Curriculum Committee 4-19-21

001see the screen yep yes we're good we're good i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands okay um first item of business do we have any public comment at this stage we have no public comments okay um all right um item two review of the minutes of the march 9th 2021 meeting you all have received the minutes and had a chance to review are there any corrections or additions that we need to make i move we accept the minutes thank you anne do i hear for a second i second uh all in favor i abstain i wasn't there okay um great so under the item of new business there's nothing listed does anyone have any new business to to raise no new business

002no new business um wow we're moving right along here um old business uh again nothing listed but does anyone have any old business they want to raise okay no old business so we move right into item five this is speedy um the informational items we're going to hear a number or a couple of reports tonight um one coming from the cheshire curriculum council on the um agp executive summary presentation and so we might as well open with that if we could well as you know the chesh um the cheshire curriculum council made up of representatives from k through 12 as well as administrators across the representation across the district heard from a number of subject areas this year and the two we are going to hear from tonight are agp which is our academically gifted

003program and we have laurie holm with us to share an executive summary of that presentation so lori thank you so much for being here with us tonight thank you thank you so much for um for inviting me uh this will be great i'm gonna make sure that you can all see um the screen and that the font is um adequate uh can everyone see that are you seeing it looks good lori looks good all right great well um i'll just move right in and i'm going to keep up with the speed of this agenda boy i wish i was on every committee was like this okay so um moving along to the next side then first of all my name is lori holm and i have been your gifted education program specialist since 1997 and

004i am very happy to be sharing a quick overview of our most recent ccc with you this evening i very much thank you for inviting me to speak with you so this slide is our cheshire public schools program mission statement and i've underlined a few key phrases that really are very much at the heart of what has guided us as we've evolved our present delivery model so um i'm actually going to start with chapter 5 because i want to make sure that you're all still awake and i need to move along i've been given my allotted amount of time but the entire presentation is available i think either marlene or kevin could share that with you so i'm going to start at chapter 5 because that really is leading into what we have now which

005also leads into sort of where we ended up uh as a result of the ccc review so in 2015 agp adopted a google classroom as a service delivery platform which i always say it was just like you know the skies parted and and a bright light came and descended from heaven i'm in love with google classroom back to the topic so in 2015 the agp specialist that is me remained itinerant located at each school on a designated letter day weekly and the agp curriculum was redesigned field tested vetted and revised so that it would interface with google classroom beginning with sixth graders and working down through the grades each year the students were issued chromebooks making the curricular bridge and and access between the regular classroom and agp complete during this evolution of agp students

006attended a one-hour weekly help center session for one trimester per year the students were encouraged to work on academies within the regular classroom and because of google classroom the regular classroom teachers also had the ability to track their students agp progress and performance because all fourth through sixth grade teachers were invited into their students agp academies as co-teachers however in spite of the ability to access the agp curriculum during the school day many students ended the year with their agp academy barely completed or in some cases incomplete so we'll move to the next slide from 2016 to 2019 year-long agp participation was phased in so that by june of 2019 approximately 250 to 275 students in grades four through six were participating in a gp for the entire school year with the opportunity to accomplish

007multiple academies the students attended a 45-minute help center class weekly and were encouraged to work on their academies via google classroom throughout the week in spite of now being a year-long program the average rate of completion was still only one academy with a few students partially completing a second academy i continued to travel to each school on a designated letter day weekly until march of 2020 when like everyone else agp went 100 remote unlike everyone else however this was neither a drastic undertaking nor detrimental to the program in fact the opposite can be said it had some unexpected outcomes and was lemonade from lemons so to speak because agp had been for many years both web-based and virtual we could for the most part continue to do business as usual while agp did lose a

008few students that spring because of a multitude of reasons that i do not need to explain to this group something transpired that i had been unsuccessful in achieving before march of 2020 for the first time ever i was able to dialogue with my students across all the schools and assist them all day long in their agp academy work the successful completion percentage nearly doubled that spring in spite of our sudden coveted remote teaching and learning situation i became somewhat of a switchboard operator sitting at a computer answering student notifications as they rolled in and for the first time ever in spite of what letter day it was or where i was located i could respond to and assist any student in any of the grade levels at any school in a very timely fashion no

009student had to wait a day to get help that they needed the help came in an hour or even in minutes uh the situation finally leveled the playing field regardless of the size of a school regardless of the classroom teacher encouragement or permission to work on academy assignments in the regular classroom regardless of scheduling conflicts and this in turn really fueled increased motivation with the students i was able to maintain even social correspondence with my students chatting back and forth about what they were doing at home on any given day the students finally had the gift of time during the day to work on their advanced studies moreover agp even picked up many new students during this time because their classroom teachers and parents deemed they needed more challenge and opportunity to fill time so

010all of this was both enlightening for me but also very thought provoking so we're moving now into the coveted next generation for this present school year uh given the space limitations the scheduling issues the cohort concerns at the buildings this year all agp personalized learning academies have been delivered virtually september was oh i think i accidentally went forward or did i i'm not sure september was dedicated to streamlining the selection process revising all 19 academies by embedding additional teaching and learning resources and completely redesigning all of the assignments to accommodate this 100 virtual model the model has eliminated all scheduling conflicts and space issues completely and most importantly it has increased the student to agp teacher time the one-to-one contact time by creating a very unique coaching situation the virtual delivery and personalized learning model

011with embedded coaching were two goals from way back in 2014 when we came up with our paperless model design that had not been able to be achieved until now so i continue to function as a switchboard operator daily this year from 8 am to 4 pm for all the students at all the schools regardless of the letter day as has been the case since the implementation of a full year program for 250 plus agp students i do make a point of answering my students help requests and reviewing assignments on in the evenings and on weekends in order to make sure that they all get the help they need in a timely manner there are important reasons for this the amount of time students have for agp studies during the school day varies greatly from classroom

012to classroom therefore many of the students also choose to work on their agp outside of the regular school day and these students need to be supported to maintain their enthusiasm because the work is very challenging the students help requests continue this year to be addressed in the order they're received the only thing that preempts them is i get an email or a call from a site administrator or a parent but usually i'm able to answer the students within a few minutes to an hour depending on the volume on a particular day every completed assignment is now able to be reviewed and accepted or returned for attention by the student with feedback for every assignment and this was made possible because i am available now to the entire agp population at all times so this year

013a few new things that were also added the classroom teachers and principals receive agp snapshots of their students bi-weekly students who have not interacted with their agp studies for two weeks receive email reminders on which their teachers are blind copied and when a student successfully completes an academy the classroom teacher receives notice and details related to the student's final rubric assessment and feedback and this serves to really celebrate the students hard work and accomplishments and has also boosted motivation and enthusiasm for their challenging work as we speak there are 113 sixth graders fifth graders and 87 fourth graders participating in the program district-wide including nearly a dozen that were added as a result of manifested talents and potential this spring communications and support have increased exponentially under this emergency model and at the present at

014the time of this presentation students across all three grade levels and at all of the schools have completed as many as five agp academies and they have taken much more ownership of their learning again by way of reminder historically the average completion rate was one academy despite being a year-long program so having said all of this there is still work to be done if you take a look at the windows of the starship enterprise you can see the missions accomplished with previous models on the right hand side these things included a shortage of chromebooks for the agp participants that affected their ability to access their program advanced learners receiving directed agp support for only one third of the school year and the agp rubrics and assessment tools measuring their growth and their progress as competition

015with oneself rather than a competition against others and this was accomplished by the infusion of the personalized learning model into the academies and to recap on the left side of the window uh the missions that were accomplished with the 2020 2021 model we have resolved all the scheduling conflicts and the building issues and equity issues across the buildings and we have created a bridge between the agp and regular classroom which had previously been incomplete and we have successfully created a shift in the gifted education teachers role from mentor and instructor to facilitator and coach and we have successfully promoted a greater student ownership of learning finally in the center window on this slide are the missions still in progress we have not addressed the unique social emotional needs of this group of learners i have

016not yet been able to create one e-academy per grade level for grades one through three based on feedback from primary teachers so that they have a start on something that they can use and there is also still work to be done with respect to promoting ownership for advanced learners by regular classroom teachers there are still misconceptions about giftedness and programming for the gifted and agp and the role of the classroom teacher those things all still persist i'd like to take pause at this first in progress mission the one relating to creating and facilitating monthly or quarterly agp participant social emotional support sessions here's the bottom line on that one historically there has never been any place or opportunity or time to address this mission and i cannot stress how very important this particular item is

