001strategies and and what we did in the elementary showcase was kind of show you what we were doing at that level to support our students and i'm going to pass it off to marlene who can continue the conversation here at the middle grades thank you thank you so in a year that's been really wrought with so many challenges our middle school has remained open throughout and we've been open for learning for all all students and all year and we are doing this to meet the needs of our remote learners and our in-person learners so tonight these talented teachers in front of you are going to show you our board members a glimpse into the work that goes on behind the scenes to prepare to teach both our remote and our in-person learners and they'll also
002show you examples of how our students demonstrate this learning during this really precarious and and difficult time we're going to continue on with that theme that jeff mentioned we had started with at our elementary level and really highlighting some of the tech tools that we use as well to make these connections so having said that i will turn it over to kevin hanlon and our middle school administrators to get started good evening everybody we have a awesome group of middle school educators here with us this evening to share and give some insight into the everyday planning instruction and assessment that's happening this year you'll hear tonight about how collaborative planning work at the division level has yielded some really meaningful experiences for our students you'll further hear about how the design of our instruction is
003meant to engage both in-person and remote learners and you'll hear how some of our assessment practices have evolved this year assessing students in different ways again for both remote and in-person environments and even some new assessments that have evolved over the course of our work this year a few a tech note before we start the presentation does have a few embedded videos so you can help out with hearing the audio of that in two ways one making sure that your microphone is muted so there's not any interference there and two um when we did this a little earlier today you might need to turn your volume up just a smidge for those videos if you can't hear it it is it is audible if uh if you turn it up a little bit with that
004i'd like to turn it over to principal dye middle school mike woods thank you kevin very much and good evening everyone we're very honored and excited to be able to present the hard work that our teachers have been doing all year beginning last spring and into the summer um taking a page out of the learning acceleration uh practice we've had the ability to have our teachers really take a look at the planning instruction and assessment that we were currently doing in order to start taking a look at how we were going to be able to do this in a dual environment as alluded to before we have remote students and we have students who are in front of us so we needed to find a way in which we could still maintain that high level
005of education for students who are a lot easier to be engaged uh you know in person uh versus uh students where it's it's a little bit harder for reach to engage students who are remote as well this evening you're going to be hearing from from a sampling of our teaching staff but i think one of the things in which you will notice very quickly is that the amount of work is really a is a high level of hard work to say the least but you're going to hear definitely the passion and the commitment that our teachers have for our students in our community we've been able to utilize all of our professional development from august all the way to our november date um and the most important thing i think has been these half days
006that we've had on wednesdays in order uh to continue this work so without any further ado we are going to get started i'm going to begin by introducing kristen shanley and maria mullally kristen is our division leader for our english language arts and maria mulally is our maroon team leader and she's also a language arts teacher as well thanks mike so as mike said i am the language arts division leader at dodd and i am here to start us off by telling you what's involved with planning for instruction in this crazy year of remote teaching and in-person teaching so it began back in the spring actually we were told from a district initiative to prioritize our standards so the language arts department started that process in determining what were the key standards that students needed
007to know in order to move forward with their work in language arts and that work continued over the summer and we continued prioritizing and figuring out standards were most most important and then we were ready to kick the youth in the fall with those priority standards under our belt um it's interesting to note that back in 2017 when we presented to the cheshire curriculum council one of the recommendations that the council gave us was maybe we should focus on fewer standards rather than trying to highlight every single one of them and that is interesting now in covid times that that's kind of what's pushed us to um prior prioritize those standards so we are um meeting regularly in order to plan and communicate and best serve our students both remotely and in person and the
008seventh grade language arts department has done a phenomenal job in maintaining that coherence throughout the year and maria malali is going to share a bit about what that planning has looked like in a more day-to-day basis thanks so much kristen i'm maria malali i'm one of the english teachers at dodd middle school i teach grade seven on the maroon team as mike said and um our grade level meetings occur every other day opposite our team planning meetings i have to thank our administration for honoring that time and allowing for us to have that time to plan um because it's been critical to prioritize our standards and to observe that coherence as as a division our half days have been also integral into planning so we want to thank everyone's support for those half days they
009have been just such a life preserver in this year so that we have the time to meet and plan um to ensure that those priority standards are um are met um an example of some of that planning that we've done this year that we really want to highlight and and showcase is our book clubs we planned a common calendar so every grade 7 student was working on the same pacing chart you could see it here on the screen where everyone had that same shared expectation across all the teams um and also had similar paired text resources for each of the books that were uh presented so we had six novels and uh myself along with two other language arts teachers work to find resources to enrich that book club experience some of the outcomes of
010that planning uh impacted our parents teachers and our students in positive ways with our parents we planned within parent information letter to streamline our communication we had positive impact with our teachers by unifying our curriculum to allow any staff to facilitate so we were going into the year with the mindset of if a staff member became ill or needed to quarantine could anyone implement our um our curriculum and we can confidently say yes because of that careful planning for our students the planning impacted them by having them allow chunking reading to ensure their common pacing and that would ultimately lead to success in the next slide it shows some of the planned resources that we put together as a division at the top you can see the six novels that we used for book clubs
011and we worked summer hours but mostly during those half days and august hours to create um some homemade pear text resources we um those are homegrown right there with our department with finding articles videos poems songs that connected to the not themes of the novels and i have some samples there that you can see from three and just like in real life when you plan and you make those careful lists and check them twice planning leads to success and as you can see we have some happy students working in google meets with partners in their group working in person at a table in a hybrid way with some in person and some computers there with that planning we had such a successful experience we look forward to more thank you so much for your support
