand it over to lisa bernabe to begin our presentation thank you good evening i'm lisa vernavi i'm the math department chair at cheshire high school um i would love for you to join into my presentation tonight so that we can all engage in what the students felt and experienced as they went through a performance task so if you'd be willing and your technology to

007join in um you could go to joinpd.com and enter this code of course the one night being good i left my cult fallen to get excited about it it'll just ask you to log in with google in the audience feel free to join in as well so while you're doing that i just want to thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight to tell you about my experience at the curriculum writing institute last summer it was truly beneficial experience that has significantly impacted my planning this year my instruction and my student achievement we were provided with outstanding professional development we are surrounded by this energy of enthusiastic colleagues and even in late june it was still such an energizing experience to be part of we never knew what marlene was going to bring in

008next for us um we have these long pockets of time to work collaboratively and develop high quality performance tasks and scaffolding that we could have never done during the busyness of the regular school year so when we left the curriculum uh writing institute i was so eager we hadn't even had a day off for summer yet and i couldn't wait to get back and start my first day of teaching because i knew these tasks were coming so let's take you in that's the extension and talk about what we did last summer cheshire k-12 so last summer the math department we had three teams of teachers who worked on algebra 1 geometry and algebra 2. and tonight i'm going to take you through an experience that all of our algebra 2 students have now had during

009this past school year we're going to do a performance task on quadratic functions which happens to be a critical unit in our high school curriculum we started by taking a deep dive into the common core state standards and as marlene was talking about that's quite comprehensive you'll notice there's about three pages of standards on quadratic functions at the high school level that we had to dive into that we had to unwrap and identify the depth and rigor that the students needed to be assessed in our performance task we need to be able to come up with a comprehensive real world scenario in which students could graph interpret and solve quadratic equations not only using multiple representations but also multiple methods so out of that comprehensive list of uh standards we were able to come up

010with six big ideas and two essential questions that we wanted all students to be able to answer so we designed a task to focus on these key standards and these two essential questions ultimately we wanted all students to be able to efficiently solve graph interpret quadratic equations based on the form three different forms of quadratic equations that they're given so here we go congratulations you've just been hired as an intern for our new minor league baseball franchise the cheshire reds the owners are ready to make a major investment in building a new stadium here in town but you need to put together a business plan you need to determine um how long it's going to take in order to become profitable and here's your job number one you need to find a home run hitter

011to boost ticket sales you need to determine the best selling price of cheshire chickens family meals to maximize profit and you need to determine how we can launch t-shirts into the stands to bring in additional income so all of our students were faced with these three tasks at hand they had some constraints that they had to work with in terms of develop developing their business plan it's a 1.5 million dollar investment and a 30 game home season and in terms of figuring out our home run hitter they had to take in some constraints of the fields we had to look at the dimensions of left field center field right field and they had to take into consideration that there was a 10 foot high fence i'm going to share these with you as well because

012we're going to have a question coming up that you're going to need that information for so task one students had to decide who should they should draft as a homeland player they were given three different players lefty lopez who hits consistently to left field so keep in mind the depth of the fence and their equation was given the flight of their ball was given in standard form homer jackson tends to hit the center field his equation was given what we call intercept form and rocket clementine hits to right field and that equation was given in vertex form so students were given this information know the dimensions of the field know that there's a 10 foot fence they are now left to go and figure out who they should draft as the home run hitter there's

013a lot of information for them to synthesize here and a lot of different approaches some students dug in algebraically some decided to make graphs i'm going to give you a little scaffolding here and provide you with a diagram of what was going on so here's your first chance to interact if you go to the presentation on your phone take a look at your graph who do you think it was that hit the home run so the graph in red is lefty lopez the graph in blue homer jackson and c rocket clementine uh or homer no i'm an english major all right well let's take a look so we have uh two for me and four for c so let's go back here uh did lefty lopez hit a home run no no no he didn't

014hit it far enough right he didn't even get to the fence he didn't even get to this at least without a bounce oh never mind here's homer jackson did homer jackson no home run he hit the fence he got a double he hit the fence he hit the fence yup so it went long enough but it wasn't high enough at the moment when it would have passed the fence so great great distractor right and therefore it was good old rocket clementine you know where i got these names from right i'm assuming it was roberto c reggie for b probably yeah so um so yes it turns out to be rocket clementine so after students are able to figure it out it actually took a little longer than it just took right here right they weren't