017i could share all kinds of research with you on college dropout rates for bright students under achievement for the gifted and the special social emotional issues that are common among these learners but i realize that we don't have that kind of time today i'd like to suggest this as a starting point for giving this subject a placeholder going forward next year i'd like to start by adding into the agp program and invert oh if i could if i could interrupt for a minute we went through those first items so quickly please don't feel rushed if you want to elaborate please do okay thank you faith thank you so much and i would be happy at the end to answer questions too as best i can um so i'll i'll continue through these and then i'll

018see what what you all are thinking and um what may seem clear to me that didn't come across so clearly for all of you um so moving into the fall i'd like to start by adding into the agp program this in-person component in a manner such as that which is shown in this slide this would give me a chance to form relationships with my students that are outside of discussions just about their assignments and their advanced coursework the topics that i have shown you on this slide are are based on research in the field and about group agp sessions that would be extremely beneficial for for the students next i want to talk about uh the next two points so the notion of promoting ownership for advanced learners with the regular classroom teachers coupled with

019the misconceptions about giftedness and programming for the gifted and agp and the role that the regular classroom teacher can should could play in all of this i'd like to tell you all that i have worked since 2013 to build this bridge between the regular classroom and agp but this fact remains i've been in this field for over 30 years and there will always be differences in philosophical beliefs about gifted education among constituent groups and as today's story has told there is much work that has been done on the agp end of things over these past two decades toward building a bridge and it's been very difficult work the result is a beautiful comprehensive package tied up with a bow on it what stands before us now requires nothing more of the classroom teachers than to

020acknowledge a partnership recognize their students with potential give those students permission and encouragement to engage with their agp academies when and where appropriate throughout their school day and that's it the classroom teachers do not have to generate a single thing for their advanced learners they do not have to post a review or give feedback on an assignment with a staff of one we in cheshire public schools have created a 24 7 year-long program for our advanced learners in this district and that is becoming increasingly rare in this country there's a direct correlation between the students who are especially successful in agp and the regular classroom teachers who acknowledge and encourage these students there are many teachers in our district who are doing that and it shows in their advanced students agp success thanks to google

021classroom i can give you extremely specific longitudinal data across all the grade levels across district about bright spots where agp is an active component of the regular classroom and i'm able to do this because google classroom notifications private comments correspondence is all date and time stamped so i know exactly when and where every one of my agp students is working on his or her academy so having said all of this i've shared sort of the good the bad the ugly with you and i'd like to share with you on these last two slides sort of a proposed timeline for accomplishing those remaining agp missions that i showed you in that center window i haven't been able to get to yet so if we move to this slide in preparation for this most recent ccc review

022and with the help of very thorough records and data to examine due to google classroom i really did have time all through this past year to examine and re-examine and reflect on the tasks that were put before me over the past two decades and i really feel i've done my best to give every constituent with whom i work everything they've asked for so this next slide and the one that we're looking at really represent my plan on how best to achieve those missions in progress that are still left unfinished because i don't like to leave things unfinished i like to accomplish those things so um having said that i would like to also say to this group that any things we would think are great ideas or other things to be added would have to

023be done at the expense of some of the things that we've managed to achieve on this very long road to quote star trek scotty i've given it all we've got we need more power um so i feel that the plan that i'm outlining on this and the next slide make very good sense the social emotional piece and the common understanding still need time in addition as i have already mentioned i i owe something to the primary grades and as a result of restructuring all of the academies this year i really wanted to make sure that i was keeping a handle on what my students were thinking and feeling as they were going through these virtual academies so one of their assignments at the end was a real reflection piece where they gave excuse me gave

024me their opinions about things and their wishes and their hopes and what i learned from that is that they would really love to see me develop more academies right now we have seven in sixth grade and sixth in both 5th and 4th but these students would really love more cad programming than the academies i have in that area they would like more engineering they would like coding they would like interior design that's just a few of the things so over the next five years what i would like to consider doing as you could see from this slide there's the next two years here each year creating another one to add to our array of academies for our fourth through sixth grade students and then also adding one each year working from third grade down but

025most importantly promoting those understandings about giftedness through coffee and conversation with the regular classroom teachers and addressing that social emotional piece for um for this population that i really am passionate about working with and feel that i know well after over 30 years and i'll digress for one second just to say that it always broke my heart when i was housed in humboston and i would walk in the door and i would see one of my former students in humiston because they needed that support network because something had gone south for them um so i would really love the chance to start putting some supports for those kids in when they're in the fourth fifth and sixth grade so that they have more tools in their tool belt um as they get older um so

026as you can see for a 20 23 and 2024 and 24 and 25 again continuing that working my way down for the primary grades adding more for the fourth through sixth grades promoting those understandings and providing that social emotional support for these kids would then um bring us back to ccc again in 2026. um so having said all of that and i i don't know i think about maybe 10 minutes or or so um thank you for your ears and eyes and heads and hearts and i know we're all washing our hands even though we've been vaccinated so i i i don't know you're all sorry thank you very much okay thank you i i have a a couple of things i would hope that you might elaborate on a bit um you know we

027certainly spent a great deal of time during the ccc um talking with teachers about how we can build a better bridge for sel we also spoke with the elementary principals about really engaging them and making sure and making a plan for professional development training learning making making sure people there's an awareness out there of our teachers of our staff on those unique social emotional learning needs of academically gifted students and i'm very encouraged by that i'm very excited about the work we can do there and how that can transcend not just the elementary grades but also we can share that training and information with middle school and high school teachers because i think there's such a wealth of information there to be shared you spoke a lot about um sort of the teachers end of

028this can you speak a little bit i'm sort of switching gears now can you speak a little bit too when you refer to the academies what an academy is what that looks like how you have created those academies and maybe you know you could list list for us that the multiple options that are available to give students choice in what they'll learn and then maybe just just give the board members a little bit of an idea about what what what kinds of work the kids are doing that they become self-directed learners and much of this is independent and that your role is so important not because you're taking a step back but because the kids have really engaged and they need to check in with you because of the kind of kids that they are

029and you can kind of guide and facilitate which spurs on that learning process for them sure yeah i just realized i left that whole logistical piece out so thank you so much for for asking for clarification on that one of the things that i realized in in starting out this year and what i learned from when we had our instantaneous 100 transfer over to our remote learning is that it made good sense for me to take every one of the academies which i'll talk about in just a second but i don't want to lose this thought and make sure that they are all set up in the same way so that for because of course for many of these students i have them for three years they're my kids i meet them as fourth graders

030and they stay with me i also do pick up new kids as they you know demonstrate these maybe latent or just emergent um gifted tendencies and behaviors as they go along but so all of the academies are set up in the same way in terms of format which the parents have also thanked me for so for example each academy has 15 assignments each academy is set up in the same way with how i present and give them their instructional support materials and their assignment sheets um every student tells me some of them are very succinct they just send me one word the word says done and that tells me in their email they want me to check their work others uh say hey miss h oh my gosh i'm sorry it took me a couple

031of extra days but i was really on fire for this story and now i'm done and i can't wait to hear what you so it varies from one single word done um but everything is checked so what we have um beginning with standards and and core curriculum uh uh as our as our foundation and student interest in what i have observed over 20 years of being here in cheshire with the topics that appeal most to these students and those evolve of course we have academies in as i mentioned before all of the the language arts math social science science uh sixth grade has one that's called kaleidoscope which is really probably the best way to describe that academy is to say that it's an interdisciplinary academy where the students are looking at the latest technologies

032that are going on um in terms of nasa's work so that they're looking at ways to colonize and create more space as the earth becomes increasingly smaller sorry i just need to rehydrate for a second and that wasn't a purposeful segue but i just realized it works and makes good sense because in fourth grade the students study water but for these kids you know they studied water the first time in the first grade and they learned about the water cycle and whatever else so their their water academy for agp is on water scarcity and they really start to look at wow the population is growing exponentially but we still have the same exact amount of water that we had when george washington was alive and when the dinosaurs were alive and oh wow this could