012everybody thank you maria very much that that was great to hear uh next we have kristin castellano who's one of our reading specialists at dodd and she's going to be talking to you about a vital piece of technology that we utilize with our students to be able to monitor our students also with the technology is of course we have kids who are at home and we're really transferring a lot more to our chromebook so she'll talk to you a little bit about our program go guardian thanks mike hi i'm kristen and i am um as mike said on the reading specialist at god and i wanted to share with you today our use of a really valuable program called goguardian because in this year where we are teaching two really separate class environments at once
013we needed a way to meld them both together and to be able to um to facilitate both of those environments at once so what some of our needs were we needed to manage both of those settings we needed to have access to student work in progress in order to give feedback to all of those kids whether they were in front of us on a sc in front of our our you know in person or they were learning remotely at home and then at the same time we needed to connect those remote learners to any feedback cycle the same feedback cycle that the in-person students were receiving we never wanted our remote students to be um you know to observe class like they were a fly on the wall we want it to be where we
014were all part of that one classroom experience and this kind of allows us to do that so goguardian is a program that allows us to manage and to monitor all of the screens that we as teachers can see all the screens of our students so if you look at this screen i know it's a little small because there are thumbnails but every thumbnail represents a student's screen who is in a class and the student's screens are side by side whether they are learning from home or they're learning in the classroom all of their screens are easily accessible at a glance in this one teacher view um and the wonderful thing about this is that i can see as a teacher at any one point in time at a glance if all of my kids are
015in the right place on the right page doing the right thing um without having to ask without having to walk around the room without having to um do any of those things that we used to be able to to take but we took for we took for granted back then but we're not able to really do this here so this allows us to manage and monitor what is on our students screens um if you click on one of those thumbnails it will bring up and that will be one of the student screens you'll bring up a larger view and the larger view is this one that you see in front of you and this one allows you to see student work in progress so any student you click on you can see exactly where they
016are on a piece of work in a lesson on an assignment at any point of time so in this particular case i could read a student's written response to a piece of reading that we had read and annotated and i can offer feedback in the moment to that student about his or her response and then the student can respond back to me and the wonderful thing about this is that not only do both sets of students get the same mode of feedback so everybody's kind of you know on an even playing field so to speak but at the same time it allows for me to see how the student has responded to that feedback um and in addition the feedback and the question if students want to ask questions they can also ask questions through
017this chat feature at the same time so i can get their questions privately so that they're not having to um you know raise their hand in a google meet where everyone sees that they've raised their hand and speak over the microphone over the broadcast system that comes through in the class the middle school student sometimes is a little private and shy and they don't want to share that with everyone in the class so this allows a private mode of communication which makes them feel a little safer a little more comfortable a little more secure in sharing their questions another thing we can do and this is a really cool feature of goguardian is we can filter what the kids are looking at on their screens so if you this is the same exact screen you
018saw before for the chat only the another tab on the right is clicked and that tab is student activity and this can show me every tab that the student has open on his or her screen the one in red at the top is the one that's active and if i see at you know when i click on this if i see that a student is doing something that he or she shouldn't be doing during that class or is just kind of lost direction or they're not in the on the right in the going in the right direction i can you know gently inspire them through the chat to you know get on the right tab or you know i can also if i choose to if that doesn't work i can simply click the red
019button and that will close their tab and they get a little message that says your teacher has closed your tab and um you can imagine how much they love that but it does keep the it does keep them on task and it does keep them um you know it eliminates a lot of the distractions for them which is a really a really great thing for especially at the middle level and finally we can create scenes and this is um amazing the way that this works is that ahead of time we can log into this program and before we even start class we can set up what the student will be um able to see before class starts so for example if i am giving an assessment and i want my students only to be able
020to open two tabs i don't want them to be able to go to google so they can look things up and i don't want them to be able to go to youtube i can block those sites ahead of time so that for that chunk of time my students cannot see those two sites i can also conversely i can make a list of sites that i do want them who i want to open when they open their chromebook and log into my classroom only for that chunk of time only those tabs will open on their chromebook so they will only have access to the ones that i've chosen so you have a lot of flexibility um with this feature and a lot of possibilities in order to set up how your classes is is run it
021it's particularly helpful in assessment situations so that you can ensure that kids aren't looking at other sites that they shouldn't be um while they're taking an assessment and then finally i've kind of i've talked about what it does for teachers what it allows teachers to do but it's very helpful for students so i thought you might like to see some of the student perspective here gold gardening helps me because in this castle honors room in every room that i go to there's like this like little text feature instead of interacting with the class saying asking out a question you can just type it down in that text area and you can get a response very fast and very easily go guardian helps me by finding the right document and staying on track um guardian helps
022me by if i get like off task or something the teacher can remind me that we should be doing our work it helps me if i'm remote learning and don't have to say i'm a google me um well it helps them because the teachers can like um they can look at your screen and they can tell you what you're doing right they're going wrong that helps me because so i don't have to i can stay off the games and if i need to ask a question it is easier for me instead of shouting to the teacher so they had some interesting perspectives so thank you for your time kristen thank you very much that was uh just as a side note goguardian was something that we had um looked at prior to the pandemic we
023were kind of in the in the um phase of testing it out um but it was amazing to hear you know as kristen shanley said some of the work that we were doing even before pandemic knowing about all of this that actually is is working out into our favor during the pandemic uh next up um we want to hear from our division leader and eighth grade science teacher on the blue team brian lopez who's going to talk to us about what life is like in science and science labs during the pandemic thank you very much mike i'd like to first start out by of course thanking all of you the uh the board my administration uh for for getting us through this school year it's been you know obviously we all are well it's well
