001thank you very much i actually stand for the pledge of allegiance which is committed to the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty i just want to say thank you everyone for joining us this evening we apologize we started a little late we had a planning committee meeting uh that ran a little over but the got a report the planning committee forwarded uh approve ed specs to forward to the board uh for the new uh school projects that's a huge milestone and the board will be voting on that spec on april 21st so it was important work so thank you for staying by if i turn it over it's going to say this is one of my favorite board meetings because we really
002have no business to do we got to sit back and see all the cool stuff that's happening our schools particularly so marlene are you going to talk about the showcase and yes i'll give you a little bit of an introduction so you know that last um june we had what we called the curriculum writing institute and we've talked over time about why we held the institute and that was because we really heard from teachers and i'm sure many of you have been hearing this now too throughout our meetings that they're looking for more time to collaborate with each other they're looking for more time to revise and reflect on their curriculum it's very difficult to do that in the midst of the day when you have a 45 minute planning period to really delve into
003that i mean even this meeting that we had tonight was an hour and we delved into some things but not all things so tonight we're here in the second phase of our k-12 showcase to hear from teachers from dodd who were beneficiaries of the curriculum writing institute and to really draw a line from what teachers did and how this benefited kids how this time and the energy and the money of um preparing reviewing writing curriculum what the end result was so i'll turn it over to mike to introduce his fabulous team thank you very much this is hard mike am i good um my name is mike woods i'm the principal here at dodd middle school um we're really happy tonight to have our educat our educator team showcase some of the student work that
004was a result of the summer curriculum writing project so um marlene actually took most of my speech for tonight so this is really really short but i do want to introduce our teachers that are here this is marie volley kristen shanley jenna podell and tom discano i also want to mention that carly brandon is one of our eighth grade language arts teachers she worked very hard with this team too unfortunately was sick yesterday and she's out so um without any further ado i am going to have our la teachers come up here first kristen maria to talk about what they did at summer curriculum writing and some of the student work that came from that so all right hello we are excited to share all of the good things that happened this past summer so
005just giving you kind of an overview of what the institute was all about and then we'll dive into the student work so we were taught by a consultant named linda van wagnen and she taught us the importance of choosing an authentic assessment to start off our curriculum design and so this is information regarding beginning with that authentic assessment this is research that is backed by curriculum design specialists and one of the important things that led into our design structure one of the tools that linda shared with us was this squared template and this squared template was something that that created and led our design to the best organized fashion these are things that teachers a lot of times so we have that big picture in mind but a lot of times keep making sure that
006we do all these little things along the way is something that's very important and marlene mentioned that teachers were like asking for this time for um this time to collaborate i can honestly say that participating in this writing institute this past summer was some of the best uh professional development that i've experienced in cheshire in my 20-something years of teaching so it was that combination of instruction that we needed in order to know exactly how to write curriculum and then it was the time to do the work and that combination of those two things truly made it a very valuable experience so this squared template has you look at things like incorporating the standards and then also making sure that you do some extension activities and also differentiate all the things that good teaching involves
007marie is going to explain another tool that we used in our creation so before i start i want to thank marlene and kevin for offering this opportunity to the teachers again it was i could reiterate one of the best pd opportunities i've ever received another anchor tool that linda shared with us after squares squared was grass and without going through every single component you can see that the theme is real world and that's really the the take away that the outcome product from the students is something they can apply or see in the real world so when we look at the goal is it a real world goal their role as an individual who is their audience is it real world um their situation the product they create and their standard for success for seventh
008grade we decided this summer to use those anchor tools to revamp our argument unit our argument writing unit so the students were presented a task to determine an audience and create a claim and then maintain their claim through their paper not only maintain the claim but offer a possible solution to their audience so they can maybe meet that audience halfway just like in real life students were establishing a claim creating reasons a solution providing evidence and organized their thoughts and also included a strong writer's voice i have two student samples literally due last week so we really came together and they did a remarkable job you have some amazing talented students and i have two examples here that really showcase the idea of their passion their voice their attention to their audience and choosing a
009real life um claim so for our first one i have juliana who will be talking about native american imagery as school mascots and her position in discontinuing those types of um in our in our nation so this is her introduction inaccurate offensive imagery that mocks native american culture is everywhere many people may think this problem is over-exaggerated but once you start thinking about it it is very clear that this is truly the case sports teams logos names even school mascots offensive imagery is everywhere such as the washington football team formerly the redskins native americans and others have been protesting about these images and names for years all of the imagery is very mocking the native americans being shown as savages wearing stereotypical versions native american clothing and headdresses the names are also extremely hurtful some