033be crazy and so for the student who um completes that academy in grade four when they get in grade six they're already thinking about okay so if i'm going to create a colony on the moon based on what i found out in research they think that there is water on the south pole of the moon so if i made my colony there and i looked at you know separating out hydrogen and oxygen molecules from the fuel source that got us there and this is where their brains can be by the time they get to sixth grade so that's one example i'll give you another example in fourth grade the social science academy for our kids um is you know kind of taking that notion of the basic needs we have as humans which of course

034one of those is having a home having a roof over our head but for those kids it's designing their dream house it's deciding where when they are thinking of themselves 20 or 25 years in the future would they want to build their dream house and we look at uh you know 70 different styles of architecture and american architecture and they figure out that they're in love with certain styles and and then they maybe want to come up with their own style of architecture that's a combination of many other kinds of architecture and then i teach them how to use a cad program and they learn what architects do when they meet with a client and they start out and the first thing they say is well so um mr hanlon so you're retiring and you

035want to have a house by the beach now when you're cooking your food do you want the kitchen to face the water or maybe your herb garden in the backyard and they learn how architects use bubble diagrams and then from the bubble diagrams those grow into floor plans and these fourth grade kids actually learn how to use the cad program to design those and then the very last thing they have in that cat academy is a cad program that is more sophisticated which they fall in love with but then that's the end of that academy so that i think is part of the explanation for we want more cad programs we want the more advanced level cad programs because they start to design rooms and get into very specific things and it was very exciting

036for me when i attended uh you know our spring um showcase at the high school which we didn't have last year but two years ago to see some of the high school kids who had been my students as fourth and fifth grade and sixth grade kids who you know now are doing these amazing models of of all kinds of buildings and students who go on to college and major in architecture but to segway so now that fourth grade child when they get to fifth grade just stop me at any point in time if i'm boring you guys or i'm just rambling but when they get to fifth grade so they've got their choices of what they might want to choose for the student that really was in love with that architecture they in fifth grade

037can create the ultimate playground based on a scenario where uh where it's an urban setting these kids do not have backyards like the kids in cheshire so a spot of land gets donated with uh input from students an ultimate playground will be designed so they learn pythagorean theorem and they learn how to use the cad program to design now playground equipment that's safe and inviting and fun um lori those are great examples i'm so glad i just wanted you to kind of get me so that people kind of saw what what some of those things were okay thank you sure thank you does anyone um on the committee have any other questions have questions for lori about her her presentation or her program to the ccc i just laurie it's one quick question and thank

038you so much for all this detail i know i know your heart's been in this for a long time so thank you for your help on this you had mentioned earlier some misconceptions about the program i never really thought about that is there like a a top one pers misperception that comes up i i'm not sure what the misconceptions would be sure uh well i can speak to that um from two angles and i'll be very uh brief about this so the universal angle that that i guess i would want to share with you um first do you go by tony or anthony i'm not sure um i'm in trouble but tony's fine okay so um there's this common misunderstanding that if a student is gifted first of all he or she doesn't need any

039special program because they're going to be fine no matter what anyway because they're smart the other thing is that they're smart in everything if if they're if they're quote unquote gifted and and that's a hard burden if you think about an eight or a nine or a ten-year-old child that is a very hard burden because first of all that's a lie they may be brilliant mathematically and and and not as strong in language arts and and so that's one thing that leads to a whole bunch of other issues that this night is not long enough for us to get it um and then the other thing about um misconceptions is is the best way to support these kids and tony you know i've been here uh i walked into coming from california in 1997 i

040walked into hummuston school i was given the keys to the third floor um and for many years the students would trek up those three flights of stairs where where we existed up there and it was like a country school they would arrive in the morning they would stay with me all day and then they would go home and what happened with that model was that those kids were cared for by this other woman down at the at humiston school and her name was lori and so when those kids returned to their regular classroom teachers their regular classroom teachers said okay they got their gifted prescription they have their dosage of that um so you know when i made the comment that we have created something that's 24 7 for these kids historically back in that

041day when those kids were busting me first of all it was a fraction of the number of kids that we have now and and and cheshire does a great job of creating kids that are strong academically so we weren't serving all of the kids who should have been served second of all then what was waiting for them when they got back to school you know this kid's already doing a triple digit multiplication um but they're now going to do this worksheet where they're doing 7 times 8 is 56 and so so those are a couple of the misconceptions is that starting to answer what you were watching you know i was i was always curious uh i honestly i think one of my daughters went through it several years ago but i don't remember i

042don't remember familiar to me probably in culvertory sadly i don't remember which one it it's not such a long time ago although uh yeah it's only probably four or five years ago but um i'm actually a little longer since one graduated but now i've always kind of curious yeah i never really thought about what folks think about the program um but i do know kids are generally excited to be part of that you know for experience i think it's come up a long way this space in the history you pursue you just describe because there's more opportunities for them or time set aside and more challenges so again i just want to say thank you for bringing your staff's work on this and it's a very positive thing for kids thank you so much and

043do you have any questions yeah thanks laurie can you um just reiterate you probably said this how many students in the program and the right now grades four through six yes um i believe when i counted up this morning you know what i'll go back uh just because i want to make sure i have the number i just i just want a ballpark uh about a little under 300. oh so a lot a lot and is it would it be correct for me to assume that these academies are like projects this is project-based learning or is that not correct um i well i guess you know for example using the fourth grade architecture academy as an example when those students are done they have created floor plans for their own dream house one of the

044things that you know these are smart kids first of all if it isn't engaging and it isn't real and it is not authentic for them they don't care they will just you know say first of all bright people don't often sign up for extra work moreover extra work that's hard because when these children are are are young starting in kindergarten you know moving up they're kind of just rolling along with the rest of their classmates although here in our school district in general the teachers do a a great job of challenging those kids you know as best they can within these heterogeneous settings but oftentimes for these kids when they get to me and someone has flagged them and said this kid's an automatic for me and this is why and look at this data

045and whatever i have to work with them because sometimes they kind of freak out they're getting this stuff and they're they've not done work like this before because this is more at their level um and in the beginning it's you know they're used to just getting everything done in five or ten minutes moving on to the next thing um so it's project based in that it's real and authentic um did i answer your question anne yeah i mean it's it's project basin that it it they can't do it in three five minutes 10 minutes it's something that takes working on and coming back to and working on some more and coming back to and doing it in parts and pieces yes that's exactly right and some of the kids will get an assignment back from

046me two or three times but you know when they get to that final assignment 15 which as i mentioned earlier is a new component that i put in this year some of the questions in that are what are you most proud of for these kids i'm most proud of the fact that one night or one day in my classroom i was so mad with you miss h that i had tears in my eyes but i figured it out you helped me and i got it and that sense of accomplishment for them you know when you when you do something that you didn't believe you could do because you've never had the chance to try to do that kind of thing and you do that it kind of sets you on fire which is another thing

047we want for these kids all of the academies are also based on a parallel curriculum model with the notion of practice and the notion of identity so that they could see themselves as tomorrow's nasa scientists and tomorrow's you know architects of green you know buildings and that sort of thing but that's hard work and so when they learn how to work hard at fourth fifth and sixth grade level that's commiserate with their ability then when they're rolling into the advanced algebra in middle school and those those high-end classes at the high school they have the tools in their tool belt having gotten the chance to do that with the academies thank you very much thank you lori um just a few questions also um can i what percentage of the students that you receive or

048that come into the agp um into your class how many are with you for all three years of the program what percentage do you think um well that i could get you that information faith i don't have it off the top of my head because sometimes as i mentioned earlier if we think about giftedness first of all one of the things that is different from how they perceived it when we were kids where it was an all or nothing nothing thing if you think of it as a seed that's getting watered and they'll sprout and germinate at different times right so you know i might not get kid in fourth grade but i get them in fifth grade because they have now sprouted so i would need to go back and and look at that

049but um there's a big chunk of these kids because first of all of course we start by looking at the data and if these kids have that strong data right from the beginning you know but there's a lot of other factors for example let's say you're a kid who is on two travel teams um maybe you're going to hebrew school have all these other things on your plate you might just pass on the opportunity when you know or the parents might say to the classroom teacher or to me we're going to pass for this year um so i could get that i could probably look all of that information up and figure it out for you i guess my my question was is this a program that um they you say you've got a third

