001pass it over to you. Good evening everyone. I I just wanted to let everyone know that Cara Casemiro is not here this evening because she is at a bar grant uh conference in Washington DC. Um so I will be seated in her place this evening. Um I'm excited to bring to you uh the curriculum meeting tonight uh within our core update which will talk about all the amazing progress that the district uh has made. And so I'm going to turn it over to Chris Roach. Before I do that, I would like to just thank uh the leadership teams, the teachers, and the students and parents for their support. Uh the growth that we've seen with kids under this new reading initiative has been amazing, and I'm so proud uh to turn it over to them
002and see all the wonderful work that they're doing. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. And thank you everyone for being here. And the way that I'm talking into this mic when you come up, you'll do the same so that people can hear you as well for when you talk about the initiatives. Um go ahead. So for the agenda, we're going to look at the curriculum alignment project overview, our core implementation. That's our reading program. Some of our I Ready results, and then some of the strategic support that we're doing in terms of improvement. Um this is some work that we're doing with the future design school, the same organization that's helped with the uh build the pathways for the academy and the work that's inherent to that. And this is Dr. Casemiro uh northstar objective to
003be a destination district known for our innovative programs student opportunities and for cultivating a excuse me cultivating cultural competence. So uh ground us in the work and and the reason I put this in here I I've had this before both in the budget but also in in general it's important to talk about like the inequity and staffing between comparable districts and we are doing that that makes the work uh exponentially harder but exponentially more rewarding in many ways. Um so that's a dam nor uh comparison. You can see just you know one you can only look down the right hand column to see that they have more with the next th this one's not as clear on the screen, but what stood out to me here, the reason I included this, South Street School is
004a is a blue ribbon school proiding a school distinction. And when I look here, um you have a Norwalk School that has 10 10 instructional specialists at that school where South Street has in this year too. I think the work that's done in Danbury because of the team here because of the school leadership teams and and the district cabinet team and everyone else involved especially the teachers who um you know just are a heroic effort to get get the results that they do with such you know limited um in terms of staffing capacity. Next slide. All right. And this was something that Dr. Casemir was really adamant about as we put together our alignment documents with curriculum. The the the vision here was to develop a clear consistent approach to teaching and learning that weaves
005together the district's initiatives including the constructing meaning framework and approach that meets each stanberry students needs and shows the learning trajectory across grades subjects and the portion of the graduate skills so that that comes along as well as the standards based report cards and then we can look um on that continuum to see how we're going to move towards the And then this is something that's going to be displayed um on the individual schools websites as well as uh the district and the core commitments. So Dr. Tester wanted me to introduce this to the board. Talk about elevating uh rigorous and engaging learning fostering inquiry critical thinking problem solving skills through rigorous student centered instruction. Cultivate is what we're doing. Cultivating inclusive and culturally responsive education. So designing environments so that all students can feel
006seen, valued, and supported with accessible approaches to learning that nurture academic and social emotional growth. Create, as you know, we're creating pathways and possibilities for future student success. We provide pathways that empower students for post-secary readiness or post-secary opportunities, career readiness, and lifelong learning that continue through themies and beyond. Okay, I'm going to ask Mr. Gomes to uh say a few words about constructive meeting. Mr. Gomes good evening everybody. So um I guess the slide shows you uh what we call an opening for studying English learners throughout the school day. Um this reflects pretty much the legal requirements coming from title 3 which in a nutshell uh indicate that English learners need to be uh receiving instruction in English at their level of English proficiency and access to meaningful grade level academic content. In order
007to do this, we have um adapted this blueprint which indicates um instruction in English at that level of English proficiency which we call our English language development or ESL classes. And then the constructing meaning or CM would be an extending way extending way of um providing a continuation of English language instruction in the academic uh content areas and that requires the uh explicit instruction of language acquisition. So the students spend um a small part of their day in the ESL classes but the majority of their time is spent in the regular mainstream classes. So they need to um continue to pro to be providing good language instruction in the content area. That's what we mean by constructing meaning, which is a way to provide that explicit language instruction and not stop the the process when