015given this necessarily given the scaffold oh the picture makes it easy yeah so they were asked to sketch by hand the graph of rocket clementine's law and according to the standards one of the standards is identify the key features of the graph so on that graph students had to find the domain the range where the function was increasing decreasing find the vertex the x-intercepts and the y-intercept and then interpret it also from the standards in terms of the real-world context of the problem so they had to understand the mathematics behind it being able to put it in terms of context so that was task one task two concession sales sales so we gave them this table which lists the price of a family meal how many meals we could sell at that price and what

016our profit would be the students had to create a scatter plot of this data use technology to get a regression quadratic equation for it and then use it to find the maximum profit of the meals now again a little scaffolding for you oh the other part of this problem is they had to solve a system of a linear and quadratic equation to find the break-even point so not only did we need to find maximum profit we needed to know how what price to sell the meals at so we could break even nice connections with business uh all the way through so here's your next one what price of the family meal will result in the maximum profit so does anybody want to take a guess okay can i ask a question yes what are the

017parameters i mean i know what parameters are these don't is that the price of a meal yes so it represents the price of the family meal and the um the profit that we would make if we sold the meals at that price so when i'm asking for that maximum profit what we're actually looking for is this point here the highest point on the graph which is called the vertex so if we were to sell meals for twenty three dollars okay 23 is dollars that's the unit exactly so if we were to sell for twenty three dollars we'd make eight thousand four hundred and fifty dollars which would be the maximum profit gotcha okay and what's the negative 50. so that that's a great question what we would look at and what we're going to look

018at with the students is is do you notice a relationship between what we call vertex form of the equation in the actual vertex and you can see those values are given in the equation right there okay the negative 50 the negative notice that the parabola opens down sure i get it it affects that piece of it and the 50 is the a value which it's not going to give you a lot of meaning in terms of the context of this problem but what we focused in on in this what we call vertex form was that 23 representing the x-coordinate of the vertex and the 8450 which was the y-coordinate okay the students made that connection so the next piece was to come up with that break even point so what this represents again is the

019price and now we're comparing the price to our expenses so according to this graph we would have to charge ten dollars a meal in order to break even students again weren't necessarily using this graph and this technology in order to do this we had learned algebraically to solve by hand a system again a standard of a linear and a nonlinear function all right task three so here's what they have to do they're going to be given an equation which represents the flight of the t-shirt into the stands we need to be able to hit our customers which are 100 feet up on up in the level can we do that so they had to figure out algebraically that was possible or graphically we asked them to show us using two different methods again going back

020to the standards students need to be able to solve quadratics using the quadratic formula complete it's called completing the square factoring and also solve graphically so there's always so there's so much um so many different strategies and methods that they can bring to these problems and um that are included in all the standards so when they did that they got this graph right here so how long would somebody have or when might they be able to catch when might they be able to catch a t-shirt so it represents time in seconds and the height of the t-shirt what's the reaction time about three and a half seconds yeah right so at 1.28 they have a chance it's at 100 feet and then it's going to come back down at about 4.732 so the next task

021we pose to them is well if you can actually get it up higher you can double your profits because you're going to be able to sell to double the people so we ask them how are you going to adjust your equation to get it to be more than 200 feet if you're able to go in and click this link we have these little sliders here that you can move to figure out what you might need to change in order to get the ball to increase so students could experi experiment with that to see how what those factors change okay so we can obviously see if you think it's h or k the h value of the k value that's going to make the graph change it's going to be k right so as k gets

022bigger we can see that i can reach up into the second flight and then students were asked to put together a business plan they had to summarize their findings based on the amount of income we're going to gain per game our concession sales and our t-shirt sales and figure out when we were actually going to break even on that 1.5 million dollar investment so not only did we take time during this week believe it or not we actually still had some time left after we created all of this we went and created rubrics for each of the tasks we wanted to make sure that the language aligned with this rigor and depth of the standards as well to make sure that students were reaching where we wanted them to be so just to summarize thanks

023to the curriculum institute not only do we get these fantastic t-shirts which we wore to convocation we were all so proud to wear them we really feel that we're just preparing our students better for college and career readiness when the psats had come back in december after we had given this task in class i was so pleased because i had seen this math question on the psat so let's give you a minute to read it so you know the answer right so you just hit the accelerator based on what you saw in our performance test does the form of the equation at least look familiar to you right this is classified as a hard question and it has a cross-cutting concept with science in it but our students i would like the percent higher but

024still scored double than what the state average was on this particular question anybody want to take a guess as to what it was based on what we did so it's looking for that maximum again it's looking for the maximum at the x value the x value would be the 1905 it was just like that x coordinate of the vertex that we learned in vertex form so such a nice smooth connection even though it was in a different context because students were used to seeing these types of problems they not only saw these types of problems on the psat and on our performance tasks in class we are making sure that students are getting exposure to problems like this on a regular basis in class we want to make sure that they're ready and prepared for