050grader or fourth grader do they forgive me if this is a dumb question do they graduate out of the program or do they stay with you all the way ah i see what you're asking thank you i get it now i see what you're asking i'm sorry i misunderstood so historically when i came here in 1997 um pardon me for being very direct but if a kid got in in fourth grade they could do nothing but barely breathe like i could pick up their wrist to try to check for a pulse and they were taking a chair that could be someone else's but they were not on fire to do anything it would be like extracting wisdom to get them to do something so several years ago now i would have to look up exactly

051what year we decided that at the end of every year it all starts over fresh and which students should best sit in those seats would be the students who would fill those seats you know we don't really have to worry about that now because i have managed to create a a way that we can have more many more seats than we used to okay okay and um and they're with you how long on average you get them once or twice a week or you get them on a on a letter day no this year i get them whenever uh every day of the week whenever um it just it's it the stuff comes up and so sometimes that you know involves you know talking with let's say the fourth grade teachers at chapman school and

052saying okay i have enough kids here who need to talk with me about um this thing can i schedule in a google meet so that we can get on a screen together um but hopefully they're with me all day yeah in faith i'll just jump in really quickly it was in the program prior to this year she would do them once every four days for about 45 minutes and that's part of the shift we're making to keep the instruction um virtual and have monthly contact time that's focused on seo and we've opened this as if we can stop presenting screen so we can see because we actually don't need the presentation up that way we can see each other just a little bit oh i'm sorry of course i i um so my question all

053right so this is the virtual um kind of frames this next question for me um as you know we're going through a modernization um pro the modernization process and divide trying to decide on you know a plan and obviously the focus is in elementary and 300 kids is not an insignificant number of students um so uh granted you're doing it virtually but what are have you been asked what are some of the needs that you need for your program that should be considered as we go about looking at the design of elementary schools uh thank you for asking that question faith i guess what i would say is just to make sure that there is a space where we can meet for those social emotional topics you know that i'm hoping that you know so

054that it becomes something where the kids are like okay today all of the fourth graders here at norton school are going to get together and we'll need a place to do that you know um space has been an issue i'm very excited about the modernization because um i have delivered instruction in some unusual spaces over the years since i've become itinerant um you know but the nice thing is the way it's working teachers tend to be flexible people anyway and with this virtual model and the ability to literally and these kids are are very savvy in this if we can balance having me be able to come in so we have that piece that i've spent a lot of time talking about tonight somewhere anywhere a cafeteria a library somewhere then we'll be good okay

055okay and i do have just one more do the social emotional needs of these kids differ from the regular students oh there are lots of issues that um are very particular to to this particular group of kids you know perfectionism which is huge and can be completely debilitating by the time a child becomes an adult um depression and anxiety something known as imposter syndrome where once they finally go away to college and they get away they are able to get out of that that place they were where everybody in their community believed oh faith well she always knows the answer and oh my gosh you know faith is brilliant whatever but meanwhile inside faith as a as a girl is going well i didn't know the answer to that what if i'm not really what

056people think and that the pressure the pressure on these kids for all of those things and there's a million more that i could talk about are very unique to this particular group of of learners and as i mentioned before um when and i still have my office at hummuston but when i would come into hummuston and i would almost see them not want to make eye contact with me because they were saying oh there's miss h oh my god what might she be thinking right now that i'm here we need to we need to to do some things to fill fill that okay thank you um well thanks for the presentation um i guess unless anyone has any other follow-up questions thank you lori that was wonderful thank you so much for your time this

057evening and thanks for listening thank you laura you're welcome thanks lori sure um so next up is the social studies summary yes so we have here with us the team that worked on the five-year review of the social studies curriculum k-12 so i think we'll see some familiar faces we have tim galvin the social studies department chair at ted for high school we have kristin giuliano who is the division leader for social studies at dodd middle school we have genie monty one of our curriculum instructional coaches from the elementary school we also have kelly grillo principal from norton school who oversaw we always have an administrator who oversees one of the subject areas to help guide and facilitate the process and also kevin hanlon so i am going to turn it over to them to

058share um an executive summary of the social studies program thank you again all of you for being here tonight so thank you marlene um so what you guys are seeing on this first slide is the c3 framework booklet um and the three c's that you see there stand for college career and civic life so the goal of the framework is to guide uh planning to create a robust instruction that prepares students is for the challenges of college career and then of course the third c civic life that's a real push for our students to become knowledgeable thinking and active citizens so as you can see on the side bubbles there are four dimensions that make up this framework the one on the left the first one developing questions and planning inquiries this is where it

059all starts and it really does start with the development and it mostly is on behalf of the teacher of what's called the compelling question um there are two types one is the compelling the other is the the supporting but the teacher really steers the ship with the with the compelling question um the compelling question is usually the bigger question um it usually focuses on an enduring issue or or a concern um they can deal with student curiosities they can they can deal with unresolved issues concerns that students might have an example of one might be why do we need rules um so that would be a good example now the supporting questions would be kind of focus on answering some of the smaller types of questions like descriptions or perhaps like definitions or processes so

060to go along with that larger compelling question why do we need rules a question might be posed what are some rules at dodd middle school or what are some of the rules of my family so that pretty much covers in a nutshell dimension and one pass it on to tim galvin thanks kristen um so with the compelling and supporting questions established students move on to dimension number two uh which you'll see in the lower left hand corner applying disciplinary tools and concepts and in the second dimension students are focused on acquiring knowledge that's why you see the light bulb up at the top of the second column and the supporting questions that kristin mentioned are used to guide the exploration of the key concepts that are part of the unit and uh they provide ultimately

061the foundation for students to be able to develop a supported claim related to the compelling question which is guiding the unit in the second dimension students are challenged to learn through a number of disciplinary lenses so depending on the course or the theme or subject they may be challenged to think like an historian or a geographer or an economist or a political scientist so if you're working in a civics class obviously you're going to be looking uh primarily but not always through the poli sci lens um in our ap geography class obviously a geographic lens um in our history classes you'll spend time in each of those uh four lenses um for example uh you know a unit on the the new deal the great depression in the new deal um you'll be looking at

062geographic themes economic themes um obviously politics uh the politics of the new deal and uh some of the historical forces which created uh that uh that calamity so um that's the second phase and it's it's mostly about um preparing the building blocks that students are going to need to move on to phase three in phase dimension three that's where students are working with the inquiry inquiry literacies as they're called under the c3 framework uh students are selecting and gathering sources they're evaluating sources for evidence which can be used to support claims related to the compelling question and they begin organizing evidence as they prepare for the fourth and final dimension and i'm going to pass it back to kristin for that awesome thanks tim so the fourth and final dimension basically concludes this inquiry arc

063and this is where we're looking for our students to communicate their conclusions and in some cases to take some informed action so the way they communicate their conclusions often students are given a variety of choice and through the rest of our presentation you will get a chance to see some samples of different uh modes of communicating conclusion but the venues can be as small as just their peers in their classroom or in some cases they could reach out to a larger venue and in some cases students can actually reach out to the community to report some of their conclusions so this is the kind of final and closing piece to the inquiry arc so we're going to pick up just a little bit on the elementary side of things that i'm going to start with

064just a brief overview of the work that was done over the last cc cycle ccc cycle which was really to align our curriculum to that c3 framework to have it grounded in those dimensions of inquiry that kristen and tim just guided you through and that really happened in earnest uh for our grade six curriculum and if tell if you'll slide forward a little bit as we um dug into some of the feedback from parents and teachers really the call and it was a call that we knew was going to be there we need to do that work in our other grade levels as well um so kell if you can go just one more on that front um i think the quote on the left is really a good synopsis of the direction that we

065need there we go thanks uh synopsis of where we need to go the opportunity to engage in higher level thinking update our resources students to interact with primary resources and again giving teachers the resources to make this easy to do in the classroom so i'd like to turn it over to genie monty who will just share a few samples of how this played out in grade 6 and how to shape our work at the elementary level going forward thanks kevin so i have been working closely with the district sixth grade teachers to align our curriculum units to the c3 framework and our team spent several meetings updating the sixth grade social studies units with the focus on all four dimensions developing questions applying interdisciplinary concepts evaluating resources and then communicating that information through something more