024aware of the challenges we've faced this year and as i'm presenting to you i'm presenting to you from this you know very nice uh new chromebook here that that i received sometime in december so uh none of that would have even been possible so i i thank you for laughing one of the little things uh done so as we go back to the spring uh when all of this started uh we were doing anything we could to try to bring science into the rooms of our uh students that are were actually at home and i just wanted to uh you know recognize a seventh grade science teacher that uh is in the science department that's uh lori seymour uh who who put together created characters and and entertained the kids and and did quite a
025number of uh tremendous shows for the students uh back in the spring so we all took uh our her work and and said well what could we do with that you know through the summer and uh as the school year started we said let's make a two column list here you know what do we need and what would the benefits be uh from that so through video labs we said uh of course the biggest need the what we all remember from from middle school uh probably the only thing you may remember from middle school science may be actually doing those experiments and being able to work with your your peers and and and collecting data and probably you know socializing a little bit laughing so how are we going to fill that void there and
026so uh we we said we had no hands-on exp experiments so that we got to figure this out and and through those experiments that's where we had the students practicing a lot practice with their analyzing data making graphs with google sheets writing conclusions using data and evidence i know that um the language arts department did a nice job earlier of course uh emphasizing the need for uh showing evidence in their writing and so we we also do that in science and so we said how are we going to do that and of course the the last need was uh you know mike and john and all the administrators stress the idea of collaboration with teachers and making sure students all have common uh shared experiences uh throughout a team or throughout you know the grade
027level uh so then we said well what are the benefits to to doing these video labs we said well well students still need those experiences seeing an experiment being conducted and we found that we found over the years that we when we do experiments in front of students we call them a demo that students often are are really engaged and they do focus and and so those benefits are there they're still seeing science taking place uh they're able to take notes they're they're uh analyze that data afterwards and i'll show you some student work student samples that uh you know show some final products there so one other uh tools that the students make use of that normally they would just use uh you know screenshots from from other videos but they're actually we're using
028our videos of teachers talking and showing labs and pausing the video uh and uh using that shot of some particular part of the experiment throwing it into a document google doc uh and and reflecting on that picture or image uh so that's what we did labs are stored for future use so any student down the road or future can access that video and and watch it 10 times if they want so and collect the data and uh we of course uh would be able to practice those skills and then over the years uh before this uh pandemic hit and the videos were done our departments always tried to uh videotape ourselves as teachers to learn from each other and so we felt this was uh going to lead to a to a resource for us
029all in terms of professional development and that uh you know removing the need to to go to different classrooms and take time out of our own class but now we have those videos and and we can study each other teaching and and look at those for years to come uh what you'll see here is a video that i that i did in eighth grade it's a chemical reaction lab uh it's a double replacement reaction and it's i don't know about a minute or so uh showing you how we did one of those experiments all right so uh because it's distributive so you do two times na two times the cl you have two chlorines and then over here you also have two chlorines here okay so uh then we're gonna do the reaction now so
030i have a test tube and uh we're gonna put them in order of how they appear in the formula so we have sodium carbonate and calcium chloride okay and we're gonna put about equal amounts it's not really uh that important right now but we're going to put sodium uh uh carbonate into the test tube okay just like that and i know that the camera there is also there so let's see we'll do about half and half try to get like a one to one ratio here so here's our sodium carbonate and so i'm just happy i didn't wear the same uh sweater as i did in that video tonight here for this uh so uh the the student work as you see here with the uh chemical reaction is student work samples so these students
031were doing this as i presented i ended up making this screencastify and uh so i was able to put my little uh lab picture there and so students could access that and and then type and reflect you see a student's writing sample where they're using data and evidence from the experiment they're actually balancing chemical reactions which is quite complicated and then if you go on to this one there was a phase change activity where ms santos miss marin and i collaborated and we recorded a video and uh it's very exciting ice melting and swinging into steam but then they they turn into uh nice crafts there and the students were writing about that and here we have another student work example on the left from the chemical reaction experiment and on the right was a
032classification of matter where as just to go back to google docs that what students can really do and accomplish with google docs you see right there they're able to do math equations uh they can uh uh you know present this they can make pie charts they all these sorts of things that uh and we were able to do them under the covet times and pandemic times and you know again i go back to we you know we can't thank you all enough for for getting us through the school year and and so science was still able to be conducted as best we could and uh you know we're very happy about that so thank you brian um as you can see in our four core areas that we've been really uh utilizing you know these
033opportunities um but we're also doing the same in our unified arts area so next up i'd like to introduce our french teacher at dodd kristen cohanidas so she can talk to you a little bit about some of the assessment practices that she's utilizing uh in a very voice dependent uh subject area hi uh thank you all for being here my name is christine kojanovic i'm the seventh and eighth grade french teacher at dodd um and my big challenge this year was how do i assess students ability to speak in the target language when a good chunk of them are not actually in the room with me um speaking is always kind of difficult to assess in general when you've got 25 kids in a room but with a good chunk of them being learners from
034home i was on about a loss as to how i was gonna do that um so i started playing around with some tools um screencastify is a video and voice recorder tool it records basically a screenshot in video form uh records you as you speak and it records whatever whatever's on your screen i know a lot of teachers use this back in the spring when we had the sudden shutdown and teachers were having to deliver lessons from home somehow they were recording video explanations as to how to do things and going forward with their work i know i was um so i decided to take that and have the students use it themselves to um record their own voice and give a little speaking sample um so this was the first time that this group
035of students my eighth graders have ever had to record themselves speaking without having written out their sentences ahead of time um in seventh grade they do do some speaking but mostly it's very carefully prepared statements that then they kind of read to me and we practice pronunciation um authentic speaking when you're really thinking about what you want to say and saying it in the target language in the moment is a very difficult skill and we're just starting to get into that now um so i put together this chart for them there are some visuals here at the bottom and they were asked to drag and drop them into the activity squares and kind of plan out their day this unit is on telling time and describing their their daily routine kind of um so they