010names even being slurs and derogatory statements these have been historically used to discriminate against native americans there is seemingly no reason for people not to change and protest against these names and images historical roots disprovable from native americans and changing social views are all reasons native american mascots and names should be banned from school and sports teams just through her writing and her own personal voice you can hear that passion with this assignment students were able to choose what they wanted to write about and i think with that element of choice it just leads to a different level of voice in their writing our next example comes from rain a 7th grader and he wrote his paper about banning standardized testing so i chose one of these paragraphs from the body of this paper and
011again uh rain has done a remarkable job with the voice in his writing the amount of stress standardized testing loads on students is unhealthy in fact the stanford 9 exam even comes with instructions on what to do with the test booklet in case a student vomits on it testing companies and schools know that testing is stressful yet it is still required by law according to education and research for gregory j sizak anecdotes abound illustrating how testing produces gripping anxiety in even the brightest students and makes young children vomit or cry or both a study shows that during homeroom before high stakes testing students had a cortisol level over 15 percent higher than on non-testing days scientific evidence demonstrates that standardized tests cost students high levels of stress harming mental and physical health students can become
012incredibly obsessed with test scores that they forget about learning altogether and just the gritty just here in connecticut darien high school students stole test answers from the faculty work students are so desperate for good test scores that they will steal to get the grade they want standardized testing changes learning in the mind of a student into a test score so again um rain's power of voice through his writing really came through and rayne also took it upon himself to add graphics cartoons comics throughout his paper as a way to again illustrate his point um and to the fact that now it's going to be a part of my curriculum i'd like to change that in the future and encourage students to do so to add a comic with citations uh because that's how we read
013in the real world we open up an article and it's not all just plain text it's broken up with images a picture a graphic an infographic a cartoon and i just appreciated that uh his power of voice allowed us to change a little bit of our curriculum um through linda bandwagon's leadership through the summer curriculum workshop we learned so much about just applying these uh anchor tools like grass and and squared but at the same time knowing that collaboration is ultimately just such an important valuable tool among all the different anchor tools that we were received that summer so thank you so much for your time tonight the eighth grade team of teachers worked on creating a task for the eighth grade students and what we decided on was coming up with a way to
014make figurative language more interesting to the students and also incorporate that in their own writing so we created this task an open mic night at the spartan sims and that would be coffee and we are creating having the students create found poems which are created after analyzing and reading a bunch of different texts from anywhere from a picture book to a poem to short stories to speeches and then students were picking important lines out of those and then creating their own found home this is a screenshot of some playing with words on a program called jamboard which is an online tool where students can collaborate or you can create individual it's individual pieces it's basically like an online whiteboard and you see those like post-it notes are all different pieces that the students can manipulate
015on the jamboard so these are words that are from famous quotes which you're going to have an opportunity to play with in a moment and they created it into a piece of their own here's another example and then showing some higher level thinking at the bottom explaining how they made the choices that they did or why they made the choices that they did here is a student sample of a final found poem the students were asked to be change makers themselves so they studied different voices from all different change makers in our history and then they put together their own poems that were about topics that they were passionate about because of us storm during summer snow during spring warm during winter polluted shores polluted clouds earth or sacred ground burning fuels shedding the light
016of earth injecting new carbon into earth trapping heat in our atmosphere so much that the clouds are covered animals diminished forests inflamed they are unafraid they let nature graze away they let icebergs mold away they are unafraid the earth is eroding because of you because of me because of us we can turn the dust of world back to gold if we try so sajuda created that pretty powerful poem and um she was really excited to share it all with you because of us sorry storm okay so the next slide is going to show some of the complex thinking that students had to go through in order to create these poems they were asked to pull information from a variety of texts and you'll see in the next slide that she actually chose 12 different pieces
017of text that that wove together to to create that poem that you just heard they also had to explain the meaning of the line why that line was important and then what figurative or in connotative language was used in the poem so here is her brainstorming to create that poem that she you just heard so lots of work went into that here is another sample of a student's poem about small businesses streamers the dreamers from the doers the believers and the thinkers the dreamers will share it because they are happy sharing it the doers they hide it pretend it never happened and rejected outright it's frustrating to see the doers blow it and win the dreamers hold themselves to these crazy high standards and still fail even though their peers also have these standards and