066of an authentic um current product so on this slide you're going to see we've included some examples of a performance assessment from our south american uni in which students had fired by just income to do a news broadcast um and called it um where in south america so the news teams were responsible for putting together a special on a specific country in south america and they had to include new segments like an introduction a lead story uh this day in history edition and money watch and i'm never be able to get to all of those but there are different segments to the news broadcast um and you'll get a chance to see a little a little bit of each hi i'm sophia pepper and you're watching cheshire local news today my team and i have

067a special presentation for for you we're focusing on a country on south america's coast argentina here's sophia pepper with our lead story today how are you sophia thank you sophia i'm doing great but some of argentina's forests are not in 1914 argentina had approximately only 105 million hectares of forest now we're left with only approximately 28 to 45 million hectares the cause is the expanding industry of soybean growth and production it is taking over the youngest cloud forest and the chico eco true news good morning i'm emma sloan with your news from peru let's start with our headline story more women are working as reporters in south america but before i continue if you don't know what a porter is i'll tell you a porter is someone who leads people on a two or more

068day hike they carry most necessary things including tents sleeping bags cookware and more in peru this is a popular job but it was only for popular so as you notice this is a the culminating uh project um for the end of so we're in south america um where they had to choose you know which country and do the research on it follow the four dimensions um social studies they had their developing question and they did the research on this applied all of that information to this newscast so it's interesting to see so if you do get a chance it's uh kind of neat the way they put it together and then we'll go to the next slide so what will be so as you look at this slide you'll notice that our focus is to

069align all elementary social studies curricula to the c c three framework um as we've begun to do in sixth grade we're looking at to update resources in all grades for the purpose of staying current and using resources that meet the needs of all ranges of readers and learners in most grades we'll we will not be relying on a text actually the only text we have right now is fifth grade us history in point three i've started working um in this area with um integrating academics with not only sixth grade but also recently with uh third grade at norton we worked on aligning one of the social studies units with our informative standards in a reading unit and we also incorporated third grade writing standards um and in the process we are also working on vetting

070appropriate resources for this integrated project in third grade and then and that's with the help of our district reading specialist and that's it for that slide you can go ahead calendar thank you so as you have heard uh through our presentation the c3 framework is the kind of the guidebook that we use to design this robust uh social studies curriculum but it's really not the only thing that comes into play with designing our curriculum so i designed this graphic to kind of maybe help uh clarify a little of like the balls we juggle as as we build curriculum um so many of you are very well aware of the common core state standards and they're still uh part of of our design and now they're called you can see below the title it says common

071core standards so they're still referred to as they're now referred to as the css so things like writing reading um listening they're still kind of uh part of our uh of our design and still very significant um but the the large bubble is um you'll see the acronym csde and that's connecticut state department of education they also put forth um a framework for uh standards for our our for our social studies and and that's across the board for all grade levels um in addition to the to the standards which uh are several different strands geography history economics civics um just to name a few of them and they also provide some themes um that we can use to design units and so forth uh in addition they they also put out some regions so uh

072grade six seven is is a continuum curriculum where we met uh grade six and seven teachers met in the past to decide which themes would be grade appropriate for seventh grade and which would be grade appropriate for sixth grade and likewise we took all the global regions and we discussed you know what would be best for for each grade level um and and we kind of design from there so we have our our standards and our kind of organizational themes and geographic regions presented by the state department of education but that c3 is kind of that guidebook with the with the four dimensions of inquiry that we previously described grade eight is um similar in so far as they do have a thematic approach um and you know they do cover traditional topics so their

073units are kind of a combination of both thematic and just traditional time period topics um one of the things we thought as we worked our way through through this we got a lot of advice from steve armstrong at the state department level who was a fantastic resource for us as we tried to figure out how to juggle all this and put something together he had suggested this case study approach so on the far right in the center uh bubble you we did take that idea and we went with it and we found this was awesome because we could actually um put out topics from these geographic regions that related to our themes that were timely that were current that or meaningful to our students that they they could kind of latch on to so this

074is just a little graphic to kind of you know maybe uh visually kind of explain a little bit of of how we put together our grade 7a and likewise similar for grade six curriculum you can advance it cal so for for dad um we have four goals that uh we're really kind of uh honing in on and the first of which is uh we have not completed our writing our grade seven 7 curriculum we still have two more units that we're looking to tackle this summer through the summer curriculum writing institute and with writing a unit comes all the pieces that that go into that like common assessments prioritizing our standards academic tasks just overall just engage in compelling content in addition grade 8 is looking to revise their reconstruction unit and create a common

075performance task along with a summative assessment and both grade levels are really looking to develop a more multi-cultural curricula just to address social inequity and and lastly one of the things that surfaced through our review was the need to have a digital database that can house all of our documents our resources and more importantly any crop video clips or websites because we're finding uh as we progress in our curriculum we might revisit a website from the year before that our whole lesson is hinged on and we open we go to open it and it no longer exists so we're really looking for a way to digitally have a storage spot for all of that and as you saw with jeannie in the the grade six this slide just highlights some of our work samples from

076our both seventh and eighth grade um students um the ones in in red are for seventh grade along with the poster you see the water is a human right and the ones in purple are for the eighth grade those hyperlinks are available for you i'm not gonna go over everyone and our intention is if you guys have time later you could by all means take some time to look at um all of them if you if you would like but i if you would go back kel just go back to the inquiry qft hyperlink right there if that will open can you click to see if that will just open up or yeah she's presenting in a tab kristen so it's not gonna okay no no problem so if it doesn't work how just go

077to the next one i can i can highlight that next one so you please feel free to take a look at all of those hyperlinks um so what you're looking at here is an eighth grade student work sample this is a culminating end product this is a way for tim baker students he teaches the 8th grade u.s history where this project was completed this was a way for his students to report out to communicate conclusions and what this group of students did here was they used the website wix.com and they were able to create a fantastic website this particular topic came in this large expansion thematic expansion unit that they had focused on it was a three-prong unit uh expansion started with the power of the presidency of andrew jackson the second prong hinged on

078the physical expansion the westward expansion and then this comes out of the third prong of that uh thematic unit which kind of stemmed from human rights namely all this new territory brought along you know the the question of uh slave rights which trickled down to as this group of students chose women's rights so this um this website was student created 100 and it's pretty impressive uh if you take a look there are several pages more than actually what i'm showing you and they chose the pictures they wrote up the excerpts um they chose the you know the topics and so for the subtopics uh and it's just a little glimpse at what these these these students are able to do this last page i wanted to just highlight this because um tim talked about using

079evidence and and finding credible sources and so forth and they do that at dodd and it's impressive we start them i think they start them in sixth grade with creating works cited pages and so forth and they really grasp the concept of how important it is to give credit um to to those sources that they've used and also to seek out credible resources so this is just a sample of this group of students their works cited page for this particular website so that's kind of just a little glimpse and and i encourage you to take a look at some of the other student samples that were on that previous previous couple slides back thank you kristen um so we'll take a look here at the key goals for chs with the advent of the c3

080framework and the new state standards that came out in 2015 uh much of our work in the last cycle has been focused on alignment with the c3 emphasizing the skills needed for college and career as kristin mentioned earlier and also that key focus on citizenship and preparing students to be engaged and informed citizens we have worked on our core classes primarily at this point uh particularly our united states history and civics and to some extent modern world history um in a in on the next slide not just yet but i'll go i'll walk you guys through what a mini inquiry loon unit would look like in a history classroom and we'll get to that in a moment um when you look at our course sequence map you'll see we have developed a mission statement which

081is reflective of the c3 framework philosophy focused on developing inquisitive learners who are going to be engaged citizens and obviously an emphasis on skill development social studies is a great content vehicle for students to develop the essential skills that they're going to need regardless of where they go when they leave cheshire high school and so the both of those principles are reflected in our mission statement you'll also see to the left of the course sequence map we have kind of like an overarching question for each grade level uh modern world us history then civics uh and then senior year is open electives primarily but we have a guiding overarching question which is very much in the spirit of the c3 framework we have worked on trying to continue to expand and diversify our elective course

082offerings we had a number of ap offerings in 2016 and a few college prep offerings but we've worked to now add three additional and i'll talk more about some ideas for ad adding beyond that but we've added ap comparative gov ece human rights in the law and starting next year the black and latino american studies course all of these courses have um work very nicely with the c3 perspective and um we're excited to have them as part of our course offerings at this point we also look to develop a annual literacy assessment which we did develop and it is the goal of it is to provide a benchmark assessment of our students literacy skills when they join us at cheshire high school and then administer that at the end of their freshman year and beginning