036were just to take some of the pictures and kind of plan out the things they wanted to talk about and then underneath they were to put the times that they did each activity and this was to kind of create a visual that um without writing their sentences out they could still have a way to track what they wanted to say next you know not panic in the moment about what they wanted to say as their next step um so at the bottom of that i just gave them a couple of scaffolds since this was the first time we were doing this i gave them a couple of starter sentences with some terms we hadn't learned yet and then gave them a little reminder about a couple of things they could say that they didn't know
037how to say that part i left in english because they should be able to figure that out in french but i just wanted to kind of um jump start their brain a little bit with some ways they could start their sentences and then at the very bottom i included some nice flowy words to help them make their sentences sound a little smoother i know that my eighth graders are writing these beautiful paragraphs and essays in english and they're used to being able to speak that eloquently so when they try to say sentences in french it frustrates them that they're these short choppy little sentences so i gave them a little bit of help with that so that they could say first i do this next i can do this and sound a little more fluent
038there so i have a little student example here you can listen to the final result [Music] so that was my student katarina she was very excited that you were all gonna hear that tonight so i uh when i asked her for permission to share her work she got all excited so i hope you enjoyed it thank you very much kristen that's really great um next up i'd like to introduce our two art teachers over at dodd and seeing how they're utilizing the tools in order to keep the creation alive in our art classes as well so go ahead shelly and marcia thank you mike and thank you board members and administration for this um opportunity to highlight the art program this year during the pandemic um shelly and i um feel as though we have
039successfully made lemonade out of lemons and i for my drawing class i had to revamp the whole curriculum for cdc guidelines and some of the following instructional strategies helped engage students in the classroom or in person and make it easy to assess their work so one of the things one of the strategies was providing a personal art kit so that there's no sharing of supplies students were required to bring in their own sketchbook for no storing of artwork um and actually that was good for them um they said that they liked being able to take their supplies and their sketchbook home and work on it on home if they wanted to catch up if they wanted to add more some of them wanted to do more assignments which is great [Music] so on the next
040slide is an example of sketchbook assignment labels that i gave the students it's at the bottom of the screen so it's just like the avery labels and i gave them to put them into their sketchbook and this helped keep the students organized in their drawing portfolio because you know the remote students and sometimes even the students in class they don't charge their chromebook it could be a network issue at home so they still have that information kind of the old school way to still work um but it's definitely more enhanced with the technology as you'll see there's a video on the screen this is one of the google slides they have 10 of them in there assignment portfolio and i created all of my own demos using a doc camera so the students can see
041the skills being provided for each assignment and on the next slide this is an example of another example of one of the assignments where there's a skill builder uh which has a video and then the students get to choose and they the students really enjoy choice they feel that there's more ownership they feel as though it's develops their own style and so i did abstract and realism for most of my assignments and as long as they're still using those skills i feel it's a success [Music] when students finish their drawing portfolios they would photograph and edit their work we would use the chromebook to photograph their work and it's it saves so much time they can use their um their chromebook is basically like a tripod and you're able to photograph right from their seats
042and it automatically uploads to google classroom which is wonderful and then the students have a drawing portfolio that i've created it's a template in google classroom so all the students already have this template and it's all the same for everyone and there's 10 assignments in it and the students upload the photographs into the portfolio in the portfolio um there are 10 slides again and they upload their work into the frames they write their name they come up with a title and then they um write what media they used then they answer questions that um eventually lead to a paragraph so there are three questions they have to answer about their work and um one has to do with line was to do the techniques they used because they're all different because every single piece of
043artwork is different and that's what i really love about the choice-based art program is that there's not 20 kids drawing a bluebird um and then lastly is what kind of mood does their artwork create they're assessed using a rubric a four-point rubric and the planning is part of it the creating the presenting and the reflecting these are some examples of students portfolios and from those exemplar portfolios so when i'm assessing their work i can look at what work i want to just copy and paste and put into the digital art show which is on the dad website which makes a um presents art to the dad community artsonia is another um technology that i'm utilizing this year for a couple of different reasons one is presenting artwork outside of the community with parent permission this
044is an opportunity for them to present their work and be a published artist and also connects um their family you know they may have grandparents they haven't seen and you know anytime there's that connection they you know it's really a plus um so the students upload their work and they um they send it over to the teacher and the teacher looks it over and she gives permissions then we send it to the parent and they have to give permission for it to go to the web there's another part to artsonia which is very beneficial is that the students can purchase their artwork on mugs masks on shirts and 20 of the profits come back to dodd middle school another um way of engaging students this year for remote and in person was a virtual art
045visit with domingo's rebus that might sound familiar he is one of our building maintainers at dad and he was very kind to create a video of his artwork and then agreed to have the students upload their photographs of their favorite pet or their favorite role model has to be their photographs we're not doing plagiarism or copyright and um he selected one out of a hat and he created the artwork the portrait and um was given to the student so that was really a highlight and lastly um i wanted to do something for the students who were at home or even in school who have hand injuries and it's always been a struggle when a kid is right-handed or left-handed and they hurt their hands you know whether it's in basketball or you know anywhere um
046and you know they say they can't do art so having this digital version of scholastic arts is wonderful because they can still learn their history part and learn about all the skills the artists used that we're using in class and it's also great for some special ed students that have the fine don't have the fine motor and need the hand on hand who are home and they can also use this currently i have three students using the scholastics art program and um lastly is a google form survey for student feedback where students were asked what kinds of strategies and methods helped keep them engaged and there was a list i had about 15 of them everything from i love art to you know other other thing you know there's many different um strategies and um
047i just pulled out a couple of the ones that i felt um related to this slideshow and the teacher created videos were definitely um popular the personal art kit was great because the students always had what they needed and remote students were able to pick them up in the office i would have a kit um in the office with the cardboard like a box you know with seventh grade and eighth grade they could just pick them up and the art labels having choice you know really kept them engaged um and then the sketchbook labels were very effective as well because you know sometimes um they do lose sight of where their work is supposed to be in their sketchbook well thank you so much for this opportunity good evening i'm shelley theriault the other art