008they leave the uh ESL classes. Thank you, Mrs. Nu, if you'll talk to us a little bit about the curricular alignment with the lens of constructed meaning for explicit language instruction. Good evening. So starting with the curriculum that we've been writing for the pathway at high school, we've undergone a process in the last couple years um and I stood before you to share that writing process um to ensure that we're thinking of a backwards design approach when it comes to not only embedding the standards of the courses that we're designing, but we're also embedding the portrait of the graduate attributes and skills. Part of that work this year has begun to look at our assessment tasks and think about how we're really creating opportunities for students to speak, to listen, to write, and to read
009with respect to the constructing meaning framework that our district is being trained on. What that means is you're going to see a higher level of assessment creation that now looks now that that looks like really specifying what kids will do in an assessment. So, are they comparing and contrasting? Are they explaining? Are they writing a sequence or um of instructions? By spelling that out for teachers, we're now giving them the opportunity to really design instruction that focuses on what does a kid, a student need to be able to explain and describe. What are those words they should be using? What do they need to compare and contrast on the continuum of K through 12? Because obviously what a kindergartener is going to do will be different than a 12th grader. So this new focus on
010embedding the ability for stu for teachers to design instruction around students um skill of constructing meaning about around the use of language um is our next iterative level of curriculum work that we've begun to implement this year. So um in a very few weeks I'm sure we'll be talking about our introduction courses that for the pathway we started with our exploration we did our essentials and now we're on the introduction and you're going to see more of these embedded language functions if we did that correctly. Thank you. Thank you. going to have um Miss Moratti, Mackenzie Moratti come up and talk to us a little bit about our core, but I think it's important to talk about um this was one of the investments in the ESR funding was funding this particular program and I
011think it was a very prudent move on the board's part to adopt all the way through fifth grade. So that what we're seeing in fourth and fifth grade now is very impressive. Thank you. So, um I think some of the great growth that we've seen um throughout the elementary schools this year can be attributed to the Arcore program because it's an extremely engaging and rigorous program and starting right away from kindergarten. We see that students are using very high levels of academic language and vocabulary in the classrooms along with teachers students. Um we're seeing all across the board throughout the schools. The teachers are also using an instructional toolkit that meets the needs of all their students. Um, we have an ongoing collaboration with our district coaches and the art core coaches and this has
012been really uh critical to successful implementation, the ongoing support and collaboration together. Um, we have also taken a lot of the feedback that we've received from those sessions from either building administrators, the coaches, and our curriculum assessment specialists along with our coaches have partnered with our multilingual team and have created um a bunch of resources for each unit for teachers. Um we have also partnered this year with the hill for literacy which has been really great at providing teachers with um some professional learning around the science of reading and just kind of expanding their educational background and giving them some additional tools to really uh support student growth and achievement. Um, we've also been partnering with principles and either working with coaching groups of teachers, certain grade levels at schools or just individual teachers working
013in PLC's to analyze the data that we've received from this and then determine what are the next instructional steps that we need to take to keep our students growing. And just to point out, one of the critical pieces of the ARCOR program that I think is very has been very effective. This is almost I don't want to say forced differentiation, but it creates the conditions where I can have a child in first grade, first grade reading level and fifth grade reading level in the same classroom and I'm able to get toolkit lessons through an assessment that shows where I'm at in that snapshot in time. So I can meet the student where they're at in small group instruction and help move that student forward. when I look at the growth across this assessment and then
014we look at the growth across I Ready, we're we're on to something with this differentiated model and it's quite exciting to see. So, thank you McKenzie for that. Oh, um yeah, please. So, we had something really exciting happen uh last week at KSI. Um, one of the actually two of the students uh submitted their work to American Reading Company and one student was chosen as an honorable mention for his story, Journey into the Arctic. And another student, Logan, was actually awarded with the award of excellence. And his book, Welcome to the Arctic, which you see here, is going to be published u by Ark and they're going to be including it in all future collections across the country. And uh what's extra special about this is we had the CEO from Mark here last week