083of their sophomore and end of sophomore years our ability to administer the annual literacy assessment this year was kind of disrupted by covid and minimized instructional time but next year we will look to bring that back we will also be looking to potentially expand it to grades 11 and 12 so that's something i'll talk about later on the goals to be so what does inquiry look like in a social studies classroom and you've at this point in the presentation you've already seen some very uh solid examples and some exciting stuff that our students are working on at the elementary and middle school levels um but i i want to just give you kind of like a brief snapshot of what an inquiry unit could look like and it may be quite different than uh it

084should be quite different than you know how uh social studies classrooms were set up uh you know even a decade ago as we talked about previously we begin with planning the inquiry and so in this example that i'm about that i'm sharing with you the compelling or overarching question that students were engaged with in this mini unit was why did the united states win world war ii as kristin talked about earlier in the presentation students need to develop we work with students to then develop supporting questions which are going to uncover the key concepts that students are going to need to build an effective and well-supported claim to the compelling question and in this case the supporting question uh for for this mini unit was one of the key ones was what was the critically

085important role played by the american home front in world war ii once we have our questions established we move on to the second phase as i spoke earlier that's kind of where the students are establishing the building blocks for their investigation in dimension 2 you'll see a combination of collaborative work among students a direct instruction from teachers peer feedback in this case direct instruction was provided on the relevant themes of the american home front military readiness um building the arsenal of democracy sacrifice rallying the public et cetera from there students were provided with a variety of resources uh differentiated depending on their ability level um they would work with selected resources you see there's blue hyperlinks in there and as they're working with those resources they're getting uh teacher feedback and they're building their understanding

086of all of the different factors which help to create um the potent home front that allowed us to succeed in world war ii uh from there uh with the building blocks in place we move on to the third uh dimension number three and that's where students are going to begin um independently as as was spoken about at elementary and uh middle school level they're going to work on independently gathering effective information they're going to vet resources analyze them pull out evidence that they can utilize to help develop a well-supported claim to the compelling question in this case we have the students identify two sources using the chs databases and then they moved on to phase four and in dimension four of the inquiry arc uh as we discussed earlier that's where students are going to

087communicate their conclusions or take informed actions in some more culminating projects for a course in this case students work collaboratively to communicate their understanding by developing a google doodle um and you'll see one of them there in the bottom right hand corner students were able to use google drawings if they wanted to do it using the google suite they also could have drawn it or some students used other apps that they were familiar with as well but the google drawings is a highly effective tool that's available right in our suite and the majority of groups used that and so they had to build a google doodle um which was going to tell the story of why america was successful in world war ii and how the home front provided the foundation for that victory these

088are some other examples of students communicating their conclusions i just wanted to kind of give you an idea of the diversity of of work that students would be engaged in kind of working from going clockwise starting in the upper left-hand corner that's from this year those are students who are engaged and you can tell one of the students is remote from home the student up on the smart board this is a mock judicial nomination uh process um the student from home was if i remember craig this was in our ap government class was a senator who was um asking questions of the judicial nominee who was seated at the table in the front of the classroom but it was a an excellent opportunity to bring in our remote learners and our in-person learners and have

089them participate in a simulation continuing to move clockwise uh that is a uh also using google drawings that's a design for an underground railroad memorial that was created as i said in google drawings and um the students had to design who would be honored on that pathway and why they would be chosen to be a part of this underground railroad museum continuing to go clockwise we have some students who were working on videos for either civic engagement project or history through pop culture net neutrality was the issue that the student was working with in the bottom right hand corner 911 in pop culture in the uh bottom and then over on the bottom uh left is a group of students who uh created a class mural they were using the superhero theme as a way

090to understand the federal bureaucracy and each student was assigned a particular federal agency and they had to um portray that agency as uh as a superhero and um each student uh probably about 80 uh close to 80 students each created an individual pain that went together to create this class mural so these are a variety of ways in which students are challenged to share their conclusions their evidence-based conclusions in um and creative ways as i mentioned before and and kristen talked about this earlier as well taking informed action is also part of the fourth dimension and that's not something that we can necessarily weave into each and every unit but it's a very effective opportunity in a culminating project and a great example of that is our civic engagement fair this is students taking informed

091action at cheshire high school it's the required culminating project for the civics course students select an issue that's important to them that they have a passion for they research that issue and develop a deeper understanding of it and then from there they create an action plan how are they going to raise awareness about their selected issue how are they going to share that with the public in this project they're required to produce something whether it's a website a video we've had students host rallies we've had students write poetry or create artwork they have to create a something tangible and then share that out both online we encourage students to post online and share out their their products but also at our annual um actually each semester we have it civic engagement fair in which teachers

092students and administrators come and move around the civic engagement fair and students share their work why they think it's important um what they produced and uh most importantly what kind of change they would like to see um put into place what are they advocating for so so that in a nutshell is the civic engagement fair and last but not least these are some of the key goals for the next cycle as it relates to curriculum we're going to continue to work on developing curriculum units for all of the core courses that are c3 aligned we are also looking to expand our course offerings um to incorporate more of a global perspective this came up in both our student and teacher surveys the need to take a look a deeper look at our modern world history

093course and also to think about proposing some global history courses potentially something in the ancient civilization area um like that used to be grade seven but due to the changing standards now grade seven is um focused on uh geography and regions of the world as kristin elaborated upon earlier so we kind of have a whole as it relates to ancient civilization um other ideas to consider for expanding our global perspective could be an asian history course that's come up both from students and teachers and so those are some of our goals going forward with curriculum as it relates to text and resources and technology we have been very fortunate to add a number of new textbooks in our ap courses but we are looking to acquire updated textbooks especially for u.s history but also potentially

094an additional supplementary text for our world history course excuse me uh we're also in hope or we're hoping to um create a social studies learning library in um the coming up next couple of years and we envision this as a dynamic learning space which could include both a mini library of discipline specific texts beyond above and beyond what our chs library has but also as a dedicated learning lab where students are receiving extra support and help on instruction we're going to continue to expand the use of the inquiry-based model that we've presented to you here tonight on assessment as i mentioned earlier we're hoping to we're not hoping we will be bringing back our annual literacy assessment on next year and as i talked about we're going to consider opportunities to to make that an

095assessment for all four levels on the professional learning um one of the things that the subcommittee came away with was a need to revise our modern world history curriculum um so we hope to engage in that work uh in the next couple of years and um continue to develop the new black and latino american studies course which we begin teaching in the fall but will be engaged in professional learning to to fully implement that course over the next couple of years and with that that's all the goals so thank you guys for thank you for listening tim i and and everyone you did a really nice job of encapsulating a five-year review into a very succinct plan while also getting in there um an explanation of the c3 which is in itself a very big

096and large undertaking um and and i i liked the way that um you were able to really meld all those together including the common core state standards the state standards the the c3 and and the examples that you gave i know our board we had some board members who are very interested in learning more about the c3 tonight so i'll turn it back to faith to see if there are any any questions i throw it out um anna tony do you want to go ahead ian um so you started out with uh the sixth grade and then but you mentioned something about the fifth grade uh us history course that is also going to be are you developing at the elementary level from sixth grade and going steps down or so we'll we'll probably take

097the approach with our curriculum writing institute that will revise one unit per grade level per year over the next five years and that'll get us k 6 all the way up to date and all the units um so we won't do sixth and fifth and fourth and third we'll do chunks of each grade level each of the next five years thank you i don't have any questions i i just happy to see the amount of detail that goes into this uh because when i look back at the development of c3 over time when it materialized for our tails i was worried how that would shape our curriculum but it's it it's had the opposite uh outcome which is great i i think again i'm just the amount of i i know i and and marilyn

098said is best you boiled a five-year review down to a very concise presentation for us but just all the avenues you showed us that goes into shapeness curriculum is impressive for me so thank you for the work on that i know it's working out very well for our students um i do have some cr questions on college and the the three the c3 i i um i'm i'm late to the game and if you guys maybe could get me some background information because um i i i just am curious how it developed and where the academic research behind it is and and um you know because it seems like you know i am old school i confess um but a shift from a to a totally it seems almost a totally thematic based approach to