048teacher at dodd i'm so glad to have a chance to share my students work with you tonight prior to returning to school in the fall i learned that my art room would look quite different tables were replaced by individual desks sharing supplies would not be an option and my traditional painting curriculum would need to be modified well i knew that i had to find a way to give the students various opportunities to make art that would excite them think about painting you couldn't even get to the sink now more than ever students would need creative ways to express themselves i knew that on the next slide you'll see the ideas behind my thinking i realized that my past experience as a graphic designer and computer illustrator would come in handy and play a part in
049my hand plan i researched ways to use the google workspace specifically sheets and drawings in august i enrolled in a few webinars and started to alter my painting units i also created reference slideshows and videos that students could refer to as needed which is a flipped classroom strategy on the next slide you'll see the beginning of my first unit which is called pixel art here i begin with a brief history of the genre including a little bit about an american designer named susan care she's a pixel pioneer who created the first icons for apple i use the smart board to demonstrate how to use google sheets and the concepts behind turning it into a pixel painting students then create their own pixel foods notice that i can type a private message on the right into
050the document to give each student a personalized critique this foundation exercise is a great way to encourage students to learn the program while they work with the subject matter that they learn know so well there's a high rate of success which gives the students confidence and i use this activity as a formative assessment on the next slide you'll see a work in progress here is a student's um pet she used this photograph from her phone and uploaded it so that she had it off to the side as a reference so while students are creating their pro paintings in class whether they're remote or in person i'm able to do individual check-ins from my computer and give feedback i can also show student works in progress on the smart board which is always exciting for the
051class to view the next four slides are going to be what i call the pixel masterpieces and this is a more finished painting as compared to the foods as you see the work incorporates a background and the themes may include anything from cityscapes wildlife landscapes portraits and more there's many opportunities for differentiation all the final paintings in both of my units include a self-assessment as well as an artist statement here the artist may elaborate on their artistic process or tell about the meaning behind their paintings some even write poetry second unit i designed is called vector art again i begin with a demonstration and formative assessment exercise students begin to explore all the tools in google drawings as they create a small animal painting based on reference photos the next four slides are going to
052be the masterpieces in the vector unit this is a great assignment for using personal photographs student choice is a big part of this just like marcia mentioned i take them through the necessary steps at a pace that makes sense to them chunking the lesson providing feedback along the way one thing that i loved was that so many students discovered little secret tricks and tips about the programs and taught me as well as their classmates so collaboration was happening all the time and students are so proud of their work as am i on this last slide you'll see um some happy bright cheerful faces looking at you these are vector self-portraits on the last day or two of the term i have a kahoot game where the students show their knowledge about the digital units that
053i developed and they also share their masterpieces on the smart board as well as take a little survey that i put together in closing i hope you agree that although the art room really does look different um there's still plenty of innovation of innovation and creativity going on thanks for listening thank you so much shelley we really appreciate it as you can see the the work that has been done this year uh has been a monumental task for our our teachers um being a larger school and having all of our students in has also been attached to be reckoned with to say the least one of the things in which i know we're going to be looking at in the future with the hope of getting back to a regular uh a normal school operation
054for next year is you know which of these tools and techniques um are worthwhile moving forward and i think as you can see even though it's a pandemic i think we're seeing a lot of great tools uh techniques methods and instructional strategies that uh really are capturing uh the essence of what we do at dot and that's really uh putting out a wonderful education for our students so at this time i'm going to have mr paraceno our assistant principal also join us but if the board has any questions for us we would like to entertain those tim i saw you go ahead thank you thank you mike yeah just a couple of questions and comments i jotted down um let me see what uh all right sorry the first point you just addressed so you
055will you're going to be using some of the technology to whatever extent you can next year because i agree i mean it sounds great some of the things that you've unfortunately gotten stuck with having to do but there is a benefit we're getting out of it um to brian lopez uh i appreciate the hands-on in science and i don't know if mike or adam can speak to this but i had mr nielsen um back in eighth grade at god he was crazy and he was fantastic now the the hands-on part of the hands-on part of science i mean for me in uh in dodd it it meant a lot so that's i know it's got to be difficult for kids what is the mike what is the percentage of kids that you have just generally
056speaking over the year that have been going remote rather than in school um it's it's fluctuated um depending upon you know kind of we we noticed some trends with the calendar year when i got closer to the holidays we're at our highest with about 60 percent of our students we're in 40 we're out um the percentage out right now is actually in the high 20s so we do have a lot more students coming back in okay thank you um with regard to um the maria malali you had made a comment about chunking the reading and keeping a common pace so i'm just wondering about that like the kids who are you know moving ahead so this probably doesn't have well it's about dot in general what happens with the kids who are the fast readers
057who move through i mean they have other assignments given to them or given free time i'm just curious that's a really good point the reading that was done for the book clubs was in a small group not in a whole class so within those groups there was already a lot of differentiation um just because like when you just said that higher readers probably reading a longer book so they have longer passages and and nightly assignments so that kind of naturally happened with the assigned book that they had okay okay cool thank you for that um and the last thing i'm just wondering about so we just went through we just went through february uh we had a national holiday president's day basically in honor of george washington's birthday i'm just curious is that is that
058touched on in like social studies for seventh or eighth grade and and really what comes to mind for me most is what happened a couple months ago uh january 6th um he had given us you know 230 years 220 years of peaceful transfers of power and it seems to me that it's important and i'm just wondering if that gets touched on or did get touched on or you know it's in the curriculum in general yeah obviously uh january 6 we don't have that embedded in the curriculum but i was able to meet with our social studies uh department who um really decided to take it on we had a couple of la teachers as well also take on the conversation um you know as a social studies teacher myself it was kind of similar to