018make it vague in darkness dreamers can only dream and they are silenced because they can't speak up dreamers have to begin in the beginning unlike the doers who begin and make it to the end almost immediately the doers provide benefits for their employees while the dreamers can only provide a paycheck but the dreamers provide an amazing experience no doer could ever provide give the dreamers the respect they've earned give them the same respect you would give a doer give them even more respect than you would anybody because they work day and night to make it big just like the doers the doers work a basic nine-to-five job and get applauded for it dreamers work 24 7 to get a little applause this stops now believe in the dreamers support them the same way you support
019the doers [Music] so charlotte was pretty passionate about her topic also as you can see there and another student who was very excited to share so one of the things that prompted these changes where we had discussions with students prior to this unit and some of the feedback that we got was that the prior unit was all about the figurative language that was used in martin luther king martin luther king jr's speech which obviously is an important piece of our history but students gave us the feedback that they did that in elementary school many many times so we had decided that we needed to make a change and here make more voices heard in this unit and that is what um made this decision all right that's the fun part for you we have little
020envelopes with some quotes on the outside and on the inside are words and a glue stick and you can create your own found poem if you prefer to work with someone next to you you may also do that so the assignment is if you open up your envelopes you are going to see all the words that are in these quotes cut up into pieces and your job is to make a poem out of those words are we being grated [Laughter] marlene was wondering it doesn't say roses so this is this is an example of what the students did in this unit and we figured a little time for you to play would make you realize how fast people make us better people there you go better people are words those words are all those words
021yeah okay we have to use all the words you do not have to no you pick out what you want so the students when they were uh creating their own found poems had an idea in mind so charlotte knew that she wanted to do something about small business owners so when she created her poem she had that in mind now obviously you are bound to the words that you have in front of you the students had lots of more words that they were able to choose from but that's the essence of the idea our poems will be shorter it's okay [Music] you know you didn't give them a time limit that's very stressful then you can't put a time limit on creation and we don't really have to finish this process for a while yeah
022exactly oh that is pretty deep i feel like this is pretty good too yeah the first line's good like your epic line there you go come up with your epic line so that our math colleagues can share share do any of the board members want to share a line or phrase that they came up with i have one all right go for it failure is just the courage to continue failure is not going for truth anyone else want to share anything yes i think this is so great great minds continue truth suffering failure all right say it one more time great minds continued truth suffering failure all right very good all right we're going to turn it over to math you can put these things away and have fun later on you know when you
023have nothing else to do tonight and you can create your own pumps on to jenna thank you [Applause] we're going to switch gears a little bit here for some math um i'm jenna podol i teach eighth grade math at dawn it's my sixth year here i'm very excited to be standing in front of you guys tonight um you heard a little bit about the writing curriculum institute that we went to over the summer i would like to put a mask in on it and tell you what we did in the math part so after dr van wagnen had her presentation on how to make a creative and engaging performance tasks for the students we were able to break up into our departments the math department was very lucky because we were able to work with
024the high school algebra 1 teachers along with the special education teachers we had our math coach there there was a lot of different people that collaborate with on our different performance tasks that we kind of finalized so like marlene was saying before we want time to be able to work together and this was five uninterrupted days which like never happens to be able to sit down in a room accelerate our standards for um a couple of the different units that we have in seventh grade eighth grade and in algebra one so middle school and a little bit of the high school as well um some of the different learning targets i mean learning tasks that we came up with were two different ones for the pythagorean theorem we had an echoes performance task and a
025fencing performance performance task we have one for exponential functions which was on mice population and our favorite one which you can kind of see here was a catapult for the quadratics unit so in the quadratics unit we made model catapults um part of the process was that we give the students a certain amount of money that they can spend on their supplies fake money of course um but they have to come up with a design for it they work with their groups to think about what their budget's going to be what type of supplies they can buy they have solo cups rubber bands popsicle sticks okay we have a whole list up there then they have to actually construct their model they get to test it a couple of times they put it into some
026math formulas figure out all the different the minimum i mean the maximum height the time it takes to launch the ball how far it goes and then we take all the things we did in the quadratics unit and analyze it as a final project okay so we're testing the students in a non-traditional way using manipulatives and kind of getting them to work with their peers to show their what they know um so the idea of doing this is we're trying to target both the traditional math skills from the common core state standards and grow them as learners um and math learners so the three um common core standards we looked at or arithmetic with binomials and rational expressions interpreting functions and creating equations um what does that mean what are we actually trying to get
027to is we're trying to hit all the um cheshire public schools performance centers trying to make them complex thinkers skilled information processors collaborative workers self-directed learners and effective communicators um and this really hits on our standards for mathematical practice we focus so much and we should on the common core state standards those standards for mathematical practice are what every math teacher wants their students to grow and learn from when they're counting to when they're doing calculus so it really helps them grow as not just here's a skill but grow as math learners when we talk about you know real life skills or whether what are we trying to learn they're planning they're designing they're budgeting constructing measure and evaluating we talk about authentic learning um once we get up through algebra 1 and geometry and