099history as opposed to you know i'm not i'm not a big huge fan necessarily of a chronological you know let's let's go through every period of history but but it seems i'm gonna be honest it seems kind of amorphous in some respects and i'm just wondering if you could address that uh almost unmoored and maybe i'm missing something and that that's where that c3 review on my part would help me understand it better sure i guess i can get us started on that um i would say you know at the high school first i would say uh the c3 framework does not have to be taught chronologically or thematic or if you have an opportunity to do both you can continue to teach in a chronological fashion while working through thematic-based units i think kristin

100talked a little bit about this and and their curriculum document for example all of our us history courses um are taught on are continue to be taught in a primarily chronological um basis at the high school um now that doesn't mean that they're not delving into some overarching thematic units at different points immigration is a great topic for that to look at immigration and changes over time another important way you could do that is coming out of world war ii and going into the cold war and then ultimately vietnam you can focus on foreign policy and the changing role of america and the pros and cons of it so you can you can do little mini thematic bursts um without really leaving behind the chronological um format um but it doesn't paint and it doesn't

101paint curriculum developers or teachers into a box um it continues to provide us as educators the opportunity to develop develop curriculum um as as we kind of have presented here and um you know tonight um and the other thing i would say too is oftentimes when people first hear about c3 or the inquiry arc and they see the focus on skills um and and maybe a misconception develops that well we're not working as much with knowledge and facts anymore and i hope that we dispelled that tonight um but you know for students to create some of the work that you saw today they have to have a knowledge base right um and and that knowledge base shouldn't just be provided by teachers of course some should be but they should be challenged to to engage

102in self-directed learning and expand upon what the teachers are offering in the classroom too and i think i think that's one of the things that i really like about the c3 framework is it it doesn't leave behind the importance of direct instruction from time to time and unit to unit and day to day but it goes beyond that um and it really allows for challenging work um and authentic learning opportunities that engage students so um so um tim how do you um clearly you know the projects are demonstrating knowledge to acquisition and and and all but um how do you what different tools do you use to assess their their learning i mean it can't just be you know the the fair at the end of the year or so what do you do along

103the way to um pull out from the kids uh what they know and measure it i think i think you have to have a diversity of assessments and you probably and you're going to see that at all of our levels um you're you're going to can you know in that world war ii unit that our u.s history teachers are working with you know that's just one performance-based assessment within a unit it doesn't mean that they're not having um an objective assessment that's also evaluating um another skill set it doesn't mean that they're not also working on um a document analysis uh task that's um evaluating their skills with document analysis or um a writing based assessment so i think the key with assessment is is diversity um and uh you know evaluating our students ability

104and in a variety of areas okay and do you um do you uh along the lines um have um oral challenges almost almost like a different dissertation ask challenge to their work and just you know so they have to defend their work before um the teacher or before classmates um do you offer those kinds of opportunities yeah i mean i i think i could speak for the high school you know if you're if you're looking at the civic engagement fair that kind of is like the college version of students needing to defend why their issue is important why you know why they're raising awareness about it and also kind of explain you know their the policies laws and changes they would like to see implemented and defend that and um they're asked to do that

105through their product but then also through q a at the at the civic engagement fair as well um you know to go back to the um the ap gov class and the students who were working on the judicial nomination simulation um they need to they need to play their role effectively and and part of that is challenging other students um you know so you you get uh a good opportunity for peer-to-peer um questioning um and and and i think the best environment we can put our students in is to have them um exchange ideas with each other and defend their uh positions in dialogue with their peers because that's when they're they're most engaged so i think um you know that that's kind of where we are at the high school but i can uh

106yeah i i have one more high school question and i've got i do have some questions about the lower grades as well but but yeah i know you have heard it we all have the concern that um history as it's taught in civics as they're now taught in high school is activism it's becoming activism it is not necessarily a grounding in the understanding of um you know the arguments that took place um why uh to to justify the three-fifths compromise or why the connecticut or connecticut is the constitution state you know what was it about the connecticut constitution that in the connecticut delegation that um you know was able to bring our own constitution into fruition so as i said you've heard it how do you address those people who are concerned that the knowledge

107is perhaps um giving way to just out and out i'm going to call it advocacy and activism yeah so i think um let's stick with the civic engagement fair because that's something we've talked at length with about today and i think everybody on the call has a good understanding of it um you know that is the final and i referred to that earlier as the culminating assessment for civics right they're working the entire semester prior to the last month four four-ish weeks that they're focused on the civic engagement project they're working for the first eighty percent of the class on um the american founding the american revolution mostly from a political perspective um the declaration of independence its founding principles uh they move on to discuss the constitution and its design and our founders concerns

108they then take an in-depth look at each of the three branches what are their roles responsibilities how do they share power how does the uh the balance between the branches reflect uh the founders concerns when they created our government and then they engage in um learning about our political system um what is the role of parties media individual citizens etc interest groups so they're going to move through the core the core concepts that i think you would expect in any civics class they're we're not neglecting those to simply engage them in a civic prod you know the civic engagement project we're building up towards the civic engagement project throughout the semester and so the knowledge that they acquire throughout the year feeds into how they approach their civic engagement project okay all right thank you

109um and then just looking at the lower grades with the you know the k through we focused on the um sixth seventh and eighth or at least we saw the examples of that how is this being applied or how will this apply to the um first through fifth grade um because it's it's seems like such an abstract concept and and you've got little concrete minds in the classroom how what are you guys going to how are you going to approach that and incorporate the c3 at those levels so students at at all of our grade levels can take a pretty deep dive into i mean we're about complex thinking uh here and like our kindergartners all the way up through 12th graders can take deep dives into this the content at each grade level you

110know purposely starts with self and community and builds outward as a really broad statement over elementary so students are starting with things that are very familiar to them um they're they're how do they operate in a community how do they how do they what's our town of cheshire like building out towards our state regions of the united states u.s history so they start topically they're starting with things that are very close to them and under and that they can understand because it's relatable to them and building outwards so that's that's how you address the developmental needs of students um based on the topics you're choosing but they're diving in and can do some of this work and you know to build a little bit of what tim said that the content part of this really

111comes in the second and third part of those four dimensions there's dives into content that students really need to know and understand and have exposure to and have experience with the back end of those dimensions of inquiries now you can do something with it and that might look like how can i make my community better how can i make my school better how can i so there's ways for students to do all parts of that um you know if we're teaching about government essential functions of government they can relate to that classroom rules and understand that classroom needs rules to be able to function and and operate and work and so does the school so there's entry points for our students on that front and they they their work on the back end could be

112improving those rules improving those structures in the classroom to make it better so there's a way to do to get at this work that's development inappropriate for all of our students but they can do some pretty significant thinking on this they're um constantly amazed by what our students can do developmentally it just starts broadly with their self and works outward okay all right thanks and then one final comment i um just want to applaud you for looking for new history books for the um um the cc um just because i had heard from a parent about the age of the books and then marlene has let me two of them that i'm now using for weightlifting uh they are massive and dated so i am glad that you guys are exploring new textbooks and um

113there are some wonderful ones out there i know and um and i think you know the non-ap classes really deserve some attention so i'll just um you know endorse that idea as well and um so thank you okay so marlene you're on mute i was just gonna say if there's no more questions i think we are ready for the update we are ready faith yes we are thank you um so item c we want to make sure that at each of our curriculum committee meetings that we're updating you on the types and content in professional development that we're offering we know we've had a significant a number of collaboration and professional development days and i think it's important that folks understand the content of what we're we're going over at each of the levels so

114and to turn it over to kevin he's going to share especially what we've been doing related to some fun things in math so uh since since the last time we met we did have a full day professional development day and as you've heard this year we've um been really focused on helping make sure teachers can work within this very unique school year i would say our march pd day represented an opportunity for us to all at each of the levels pick our heads up a little bit focus on this year but also look forward a little bit and i think that was a theme through each of the each of the pd opportunities at the elementary level on math we actually did a professional development provided by eureka who was the authors of our math

115curriculum it was the plan pd that was supposed to happen march of 2020 uh the title of it is major work of the grade level so it's really deep dive into the math content um that uh that students need to engage with in across great spans so an understanding of well whatever let everybody jump off there uh an understanding sorry about that kevin as we were transitioning it was not a very smooth transition i just wanted to thank them and let them know that they don't need to need to stay that was good i don't i don't think tim had dinner tonight so i'm sure he's he's rushing off to get some food right now i know he appreciates that um so so bottom line on on our elementary math pd was we got a