059you know post 9 11 and us having good conversations with kids um in the classrooms as you know we're we're also the same citizens as they are in those moments so uh we're just trying to put some context of of what had happened and what had occurred uh but yeah we were talking about that uh after january 6. good thank you for that and just curious in general like in relation to president's day do you touch on george washington at all yeah we touch on we touch on many of the presidents throughout the curriculum but we also touch on the significance of each of those presidents as well thank you elaborate on that a little bit um you know there are a lot of famous american individuals in history and certainly famous events in history
060and our curriculum touches on each of those throughout we don't typically like stop uh every grade level for lincoln's birthday and washington's birthday for example you know those things will receive mentions in many places but we dive more deeply into those historic figures and events within the context of the curriculum the way i like to think of it is you know if i you know if you walk through the woods and you have those those boondocks there those little things that stick to your clothes if you're walking through wearing their the raincoat they don't stick to you in when it's in the context of what you're learning that information really sticks with you if it's just a hit and run one day off it's just like wearing the raincoat and i can get away with
061making obscene metaphors like this because my friends that i've worked with that died for many years will laugh at me but it's a visual that you know within the context of what you're learning it's such a more powerful experience and a hook that will really um stick with kids we don't really subscribe to one hit wonders like hit it like today was this i mean the student may go home and remember that today but three days from now that boondock is falling off uh and they they've lost it but we really try and dive deep into it when we're going through those uh events in our curriculum hope that was helpful thanks adam uh you're up next and actually every board member so adam and catherine let's go through the list thank you um uh
062firstly i'd just like to comment on what uh what a great presentation this was the uh to see the the application of all these great technologies which i'm sure that you probably all had to learn in a very short period of time certainly uh weeks if not months to and to see you execute them at a near what appears to be a near expert level uh and to be able to to be innovative in teaching kids in this difficult time is really amazing and so i congratulate you on that and i know that the community does as well knowing the importance of being able to to keep our schools open um especially um at the middle school level um where um you know it's because of you that um our kids were able to to
063learn uh in a more normal way uh than they would have especially in other communities um and i just wanted to to to give a little kudos to the uh the language arts teacher um i took uh three years of french in high school and i probably probably learned more in the uh five minutes i saw uh there no i know that the teacher's no longer in the school system so it's fine but um at least i was able to to recognize uh french um at its very basic level so that that was great um and uh also i had mr sagnella for uh my science teacher in uh dot and his teaching methods were much more traditional than the hands-on that we that we witnessed uh this evening so you guys are all doing
064a great job thank you adam uh catherine you're up thanks thanks tony um and i just have more of a comment as well i don't really have any questions but i just i'm struck by the creativity that you all um showed in figuring out the right way to have like as as i guess synchronous you know experience for remote learners and in-person learners and because it's i'm not a teacher and you know i have teachers in my family and i know how exhausting it has been for a lot of teachers to try to sort of juggle um paying attention to the students that are right in front of you and the ones that are learning from home and i just have to say that um everything saw tonight is just such a uh fabulous you
065know indication of how creative you all are and i i'm just so impressed by what you've been able to accomplish and it's just another um let's see example of why our school system is so fabulous i mean it's you know you teachers and and administrators that are able to focus so you know deeply and and quickly and and you know as adam said you know get up to speed on things that were like who knew you were going to need this kind of stuff um and so i just congratulate you and i really appreciate all of the hard work that you have expanded for our kids and you're doing a fabulous job so that's all i wanted to say thanks thank you catherine ann and then andrew hi everyone and thank you for the great
066presentation it went across the board i have a pretty good idea of what's been going on at dodd this year uh my question is is based on because i'm an educator myself at the college level and i've been teaching um sort of online and i've done some hybrid classes last semester my question is how much of this these new techniques and these new uh parts to your curriculum will you keep even as we do move back to having most of our students if not all i don't think i don't know that we'll ever have all but um when we get back to the time when we have most of our students back in the classrooms all the time and i'm thinking specifically well different areas but i'm thinking of the pixel presentation as part of
067the art curriculum will that stay there as a unit and i'm also thinking of the um the go guardian um program is that something that will stay as part of the curriculum when you have uh students working individually on their chromebooks or whatever it seems to me that it's it it's a really useful tool to be able to see what all of your students are doing at a glance on on your one screen you see what all of their screens are doing and and you can sort of zoom in and out of of different students um views for feedback and um i don't it seems like there are some things i know there are some things in my teaching that i i'm not going to be letting go of because they're working for me and
068it's all about when something's working for you you know you got to incorporate it in and keep it keep it there so if anyone wants to speak to that i'd be very interested to know um what you're planning to keep in the curriculum these are incredible curiosities and i think what you're experiencing as as a teacher i think we're going to be experiencing as well um and as you can see if we were to take a look at the skills um that are needed in order to do those whether it be the the pixel art that shelly was talking about um or whether it be you know taking a look at video instruction and applying some techniques as we saw in the science class as well those skills are going to be throughout for these
069kids for the next you know five or six years um i know we're going to be taking a look as we go into our summer curriculum uh projects and those types of things these are going to be embedded if not some of these might be some standalone tools that we have in our tool chest as you heard from marsha you know if there's an injured student you know how can a student potentially keep maintaining uh some of these classes um you know shelley could utilize some of those art uh components um and and use that in a differentiated environment where some students who may not be grasping concept it may need to start a little bit more basic um and we we do this on a yearly basis we evaluate what we're utilizing in our
070in our classes um we you know obviously keep the the things that are working very strongly for us and we look to tweak and grow in the areas that we feel that we need to grow with our students um so like i said i i really do think as as you go through and and i can speak on a personal uh level as helping my father with some of his uh university you know lessons and lectures and powerpoints and presentations and those types of things the skills are there and and these kids are going to need these skills going forward because i think we can all agree um at least from a technology wise and how education is going to be running in the future i i think this is going to be permanently embedded