028algebra 2 the learning can be abstract for students and anytime we can put a physical product in their hand so they can actually see the math at work um it gives such deeper meaning to it and um like i said i think of the five days this took two of them having that chunk of time to be able to make this and and set up this project for the kids to see how their learning is used was um it wouldn't have been possible without the curriculum brightness to do and we do talk a little bit about you know kids always want to know what am i going to use this and um unfortunately it's not always a clean answer but when we talk about something like quadratics you know there's um lots of things out
029there one of the things we kind of talked about was military law enforcement or ballistics um how think you know economy engineers all those things where this might not be what they're doing they might be doing these quadratic equations as adults but it's the stepping stones it's getting them excited about the learning it's getting them excited about the product so we were thinking oh yeah so we need um two volunteers i think we decided two volunteers to help us launch this catapult and measure it and be able to put it into the front launch anymore should go a lot farther than that oh sure i'll do it okay thank you you can stay right there i'm still working no no no no you can watch it you can launch from there you might move a
030little bit and we need a time slip can you do that yeah okay so we want you to hit the timer um nope just two times as soon as it is once it is hit and once it lands so what so so usually we um our classrooms have those nice tiles that are exactly one foot line so that really helps with measuring um but then we have ceiling problems hitting the ceiling with some of them so we've gone outside and done shocks so give it a good whack but not like too strong oh wait oh wait hold on we're not ready yet okay timer so once she hits it hit star and then once it hits the ground hit stop okay okay ready oh i took it no that was good that was a good
031launch one second sounds alright all right very good anyone else want to give it a go while he judges some numbers over here it's pretty sturdy when we do this with the students we'll have multiple trials and then we'll kind of average it but for the sake of the time of tonight we'll just time one of them tom's crunching some numbers right now to be able to put it into the equation but anybody else want to try without jeff you want to get back it seems like so the kids get really into it obviously you know who can watch the furthest no no no no no yeah on the spoon who can launch it the highest all right so then what we make sure we do is part of this and one of the standards
032is we're going to graph so so if you've never seen desmos.com it's an awesome place to be able to graph things right on the computer what is it this is a desmos.com it's just a free free free graphing calculator they also have a lot of cool activities on there too for all different topics so so this was our flight um it's a little flat because we're not outside with the rain um but what it offers the kids to do is they then can compare um not every ball that's launched that lands 11 feet is the same right so what we do is we actually are able to give them a intro so we're talking about is it geometry we try to stick to the algebra one standards but we get into some great physics ideas
033um we can measure how high the ball is because by taking half the distance we know that's the maximum and then we use the gravity coefficient to figure out what that actual height is so it's cool for them to see that um a lot of our athletes look at like statcast when you see a home run now they show that right they show that so not every home runs the same we see um not every ball it's in the air for one second so they see how we can manipulate it they have a good connection to it and um any time we can make math more fun make them want to come to math class you know it works but again this was an activity that you know we had three of us working on
034for a couple days we didn't want to get too nitty-gritty into the math that you know we had to crunch to do to find what that is but um it's just a great opportunity for kids to see their learning see it in something you know one of the nicest parts i think about the writing institute over the summer was that we were able to come up with a final product like we had the introduction we had the actual assignment we had the rubric to go along with it and everyone was on the same page because we were there for a few days and really fine-tuned our assignment that when we started the next school year we were ready to go with them so having that trying to do that in school doesn't really work when
035you've got a 45 minute period and kids come in for help so it was really nice to have that time away during the summer with our colleagues [Applause] any questions don't go too far guys questions no well thank you very much for being our audience this evening i know we're trying to figure out our words i know this is so much fun so i was gonna say how late will the library be open this week until the rain stops so this was done over the course of a couple of days so the actual curriculum writing institute was the five day piece and then throughout the year they've been working on and tweaking and those types of things but as jenna said you don't get that chocolate time no i yeah right just trying to find
036time to think right sometimes is yeah we uh have curriculum the writing institute 2.0 plan for this spring or in the process of being tough to trump last year because it was so unique last year i think this year it'll be even better because people know what to expect it makes a couple of minor changes but um to provide that opportunity is really positive and it we pay people to be there so this is an investment um that we are making but you can see the dividends that it pays off for our kids in the learning that they get to experience and engage in the enthusiasm and our staff to to do that and our teachers so you know it's a worthwhile investment yeah and i would say it was awesome to see enthusiasm for