025the depth and the rigor that these standards are calling for so this was an example we had used in class um pumpkin chunkin there's the festivals every year where they launch pumpkins so we took them through very similar type experience um where they had to look at the three types of equations and be able to use those two and apply to solve problems so just in general i would say taking away from this experience we went back we had about six uh regular teachers and a special ed teacher we've gone back we've shared these experiences and this is now how we're starting to operate when we're planning in our plcs every day we're planning collaboratively engaging in relevant tasks we're thinking deeper about our instruction about how to prepare kids to be ready to tackle

026tasks like this and we're building the appropriate scaffolding to ensure that every student has access to these types of tasks in class that's it nice thank you did anybody have any questions so there were how many teachers six participated i believe we had uh six math teachers and a special education teacher and that was for algebra two well we paired up for algebra one algebra two in geometry so in algebra one we have built a task around cell phone plans which they had recently used on solving systems of equations and then in geometry they had built two tasks around right triangle trigonometry i think it was related to building wheelchair ramps and staircases some type of real world application along that lines great thanks how many teachers are in the math department um i feel

027you're at 15. okay so 14 16. sorry so you said with that one particular question our students scored twice yes as high how do was there a similar question with last year's psats and how did our kids do relative to so great question to ask this is the first time that i've actually i see the the test is starting to shift more to align with the common core um so i was excited to finally see a question that looked like this but there were probably three to four problems that i could say that kids could definitely do based on what they had learned in this experience related to quadratic functions yeah and so these are all um functions that they have to master to be successful long-term across all courses right so students will start

028with linear so we built um a linear task in algebra one um we started we had a little time left during that week so we started to build a performance task around polynomial functions as well which is our follow-up unit to quadratics in algebra two and we'd like to continue to build those uh in the future in the summer possible to continue to strengthen the assessment system no question i just want to say i really appreciate the fact that it's the real world examples and tie directly to the business side of thanks to profit and loss and so as i said it carries through to that side of the curriculum and i only wish when i was doing algebra many years ago that i had this kind of examples to work from it just moved

029a lot more into it for me so that's awesome thank you and it's actually a nice transition because michael kelly is going to come up and show you uh how his students had created a business plan as part of his research thanks lisa darlene real quick um so um lauren said that you know 17 to 20 participated last year they hope to have more what incentives do you give or how are teachers encouraged to participate so we had 80 teachers overall 17 from the high school and a lot of them have reached out to us to see if they could participate this year i think what we did at convocation was to showcase the fabulous mike solomini video of the institute we had those t-shirts made so that people would talk to folks who had

030been and were really relying on um you know teachers talking to teachers in their departments saying how what their experience was and we reach out through through all the principles through our rams through our coaches etc to determine what we want to write this summer and then based on what the needs are what the priorities for what needs to be written then that's how we get teachers to um volunteer to be there but it's all voluntary and it's you just said that right because outside the contracted school year okay they do get paid but they volunteer and you know as i said at the middle school showcase last year was incredibly challenging for our teaching staff a lot of adjustments and at least was talking about you know that was a long year nevertheless we

031had that many people just select to be there for this and we knew that it was a long year and we better make it engaging the same way we would want to model that you know that our we would want our teachers to do that for our students and marlene and team really did a tremendous job doing that that's why we have even more people that want to come this year it's great it's exciting all right my name is michael kelly i'm a business teacher here at cheshire high school i had an opportunity to participate in the curriculum writing last summer and i could genuinely say that uh it was the most meaningful professional development opportunity that i've had in 20 years uh it was fantastic and i'm going to explain there were there were

032three real it was a combination of three things it was instruction resources and time um in terms of instruction we had a curriculum expert um in linda ben wagonen uh was there to to show us how to properly write curriculum and she used the uh backwards by design model which i'm i'm going to explain uh along with linda uh teaching us we had the opportunity to brainstorm bounce ideas offer we got feedback um live feedback she was there all day um including the administration was there all day so we had the resources there and and i i felt very supported um on writing something that i was a little uneasy about um we also got an opportunity to share the curriculum and uh with linda in my case it was one unit of an introduction

033of business uh course that was new it's a it's articulated it's a dual enrollment course where students get three credits at tonses community college and it was it was kind of ironic i shared it with her in one evening and she was online and we had actual live dialogue together and i was i i just i don't i thought it was neat i felt kind of like important um we had all the resources there uh i won't go through each one but we had a square template the master curriculum we had it was a one-stop shop we had everything right in front of us um so curriculus curriculum is not something you just you put down and bring up again you need time and i'm going to get to that but this was very important