071and i'll just add on to mike um for a couple of months now we've been engaging at work what we're belovedly calling keep stop change activities and so lots of the folks on this call were a part of our district instructional technology committee where we did this activity a couple of months ago it's since been done with our elementary teachers and just recently it was last week with our administrative team so we've been compiling a list of all those things that we want to keep those things that we never want to see again and then those things that we we want to tweak we want to change so i'm so glad you asked the question yeah i i think it's very interesting and there will always be there are always good things that come out
072of even really bad situations like the situation that we've been forced into as teachers this past you know for a whole year really and but you know some good has come of it we have been forced in many ways i have been forced i know to change the way i do some things and it's not been for the bad it it really hasn't it's it's not a bad thing to shake things up a little bit re-evaluate there are some things that don't work well as you said marlene and you get rid of the stuff that doesn't work but there is stuff that we will keep and uh and i saw some great examples here tonight so thank you for for your presentation tonight everyone thank you ann andrew you're up yes thank you i'm just
073kind of following up on what everybody else has said here um i have watched my daughter's an eighth grader at dad until i was basically been feel like i'm part of the diet community since uh march of last year so i've seen a lot of what you folks have been able to do and so you've thanked us so i want to thank you guys for all the hard work because it's not only what you're able to provide to them but how you were able to pivot so quickly and use the technology that was afforded to you and as you know adam pointed out you you were learning right along with these kids or with these students as to how to use these platforms um so thank you for that but just quick question for miss
074castellano with the go guardian or maybe for for any of you really how is that used by everybody in the school or is that just being used by certain students or for as part of the reading curriculum or so i could talk a little bit just on the as the vice principal a little bit on the discipline and uh andrew obviously we know we give these kids these great technology tools and we really use them to enhance learning but it's also our responsibility to make sure they're being used responsibly so whether it's you know we start off with a responsible use policy but really you know miss castellano really was able to highlight some of the great features and how we've leveraged a pizza software that we really were using to make sure students were
075using technology responsibly and now we've taken that and we've really kind of developed our knowledge of that program and used it for everything we can and now we're using it to better our instruction as well so it is something that all our teachers who get training on being able to use in the classroom in in ensuring that students are you know you know they're talking around responsibly um from from class session to class session great thank you john and it is just as a quick note too it is also something that um is part of the kinetic guidelines when we do have technology we also have our students all have email addresses and those types of things we have to have some sort of monitoring software in order for us to engage students as well
076thank you thank you faith you had a question yeah thanks um i i echo everything my colleagues have said and i'm just so impressed at how quickly you all did get up to snuff on on all of this just your pros um so congratulations to you all and thank you um i have just uh the i think i was going through my notes and i guess the way you know your evaluation and your synthesis of census you got it of the um standards i think you called it acceleration way back in the october time frame when you were explaining it to us marlene can you give us an example anyone can speak to this where you went how you went through the standards and decided i mean give us some specifics what you kept for
077example in language arts what you kept as necessary and what you had to jettison and then also is that is that going to change our standards now that you've been working with them do you see you know just as we're changing technology and we're changing the the you know the methods of instruction are we going to change in some ways our method of um of establishing standards and then assessment and i don't know who wants to take that one well i i mean just from our practice that we have and marlene i know you can speak on this as well the practices that we do like i said before uh we assess you know at the end of every year i mean coming into the spring i'm sitting with my division leaders right now and
078we're really asking you know what's working what are the things that we need to tweak um we take a look at the needs based upon alignment we have some pieces coming right now in ngss you know we're taking a look at the book clubs and those types of things but we're also taking a look when we look at the standards when you see some of the standards we have the ability to really stress on some of these standards and we also have the ability to embed some of these standards in other places so can you give an example it just happened off the top of your head so um i will i can give you social studies ones because that's more quick but kristen kristen shanley can you uh just really quick i know there's
079there were some components about our writing standards that we would look to embed in other areas as well okay or i would tell you one example of things that we prioritized was students being able to cite evidence in a text that is definitely something that we want them to be able to do and that is something that applies to all the curricular areas it's not just specific to language arts whereas something like comparing text structure or analyzing the text structure that's not as important so like diving into the structure of a poem and why the poem was structured that way well yes it is you know important if you're going to end up being a english teacher or an english major in college it's probably not a skill that's going to be crucial for the
080average middle school student does that make sense no it does it does thanks and faith if i could i it sounds a little bit like you're asking too is something that i know we've been focused on you know for a long time actually in the district and that's providing multiple pathways for students to demonstrate mastery of a particular standard so you know as mike was saying within social studies if if you're looking to understand uh themes within the conflict you know that might be uh illustrated in a in a visual sense it may be uh shared musically it may be shared if you're measuring exactly uh the standard which is understanding those themes of conflicts there are various ways in which that can be demonstrated i'll never forget being high school principal when a student
081um shared an interpretive dance of a of uh the theme of a uh poem that she had read um and it was so powerful for her and the whole class it really illustrated to people that she captured i mean now sometimes students like like uh kristen just said using text-based evidence you can't do a dance for that you know but there are a lot of different ways although i have seen kristin dance because of text-based evidence before um but there are a lot of ways to demonstrate mastery of standards uh and we want to make sure students master a particular standard and there can be a lot of different expressions of that um i think you know when you say and all this does all this technology it allows us to provide students now even
082more paths to demonstrate mastery and i think that's really powerful for learning so you know that's one of those otherwise silver linings in this this dark period that we've been you know and what you've seen here tonight is these guys are amazing like what they've been able to learn and and share with our students in the period of now what's one year um really really powerful learning for our educators too and our students will benefit tremendously from that yeah can ask one more thank you sure thanks jeff um it's just in terms of you know i mean this those pictures of the book clubs kind of sit with me and and um i love the i seeing the kids together talking but you've got 20 percent of your students remote and how do you incorporate