116chance to to do some really good pd that was planned last year it helped us focus on kind of the theme of this year acceleration prioritizing essential concepts but it also helped us in the future kind of pd that we would have otherwise done last year at this time so that was a mouthful not very smooth with that transition there but uh we're happy to have and eureka does a great job with a professional development there um their presenters are always top notch our teachers always walk away with some good good outcomes from that pd at the middle and high school level we did um each division and department latched on to one or more aspects of the acceleration framework and spent some time and part of the day diving into that and then really

117applying it to the work for the remainder of this year and in many cases looking beyond this year so our middle and high school teachers kind of took part of that acceleration framework there's five components of it they picked one or two to dive in more deeply and then applied it so that's a brief pda pd update from our march 12th full pd day thank you kevin that was good um any questions okay seeing none um we will move on to the summer transition program overview review thank you faith um we wanted to make sure that you were sort of a part of this conversation informationally um we have a number of remote students who have been remote since last march and it is very important to us that we do everything we can to

118get students coming back as soon as their families are comfortable and if there's anything that we could do to lessen their concern especially now that we've had more and more and more people vaccinated and the majority of our staff is vaccinated and we know there's been very little spread because students are wearing their masks and we're adhering to social distancing guidelines that's our first priority is to try to get more students back but we know that there are going to be students for whom that is difficult and we are very hopeful that we have a full return of all of our students next year so in order to sort of bridge that gap for those kiddos who some of whom haven't been in a school for over a year we have begun planning for a

119summer transition program and we're looking to hold this towards the end of march right before school starts and we're looking to sort of gradually bring kids in right we want them to try and take get on the bus we want them to enter in through the doors of their own school building we'd like them to be able to you know do a tour if they haven't been in that school before if they haven't been there for a year down the wing that they'll be in we want them to meet some other kids and know what it's like to wear masks and have to interact we would also like for them um to talk about any of the fears they might have about being in a public space during you know the the tail end of

120this virus so we've been working and planning on for every one of our schools to have a summer transition program we've been working with luther miller as part of transportation we've been working with rich clavette as part of buildings in in maintenance um we've been working with all of the principals getting counselors involved getting teachers involved to come in during the summer so that we can have a really fun energetic positive experience for our students because we want them to enjoy coming in for these you know shortened sessions across maybe a total of five days over the summer and then we want them to come back we want them to feel safe and confident that they can have a great experience so that in a nutshell is our summer transition program and i hope to

121be able to at our next meetings you know share more and more as as this takes greater shape any questions so far no and thank you for doing that outreach marlene that's a great idea thank you thank you yeah i wanted to reiterate that as well i i think it's really important to remember that there are some kids that have not been in the schools for a very long time and and it's a big part of their of their time frame it might not be for us yeah um but but we're talking even um high school kids having the opportunity to get in yes and something that i'm wondering about is um do we have are we making any plans to get parents into the schools or is that need to be still put off

122i'm glad that you mentioned that anne as part of the summer transition program we intend to have parent sessions because it's really tough if you're a mom or dad out there who's having a hard time getting your son or daughter to school because they've been home they've been able to you know sleep in because they don't have to catch the bus they've been able to sort of you know throw some water on their face and get in front of a computer they haven't maybe had to shower and get dressed and you know gather all their things because it's in their room so we wanted to offer parents some support some strategies some tips let them know they're not alone and and give them some ideas physically getting them into the building we're still not there

123yet with having visitors to buildings but we do have a there is a parent piece of this summer transition program that we're also working on so i'm i'm glad you reminded me of that thank you for that and marlene we've talked about this could you um just give us an idea of how many kids we're talking about in the district yeah so originally um [Music] let's see a couple of weeks ago it must have been over the the president's break right we had close to 800 kids who were remote right and um we've since dwindled that number we've been doing personal outreach we've been doing personal emails we've been doing teacher phone calls principals have started to make phone calls and we're really trying to get as many students back as we can after may

1241st i know that number had dwindled into the low 700s and we expect that number to continue to drop still an amazing number of kids yeah yeah who have chosen right to to be remote yeah okay all right um so uh yeah please keep us surprised as it develops and um takes shape and uh anyone have anything else i think we're good all right final item on the list is out of state overnight field trip so yay nice to see this again so i know this is this is really do we remember how to do this part of the agenda before right because we haven't had one of these in so long this is a site for sore eyes thank you mike for talking about you're talking about the trips right [Laughter] thanks for sticking

125it through all the way mike to um talk to us about your work with uh chespercott and trying to make this the the safest option um to get our kids to d.c for that really important um you know that special part of middle school sure absolutely so um the process uh for dc really began back in uh this past summer working with nations classroom the uh the the two owners that we've been with probably since i want to say they nation's classroom was dodd's first customer when jeff was principal at dodd and they've been with us ever since um they are a great customer care provider for us they really are people who move um very fluidly with everything that we do and this year has been nothing less than a challenge for that um

126one of the things in which we took a look at obviously were all the components of our trip um taking a look at aligning with any state guidelines safety and those types of things so as i was going through all of the guidelines for schools taking a look at air filtration and those types of things we were applying the same thing to buses to tour guides to social distancing what are all those components that we have um and we've come up with what i believe to be the safest possible trip we can for our students um we took a look at from a perspective of um leaving our school in the morning where we have a huge collection of students and spreading them out a little bit more for social distancing purposes um to taking

127a look at the buses the buses that we're using are from gunther uh bus company out of baltimore they've been they were really reliable for us for the last two years i've been very happy with the condition of their buses um they were very responsive to the things that we had asked for including um you know including air exchange areas exchanged in those buses every seven minutes and they've also applied the highest level of filtration the merv 13 filters into that environment as well so at least we know the air in there will be as as safe to the highest standard that we have in our own schools um taking a look at the itinerary um is still a work in progress i was just on the phone with our people today from nation's classroom

128and really we're looking at um the smithsonian is really obviously a big portion of our trip all the different museums in the smithsonian from african american museum to the american history museum all the different museums that are there um right now the smithsonian is not open so they've been supplying me with some uh supplemental options including heading out to mount vernon um heading up to gettysburg um in those places so um we've been still piecing the itinerary together we are taking a look at doing a few things different arlington national cemetery we'll have to do in smaller uh buses um uh that visit we're not gonna be able to lay a wreath this year just because of the collection of the 200 kids on our steps on the steps of arlington is not going to

129be possible so we're abiding by what the the precautions are um that dc is taking care of we're also kind of taking a look at three different areas of our country in virginia and dc uh in maryland in which we need to apply all three of them have different um you know have different stages of the prerequisites so we're trying our best to abide by all of those um we are going to be taking uh six buses um the buses won't be as full um necessarily with students we want to try and spread them out um i will be sending out information to parents this week um really just about the reality of that we are gonna be wearing masks the entire time um we are going to be uh we've already developed roommates and

130parents have been informed of who you know the students are um and i was talking with jeff today we're still in the background with chespercrat trying to see if we can get some testing of kids the friday before the trip they'd have to quarantine over the weekend they would do remote monday and tuesday and then come to the building on wednesday morning to board the buses so we're trying to take those precautions going there coming back as you know we are in a recommendation state recommended state um right now for people who are traveling um you know in outside of the state of connecticut so we are going to be putting it out to parents that's a recommendation that the child is tested um after uh the dc trip as well so i think the

131uh the rub for some of our parents is is probably going to be taking a look at that weekend before the trip um when the kids are quarantined they won't be able to do this their sporting events or any other type of events on that weekend that the kids will be quarantined for that so um we're still in the process of finalizing our itinerary depending upon who is going to be open for us or who's not um and we're still going to continue to work to make sure that we're providing the safest trip to the standard that we have in our buildings every day any questions mike i have one um have you um got an idea of how many kids in the 8th grade are going to participate we have 207 that are officially

132signed up um i just got word today that one more student would like to attend so we're making the accommodation so it'll be 208 students okay all right well thank you um thank you sounds good keep us posted um all right that brings us to the end of the agenda um no other questions have come in right uh through the coven line or anything no other questions faith okay do i hear a motion to adjourn the meeting anne tony do i have a second man all in favor hi all right thank you everybody thanks thank everyone thank you so much have a good evening everyone thank you