034because we had everything there for us we had the resources the instruction the support we had time to collaborate with colleagues wide it was nice to see a lot of the other teachers uh with questions district-wide we all kind of bounced ideas off each other we had long blocks of time to write curriculum time to create real real world authentic assessments and when you when you create these assessments you have to measure the assessment um you can't just give it a a performance assessment and not measure it so i'm going to explain about backwards by design but we had we had that opportunity to create the the real world authentic assessment and then be able to create rubrics uh to measure those uh assessments and then the assessment has to meet the learning target and

035you're able to create those those rubrics to assess that um the backwards by design model uh the first step is to identify how the power stands the learning targets and you're kind of putting the cart before the horse so to speak the next step is to create this this authentic hopefully assessment on how you're going to measure whether these students master and the level in which they master these these learning targets and power standards and and to be honest with you this takes time it's it's not something that you just pick up and put down it's it's a it's a long process and we had a great opportunity with great resources great instruction um and then you just kind of scaffold backwards and after you create this performance assessment you then create your your your

036scaffold backwards and create your your lessons your learning tasks your activities your your assignments your quizzes your projects so i'm not going to go into my professional goal um we had um i was able to tweak around a real world and in my opinion this is a real world authentic assessment which is a business plan uh where students create a comprehensive business plan i'm just gonna this young lady did clara's dance shop and i think she did a wonderful job is the student project this is a student project i practiced before so yeah so i'm gonna start this young lady created a business plan for clara's dance shop claire claire's dance shop is a store that sells all types of dance apparel and necessities she created a mission statement she created a vision statement a

037management team she gathered her employees her advisors um this is a summary of clara's van shot startup costs her equipment that that it entailed her supplies the inventory that she would need the total startup cost a balance sheet with assets liabilities owner's equity which should even out um the competition uh that she had and her competitive advantage um she had a target market her demographics or psychographics or geographics uh her marketing and advertising plan uh she did a little business card and for the philanthropy plan i practiced this philanthropy plan uh intellectual property that this would include and just kind of a summary of her little project this comprehensive business plan and her resources [Music] sorry yeah um and just i the the impact on students uh i just think real world especially in one

038of our district-wide initiatives is critical thinking and social emotional learning um and i think just projects like this allow students to uh to express themselves to uh have an opportunity to showcase uh their knowledge and themselves um in a real world like an authentic way so um i found this curriculum writing workshop um extremely valuable i i thought it was fantastic but i i thank you guys for the opportunity um from me to participate in that so thank you um i'm next going to bring up terry morneau from the business department she's going to talk a little bit about uh her experience with the curriculum writing institute thank you i'm just curious what course do you teach for that where that feeds into it i know the business department but i'm just curious that was

039an introduction to business course okay okay it was a it was a new course i had i previously taught a business ownership we had an opportunity to um articulate with a with tungsten community college in a concurrent course where the the students receive three credits um and and so i actually started this institute with with nothing there was no curriculum it was never taught at cheshire high school so um so that's where the the the this business model of this business plan sure so was that one project the entire semesters no that was a that was a unit on entrepreneurship which was which was how long how many weeks uh i would say it was this new uh our new i would say it was about uh the entrepreneurship was about a three three week

040uh in terms of this in terms of activities lessons and that so that product was was after at the end of the three weeks correct three three three and a half weeks i would say that's impressive thank you thank you thank you mike welcome i'm going to start off with going into how i professionally benefited by attending the curriculum writing institute for the first time offered this past fall it's a brand new course internship experience it's offered for juniors and seniors it's a half year credit and they also have the opportunity to tie in with this course a credit for mastery-based performance assessment which is going to be a graduation requirement for the graduating class of 2023 there's seven different ways that students can earn that credit and taking an internship course is one of

041the ways i wholeheartedly agree with everything lisa and michael said about the advantages of attending the curriculum writing institute from my vantage point i can't stress you've heard the word time time but it was time that was continuous five days straight where we were in an environment that had the resources the expertise the colleagues where we could bounce ideas off of each other see if we're going in the right direction so we weren't spinning our wheels and it was so valuable um as opposed to me just being in my classroom by myself or at my home where i would spend one hour here two hours there and then spending time getting acclimated okay where did i leave off what do i still have to do am i going in the right direction um i can