083those remote students into those book clubs so that they feel like they're truly a part of it even though they're distant and you can't have a video on the you know on the risers kind of thing but i i you probably saw in in those photos that um students did bring laptops outside with them so they could run a google me so i had initiated the google me in the classroom uh started the meet a student logged into the meet from their laptop and then they became the laptop liaison they brought their laptop outside so then they could integrate the home learners into the book club discussion so it was um a way to integrate the in-person and our remote students the best way we could before we had breakout rooms that was early in
084the fall before we had breakout rooms as a free google service and now we can easily break into groups pairs groups of five six anything we can do we can any combination of group work we can do in a breakout room before that um i was running six school meets once and um making my own little breakout rooms but it was actually a pretty seamless way to integrate both the remote and in person students great okay thank you and that's across the board faith the breakout rooms was a game changer for us in the fall in order to engage the students who were learning remote yeah and if you're not familiar with breakout rooms in the meet like this right the organizer will allow for anybody who's watching the organizer will be able to break
085students into small groups into smaller meetings like this i know many people if you've used zoom have been able to experience that too so students still get that small group discussion and then the teacher can bring them back into the large group discussion right right okay thank you great thank you before i return back to john i know i think john wanted i think michael's going to hand out some of john before we started the comments about 10 minutes ago but i just want to just say one thing i know a lot of educators tonight and on this call i have thanked us the board administration but honestly the thanks belong goes to you because you know we we we do our share but you you folks are in the trenches you got thrown a
086curveball and a slider uh in a number of other very difficult pitches since since last march and i i know i it was rough going at first everyone had to learn quickly on the fly i'm just amazed at how you know our educators our staff came together i'm not surprised but but given this pandemic and how things change so much since last spring um there was always a fear that we're going to fall behind on some on some things that kids will be impacted and that that probably is happening to a very small degree but the fact that you've been able to achieve what you've been achieving so far for the last year um we have i think a lot of great feedback from parents a lot of great feedback from the community nothing's perfect
087but but the fact that kids are engaged and you know we we had a fear that you know being remote for so long at least those that stayed remote maybe they would lose interest it does seem the case actually soon be the opposite it's going to pick up interest so again i think that thanks goals definitely goes out to you all um not so much the board of ed but again thank you that's all i wanted to say that's not lost on us the work you're doing and continue to do so can't thank you enough uh before we turn back to john tim joe another comment yeah thank you tony uh yeah jeff i just wanted to um go back to what you had said a few minutes ago um not speaking to the curriculum
088and where topics are covered but uh while i recognize fully that george washington was an imperfect person uh he i i don't think it's fair to as far as i'm concerned he's not one of many famous people that is why he has a national holiday basically named after him and and so i don't think for me it's not fair to characterize him in that way i'm thinking martin luther king has a national holiday and that's probably about it um so anyway that was a simple point that i wanted to make thank you for sake of discussion i'll turn it back to the topic at hand tonight so john it was something that you wanted to talk about you know what tony i i think that hearing the comments from the board and even your summary
089i think the essence of what we wanted to portray tonight came through which is we wanted to really showcase you know what's going on in our building and the hard work our teachers are put in so you know i'm happy to take a back seat to them at any day of the week because they are the the lifeblood of our success and you know we're just so fortunate to to be able to work with them so i appreciate it but i think that you know we're pretty good that's great listen when i say educators includes you folks as well john administrators and support staff knows many folks but again we can't thank you enough and i know i speak for many many parents in town and students as well so when i say that uh
090dr sullin or marlene is there anything else to the middle middle school showcases evening no concludes our presentation yeah i was just gonna say again you know i appreciate both sides acknowledging the efforts of the other to provide the resources and the talent to really try and make the best of a very challenging situation but i also want to acknowledge our our students who it's so hard to be a 13 year old student and sit pretty much in the same desk all day and not be able to play basketball or be in the play and that is so hard i i can't imagine being in those shoes although i i try very hard to empathize with what they're experiencing and i think that's what makes our staff so special is because i know that every
091day they're connected to that and they know what our students usually experience and what they're not experiencing today which is why they've gone so far above and beyond what they probably thought was possible to be able to accommodate our students and why our students are are so awesome that they've been able to put all those challenges aside the best they can and make the best of a hard situation so i would be remiss if i didn't acknowledge them too so that's that's all i have for this evening all right before i uh almost missed it but brian lopez had a comment brian if you definitely i know i was going to just echo that that you know i can't say enough about the students and and how resilient they've been all year and and we
092find ourselves in our classrooms uh going walking in and and just saying you know we really appreciate the efforts all of you are making uh to make the class still successful with everything uh mr solon uh uh just said uh that the students have really been resilient and are working hard and uh if you ask them they're they're you know they they're they'll feel that they've had a successful school year uh you know so far even even with under all these circumstances so they're they're happy to be where they are uh learning from us and you know i can't be i can't say enough about the efforts of uh our students uh like uh mr solon said that's that's exactly what i was gonna comment on and uh you know i have three kids of
093my own and so they're in three levels of school here in cheshire so i i i hear the other stories about the elementary and high school and and so i'm very proud of all of the teachers on the school system and what they've done to get us through this year and and call it a successful year at the end of this that it was so i'm happy for all of that awesome thank you brian uh before we adjourn jeff was there any uh comments that came in during the meeting from when i might be watching um no there are not mr perry genie great someone could go home early tonight well being that there's no other uh items on the agenda uh we uh is there first of all before we join a meeting again
094behalf of the board and anyone ever watching in our in our community thank you for attending this evening to all our educators tonight and we have a very long day very long week and uh the fact you stayed here almost at 9 00 p.m again thank you uh hopefully uh get the leave and no grading due tonight may get a nice sleep and get back at it tomorrow but uh i'm sure it's not that simple nonetheless uh do have a motion to adjourn so faith is there a second i think ann got the second all those in favor raise your hand it is unanimous the the meeting is adjourned again thank you stay safe thank you