037everyone obviously you can enjoy doing this advertising so thank you so much you even got me here as well we definitely don't make cannibals who is the faculty that was involved was it just dodd or was it the whole asian teachers k-12 special education teachers the arts so what you have about 350-400 teachers right yeah yeah but we have about 400 total teachers and i just want to put this in context a little bit you know the last three months of 2020 everybody went remote it was crazy last year was really challenging we had so many teachers who were teaching kids both virtually and in person kids in and out regularly during quarantines and isolations teachers in and out during that time a lot of pressure because it wasn't just the professional life they were
038juggling but their personal lives with those same sort of challenges with their families yet marlene and her team designed such an incredible worthwhile experience that almost 25 percent well 20 percent of our staff came back for five extra days after that year well let me tell you everybody wanted to just shut it down after last year and like go hang out by the pool or something but of our staff which speaks volumes about our people that work in our school system and the program that marlene put together that is i don't want to that's a real testament right there so thank you guys for participating that's it really speaks so much about you as teachers tremendously see that we're excited is we want to do it again it's not just the opportunity to work with
039each other you know get the whole fomo [Music] we're likely to keep it to 80 because of the space and the ability for us to get around to provide that feedback gotcha and i would think it would be ongoing because you guys only accomplished one unit over the summer one unit for each grade level yeah so you have several yeah yeah we did three different performance tasks but like yeah so for two different grades but we had a large we were able to have a large group yeah we had a lot of math seven through 12. and there's a lot more to do in the revision cycle i would assume you have to unpack your old units and embed all these activities you heard the math people talk about you know tom and jenna talking
040about the incorporation of the performance standards too i mean as much as uh i appreciate you guys mentioning it explicitly but it was also evident in the la bla components too the more that we can do that the richer the experience is for our kids i'm sorry tim no um i'm just wondering you said 80 last year 80 this year is it kind of like that was the graduating cohort and they will move on to the second year new people could be moving into it without it getting lost like going out to the second there will be some people who come back who we're going to repeat from last year and we believe we'll have new people also who want to participate a lot depends on people's summer schedules those kinds of things and what
041works we're looking to we had we tried to get a special education teacher embedded with each group so that that scaffolding was there yeah um so we're looking to increase the number of special education special educators in that process so it'll it'll be a mix all right thank you i just wanted to comment that um i think it's really important that you bring this to the board of ed and to the people in town um because success it for professionals which you all are is dependent on having the time to really rejuvenate constantly i mean that's what that's why these are creative experiences that's why they affect our kids that because you've had you were given a gift and you were paid for it which you should be because this is your professional time and
042i i just think you know people need to realize how important it is to have this professional development to have the time put aside for teachers to collaborate and to work on cooking in a meaningful way in a really deep way so i'm glad you're doing it again and um thank you for bringing us yes um question for jeff actually um so a couple of nights ago you had mentioned that we were we were reinvesting in our staff this is an example of what you were talking about it is yes so there was some federal money used to help facilitate this and um you know we've tried to evolve uh and provide new professional development opportunities this is one example acceleration of professional development we had a number of staff participating after school hours again
043last year after school hours our people were participating in these acceleration workshops which was really incredible of them but powerful as well we also have done um uh coaching uh we've invested a lot in coaching and helping our staff because if you remember we as a board adopted that bounce forward plan our federal money won't last us very long we didn't get a ton of money when that money runs dry all of our people are better for the experience but i also realized that you know tony had said to me on multiple occasions about you know it's important to see the power of this investment and you know when we build budgets in the future i think this provides a more tangible understanding for members of the board and the community about why like ambulance
044you're saying why this is valuable and why it is important to invest in in professional development is we continue to evolve as a school system i just think for long term because the funding will be sustainable is there a train a trainer motto because you will have new staff and you will have you know units that you have to go back and check and and so on so just yeah it's definitely the coaching uh component is very much grounded that way we have reading math specialists we have middle and high school coaches that our coach to be able to help others learn to be coaches and things like that acceleration and curriculum writing because it's always and changing um we don't have as much of that element that you bring up into it but we
045are certainly cognizant of how do we how do we do that better in our mental health work we are doing more of that where we're training people to be facilitators to train other facilitators any other questions from the board as members as aaron and i just realized i skipped public comment before i jumped to the showcase my assignment got the better so before we enter the meeting uh did we have any public comment any comments from the audience everyone has to go home so i won't keep you they they got the memo that's impossible so uh before we journal i just want to thank thank you mr winston staff for everyone you guys the outstanding job beyond our four teachers who uh who presented tonight we also want to thank kevin and john for really
046helping with their guidance so thank you so much um so once you guys are home early night um but i have a motion to adjourn some of all those in favor unanimous this meeting is adjourned thank you