042honestly say that i this is my 41st year of teaching and in the four decades i've had my chance of my opportunities of writing curriculum and this past summer i benefited so much because i felt that my time was efficient and productive as opposed to just accomplishing this on my own how did my students benefit i had to keep in mind the end goal and that is to place them in an internship experience in the cheshire community and have them be successful so different things that had to be designed from square one these are young children 16 17 years old and they for the most part don't really know what they want to go into for a career some do but most of the time they don't and i we designed a career uh interest

043survey no exaggeration i had one student when i asked her well what are your top three choices that you i can help you get a placement in cheshire and she said hospitality airline business physical therapy okay we need to narrow this down and find your passion so there was a career interest survey then develop a resume they don't have a lot to put into a resume at this point in their high school career but the resume is a working document it's not a one and done they are going to be going back to that resume for their entire working career and i know they have naviance where they have a listing of their uh extracurricular activities community service their work experience but it's not really professional looking it could go on to four pages long

044so we developed a template for a resume that would be beneficial for a high school student to start using and then with the goal in mind that they will go back to it after they graduate and use it for their entire working career building communication skills both via telephone and email i know the students send emails back and forth to their teachers on a daily basis i get them from students every day i'm not going to say that a lot of them are formatted accurately i see a lot of emails with no capitalization no punctuation spelling mistakes no reading so i spent some time helping them learn how an effective email should be designed uh picking up the phone they can live on their phone and text constantly and do social media but if i

045say pick up the phone and call prospective mentor they need to develop those skills practicing uh mock interview we've developed questions commonly asked questions the um what are your strengths what are your weaknesses and we practice those but also questions where they have to think off the top of their head that may be a question that they wouldn't be prepared to answer today leslie pierre and i had the opportunity to bring seven students to visit the uh office of the president of the chamber of commerce uh mr um yeah phil knew phil you went to his uh allstate insurance office it was an awesome experience and he said one of his questions that he likes to ask prospective employees is if you could have any superhero power what would it be and why and that

046makes the students think it's something that they may not have been prepared about for to answer but um they can be successful in formulating an answer i also had a colleague come in and run through the mock interview process from start to finish entering the room shaking the hands having eye contact answering inc and complete sentences and then thanking them and all my students said that they appreciated the fact to run through that mock interview because they felt less stress and anxiety when they actually had to have an interview with their mentor in the workplace develop great work habits show up on time be early put your phone away dressed up dress appropriately i know the fashion out there is to wear ripped jeans and show your midriff but in the working place that's not

047really appropriate if you're going to be late pick up the phone and call them if you're going to have something you can't make it into your mentorship uh that particular day call them i know in the real world late compounds if somebody has three no call no show they lose their job so those are all different things that we concentrated on and others to prepare them for the placement in their internship there is an awesome uh web online resource offered through the cheshire public schools upon clever and it's called the virtual job shadow and on that virtual job shadow there's all different career clusters and no matter what they have an interest in they can go to this site and call it up there's videos from actual professionals in that career talking about the job

048description the duties uh questions and answers from those people is there required further education licensing training certification what's the possible earnings for that occupation future outlook if they are interested in that career where could they attend college and here is just a listing of all the different career clusters housed on that virtual job shadow and underneath each of these clusters there's sub clusters so if you have a student had an interest in finance they would go into that on the website and then there would be different jobs that dealt in that finance field that they could go into in more depth so all of this would prepare the students to for the end goal be successful in an internship placement and i am now going to hand the clicker over to leslie i'm going to

049talk about how learning extends beyond the classroom environment all right so um i think that we're really sharing with you how powerful the curriculum writing institute was um the time and the resources our teachers benefited so much but even better than our teachers benefiting as much as they did our students really benefit from all all of the planning that they were able to do and the approach they use the backwards by design and you know just the curriculum is is is great but we want to share with you at the high school level all of the other experiences that our students are able to take advantage of based on the curriculum that they've learned these are some other opportunities where they can really explore and expand their areas of interest so for career experiences terry

050just talked about the internship program we have a cadet teaching class uh we have the career development class where we're starting to get back into letting students get involved in job shadows and then terry also mentioned the mastery-based performance assessment uh all of the students are that are engaged in one of these uh projects they're supposed to have a mentor they're um that allows them to make another adult and professional connection uh when they're involved in whatever the research is in their learning for the mastery-based performance assessment uh our curriculum and we're extending that to the college level micro curriculum this summer for the dual enrollment class the introduction to business class um these are just the class the um classes in the business department where you can earn college credit but throughout each of

051our disciplines in cheshire high school there are opportunities where that where the curriculum is taken to the next level i can't not mention how how valuable it is when we have guest speakers coming into the high school huge coup um just last week we had rob nooner who is the ceo of boost oxygen look it up boost oxygen was featured on shark tank and it was really wonderful to have him in person he was in the auditorium we had over a hundred students and not just business students we had other students that were interested and they joined us and he really spoke about the path that he took starting in high school where he went to college what that experience was like and what led him to become the entrepreneur that he is today and

052it was just um really great to hear that and then all of the he brought in part of his conversation was talking about the um fda it was talking about his marketing uh their their website design their accounting so it was really um a shark tank investors you know providing him with capital it was just really great to hear we also had back in the fall uh ilona samoji and corey nash from the ball and socket came in so we brought in a little non-profit and they shared with us um their experiences of of bringing the ball and socket art center to life and that's really exciting for our community um and then lastly the curriculum connections that we make and the skills that our kids learn when they part i'm putting in a huge

053a little shameless shamelessly mentioning our business clubs i wanted to share with you um our three clubs they all had big competitive events this past spring and i have our deca club they compete our students competed against about 500 to 600 other students statewide we had 29 cheshire high school students compete 14 of them placed in different categories so they were professionally dressed they had lasers they they looked the part they prepared and it was just a wonderful experience extending what they've learned in the classroom um and beyond so that was really awesome we had oh i have a little bit more sorry about that um we had our future business of lee of future business leaders of america compete also um this past spring uh nine of our students competed four of them placed

054and i will share with you those students placed in [Music] accounting accounting one business calculations and we had two teams that put together business plans uh and i i will share their um their advisor said our students demonstrated their knowledge and business skills with integrity and true professionalism isn't that what we're looking for for our students to take what they've learned in the classroom and then take it to the next level and then lastly our mock trial club those students we have 30 students who are actively engaged in the mock trial club they work with their advisor they work with a a local attorney they practice twice a week they have meetings at like 6 30 a.m and um they also practice on saturdays to prepare for the um mock trial events that they um

055participated in this uh this past or for the past several years but our students have really taken their learning and that their that they have here that they're receiving here at cheshire high school and taking that to the next level and it all starts though with the lessons that our teachers preparing that they're putting together in the classroom and that the opportunity that they had to work with with the curriculum writing institute was really a wonderful experience and a powerful tool that they've learned from um and that they will use going forward and the time they were provided with i think you've heard you've heard us mention time quite a few times is so important to have that chunk of time and to be able to collaborate um with colleagues to really do meaningful meaningful

056planning for our students in our classes so i will turn the floor uh back over to marlene or jeff no i thank you very much sure go ahead tell me sure i was gonna say first off everyone a phenomenal job tonight it's so exciting seeing all this and i would say that on the on the business side i'm so happy to see um teaching our kids just the basic fundamental traits that will carry you through life and you mentioned it be on time being professional dress for success uh even making cold calls right because you know we're our you know my even my daughters are in college but they grew up with a phone generation and uh you know it wasn't until they got into the media thing that they had to learn those soft

057skills they had a chance to do in high school so um that's awesome i see the passion i bring that across i'm not surprised that the feedback we get from our employers that our students are working professionally with integrity that's i want to see that secondly um i hear more often than not from businesses in cheshire that they're literally dying to hire students for internships job shadows what's the best way to get those employers in touch and hooked into this program so that they could have a seat at the table and tell you about the opportunities i hear this frequently it's it's it's a number it's a number of businesses there's a and even where i work at the regional water authority there's a whole uh slew of opportunities for job shadowing in environmental science

058sciences biology arborists i can easily get contacts if into the school system if students are interested in business utilities management those i feel as a you i even hire folks undergraduate uh students out of stomach university into the technology program and they're great students um they're just learning a lot of these soft skills and it's nice to see that so i feel like there's a wealth of opportunities up there for students to to get an idea of what's possible how do i how do i follow these opportunities too there's so many options i don't want to just totally jump on mike's but in the business department i mean leslie talked about a real myriad of of opportunities that our kids have and some of that is through internships but our guidance department also has other

059connections but between michelle kituchi our guidance director at the high school and leslie they they've got a gazillion things that we could connect people into or you know they know so many students that are within the department that have these passions that make them so successful in these opportunities that they might be able to make a connection there too yeah i i sound like there's more opportunities than we can fill with students is that about right well that's a good problem to have and i will say you know ryan murphy was also um helping us uh place some of our interns as well so is it's a it's a group effort it's not just that there's no there's no one point but if you contacted any any of us um we hopefully would be able

060to find um to find a fit or that we could contact um contact you and see if there's uh so that being said i'm gonna make a shameless plug for myself at work anyone that might be interested in software development cyber security uh job shadowing over the summer i'd be happy they just sent the junior class a video message yesterday inviting any interested students to intern or do a mastery based performance assessment with me for communications support and marlene saw the email and said i want one too you know we want an intern so there are certainly there are so many talented kids that and passionate kids too that attend our schools that you know we want to connect them into these opportunities and help them evolve uh personally professionally and uh it's great that

061we got an opportunity to see some of these opportunities our kids have is it's really powerful thank you i'm just going to um just echo what tony said in terms of these uh the skills that you've got the career survey the resume the aurora i would think every kid in this school would want to go through those skills and we should be encouraging them because there's nothing that builds your confidence more than knowing you can walk in to an interview and you at least have your first sentence done because everything else will follow but even you know the how to write a decent email um and use grammar and how to speak on a telephone and you know the internet has just destroyed communications and so many i i mean i won't even call ello

062bean anymore i just because i don't want to talk to somebody which is terrible so um i know and they're the nicest people in the world but there's just this psychological wall that has been built up in these kids i think are are suffering from it and so you know i mean i'm happy to volunteer my service it's not that the most articulate person but you know i think we all should be working with these students and young adults to get them into the market so they can succeed so um i just i echo what you say um i do have one other question when you guys do a are you mapping out an entire year or just a single unit we start with a single unit the curriculum writing institute the goal going in

063was to write one unit um i i had an opportunity i think i wrote close to three units okay because there's because it was all there it was like a you know it was a one-stop shop so so in terms of correct when you write a curriculum that with the backwards design model you start like years ago you'd write curriculum say okay let's start at 1.1 and let's what's our objective and what are our learning tasks um but we would create units of instruction which could include years ago was chapters so it could be chapters one two three could be at one unit that answers yeah and so as you do these these um uh institutes every year eventually you'll have your library that you talked about and so then you'd hope but it's a

064it's really like with curriculum with especially with business it's a live document yeah it's changing like i teach an investing course it's constantly changing so you have to go back which is nice with with the template that we have that's shared with everybody if there's multiple teachers involved you go into the document you can just change it you change the links you change the tasks the activities so it's a live document the goal in three to five years is to have that library so that when we hire someone they can go to the library and pick out you know the digital library and say okay this is this is what i'm going to teach this year but knowing full well that it's you know it's always changing ever evolving because of the way things work

065and how many new resources and things we have but but the goal for the project yes is to have as much housed as we can okay i just want to put a plug in because what i'm hearing loud and clear is that this professional development is so integral and it pays off in spades for our students and so i feel like our task as the board of education is to be constantly your cheerleaders for this professional development because teachers are professionals they want this professional development you talk about the time and as an educator myself i know there's there's nothing like having that block five days five complete days of time that you're just dedicating to this these are big tasks right but look what happens when you're given that time and you're given the

066resources to be able to develop just one unit right and if you go year after year you're developing more and more as you go along you're making that connections all the way through from from k through 12 so you know what's happening all along the way and there are are not gaps in the curriculum for any students and um and we're connecting everything to the standards as um you know you can we can say things about how much we dislike common core but standards are important and um i do i think it's fantastic and i pledge to be your cheerleader as i have been in the past and some of that cheerleading needs to come at budget time quite frankly yeah i i do want to commend the board you know because i over the

067last several years the board has been incredibly supportive when we've talked about things like early release time and this we can't do this in you know february maybe just give kids a week off or whatever but the financial support has been there for things like the curriculum institute things uh like the early dismissal time and i do wanna thank you and i think that's some of the importance of having the presentations you've seen throughout the year because it's important for us that you and the community sees how that time and investment translates to authentic problem solving for our kids and that it's meaningful you know because i i think when you don't see that you don't appreciate it and so i'm glad that you and i appreciate you guys taking the time to you know

068really digest these these presentations throughout the year and as we wrap up our last uh you know showcase tonight i also again want to acknowledge marlene and her team um kevin uh linda van wagnen has been a great resource for us but marlene was really passionate about providing a great opportunity for our staff to not just write curriculum i think that would have been one thing but you know mike you heard repeatedly talk about the instruction the the coaching that our people had in that and marlene made that possible and so i just want to commend her and and all of our teachers who who participated and you again for uh making it possible so thank you yeah um so i'm not an educator i'm a cpa but this definitely resonates with me because i

069can only imagine i would love the opportunity to have one week with no emails no phone calls and just think of how much forward progress i could make in my own job um it makes it makes a lot of sense to me i really like the level of excitement that i've seen from the teachers who have spoken about it because i hope and i i feel that that excitement probably goes into the classroom and that for me thinking back as a you know as a student it can be inspiring there was um so as i said i'm a cpa i would not be i could not have gotten through principles or accounting principles of accounting in college without having taken the county one and accounting two here with miss jacoby 30 35 years ago um

070but no i i'm a true believer that what what you're doing in the business department and throughout the cheshire public schools is progressing people progressing the kids to shaping lives and we say we don't graduate transcripts graduate people in in cultivating those passions that's why these guys went into the job that's great thanks for sharing that um so i i have a question about uh finding the interest you say like you were talking about internships before this really relates to probably all the cheshire public schools probably more so at the high school level but what i think of is how do the how do the teachers how do the schools connect with the kids and i don't mean to make this like an hour-long conversation but the concern that i have is that you have

071the extroverts who want to talk all the time and you're the introverts i'm thinking of myself although it may not come across that way but i i i often have an introvert you know there are students who are there are students who are shy and more reserved and how do those connections get made where you know even if it's just walking out of the classroom and you pick up on a subtle interest that's not necessarily something that would be obvious you know i mean if you play a sport here people are going to know it but if you if you're writing code at home maybe nobody knows it so what happens is i mean totally informal is there anything formal i can't share with you in our personal finance classes that's one of the first

072activities that the students do terry spoke about using the virtual virtual job shadow it's an online resource and they take a little interest survey and the results are really pretty good and we've said to the kids don't choose anything in the middle just go with your gut i i'm interested in this or i'm not and that's one way they kind of can go through and maybe not narrow down but it'll give them some for the student that's not sure what area of interest they want to explore it'll give them some ideas but all of our other disciplines and areas and other clubs and activities and in sports those you know those are other ways too that students get involved and they meet new people they hear new things so whether it's in personal finance class

073or in a a different discipline and you know uh guest speakers in in other classes there's lots of ways that our students um and the through the mastery-based performance assessment that's another area or avenue where students can explore their particular area of interest or a passion but i think at the heart of what you're saying too i'm sorry but at the heart of what you're saying is it's a relationship it's getting to know kids yeah and you know the elementary grade i think it's it's obvious that that's a little bit easier that you have those students in your room all day every day when you get to the middle school you're on t and that's always the fear i'm being a middle school principal that is going to get lost when they go to middle

074school amongst you know the team whatever and we would mike would reiterate that we make a big school small by putting kids and teams and getting to know them and we do a lot of activities grounded in that at this level we have things like our advisory programs where a small group of students is with one adult for four years and he gets to know that person gets to know them better of course you know you'll have situations like the class where you are taking interest inventories uh or in english where you're conferencing with your english teacher and you get to know them much differently but it is important that we have relationships with all of our kids and that yeah that's part of that and that's how you get to know kids and bring

075out those talents and invest foster those within them marlene and jumped out is so true i had this shy young lady had her in computer central had her microsoft office one had her microsoft office too had her again in internship making the connections the introvert would barely look at you in the eye but she wanted to work in an office so contacted mr phil newton and he said sure send her over working in allstate and by the end of our internship phil knew and had her making calls to insurance owners who were not paying their bills but she wasn't so introverted at the end of her internship i'll i'll just say that i i think k through 12 that the teachers that we have and the way that they connect with kids it's a it's

076a passion for our teachers and i'll just say coming in here today this morning i might have just said i'm going to go into the high school for 20 minutes i i can't go 10 feet without somebody telling me oh did you used to have so and so or this just happened with this child in the class or or this kids just came up with this idea in the assistant principal's office this morning so there's a great um energy around and i think that's a culture that's been fostered and really built for her yeah you saw the enthusiasm when our teachers throughout this year have been presenting projects that are so authentic in nature and you know we may have nightmares of going to school and reading the chapter you know the bold words we're

077going to define those bold words you know that you know whether it be math we're just going to do this worksheet that it was more route in nature and our goal and this provides time for creativity and engagement what do our students need to know how we will we know that they can do these things let's design engaging tasks to measure to what degree they can do these things and that builds the passion for them to want to to learn them and that's really powerful marking those patterns yeah sparking the passions that our kids have so appreciate you guys and at least in sharing you know what you've done today thank you [Applause] well that's a pretty agenda i think most folks want to probably get all right i'm sorry i went back to everybody

078but i before you journal i just want to say and sean hunter has agreed thank you so much for being here this evening folks for a lot of time as it is and i really appreciate the fact that you took your own time to attend to see another good workshop that just shows your passion i'm not surprised so i do know it it does it's not going to notice we appreciate what you're doing so and we're seeing our kids which isn't better so again thank you um that being said i have a motion to adjourn uh sam and seconded behind faith all those in favor is