015to meet with our principles and building administrators and she told us that in the last 10 years they've only had about 15 student books that they've published. So this is a real honor. They get tons of books all the time every year. So you know these two students and their teacher, Miss Pearson, have been working really hard and we're very proud of them. [Applause] One of the misconceptions I think sometimes in public education is um what you need to effectively run a school and or district. And I think I liken it to professional athletes, right? If you're a Matt Yankees fan, whatever, you've got a manager, you got a pitching coach, you got a bullpen coach, you got a hitting coach, you got someone working on the field and in the field. And I think
016sometimes, you know, it we look at a school, they have a manager, they have players, right? And they're missing often times that piece of the the instructional, the content expertise, and that sort of narrow slice that goes a long way when you have deep expertise in a particular area. And what we're seeing this year is that expertise both on the leadership level, but also the the coach and and and department head level um is really paying dividends. And I'm going to ask if we could have um Mr. Ian and Yes. Mr. Ian and your group that has worked together kind of talk about some of the successes you've seen uh through the coaching model in literacy sorry athletics which culminated in exceptional it's not yeah it was the rest development um hey guys thank you
017guys for having me so you're you know you hear about a lot of Oh dear. I did not know there was a photograph. That's jarring. Um, so I've had the um I've had the opportunity throughout my career. I'm going to talk specifically about work I've done with Miss Porman. Um, I've been in this district for 13 years. I've worked with plenty of coaches. What I'm going to talk to today is about my experience this year. Um, but you could cut and paste this Pman's name with a variety of coaches. what the work that has been done this year specifically is not different than work I've done with other coaches. Some of that are still in this district including Dr. Dr. Me who's not behind me. Um uh so I've been I've been in the district
018for 13 years. Um and really just to give you an overview of like what this looks like dayto-day. Um coach are up here. They're working with the curriculum. They have to give us professional development. Um but on top of that they're in the classroom. Um, so I've been lucky enough Miss Borman and uh the rest of the math team decided they wanted to come in and do a sample as fact lesson uh with students just to see kind of get a gauge on where were we, what did we need to we the teachers need to kind of sorry close enough um to kind of uh lay off for the rest of the year. Um and then after they left we said you know anytime you want to come in and it was super fun I'd
019love to. She took that very literally. Um, and that led to a lot of emails. Um, but what what I want to get to and I want to talk about the way it played out was uh this was a coaching and teaching cycle that has led to unbelievable dramatic changes. In my classroom, I'm going to speak specifically to Houston scores. Um, that I've seen this year both in math and reading because a lot of what we've done has been focused on language. Uh, I'm at Park Avenue. Those of you who are familiar with the Park Avenue demographics, we are a tremendously ML is the turnout, but we have a lot of students who English is not their primary language in my class alone. I'm the only student or I'm the only person where English is
020my primary language in a class of 22. Um I have students that have just arrived to the country. I have students who have only been here for 2 years. Um you guys understand the makeup of Danbury, excuse me, and it's a wonderful makeup. Um, so when when Mary Joe her more Mary Joe All right. When Mary Joe I'm nervous. When Miss Mary Joe first came in, Grandma Mary Joe, um, she obviously, you know, you're new to a classroom, she's pointing at students, she's like, "You in the back and you you wearing the striped shirt." Uh, it was great, but again, it didn't have that personal touch. Little did I know over the weekend, Miss Borman printed out each student's par uh, parents wear power school power school teacher and wrote their name next to her.
021So for the next time she would come in, she would know exactly what to call that student. And that may not seem like a lot, but for a person who's only been in the room one other time, to have that person know your name when you're answering a question shows how much they value what you're about to say, especially because they're used to some ridiculous thinking that probably given them. So it was nice for them to hear it probably for once. Um, we're at the point now, Mary Joe's been in, I would say about 10 times, where as students are getting a priority scores, we're facetiming her in the middle of the day. She was in a curriculum basement the other day and I had a student facetime, he made 175% growth in his math
022test. And I mean, hold the sign. I mean, she was with Dr. B. And when I tell you the way this child's face lit up, I mean, it's one thing for me to be like, "Hey, you did great." But when he saw her and her smile and then Dr. He beats up the phone. He would have thought the kid had just hit, to use your metaphor, sports, a grand slam. Nailed it. Um, that was not the only time. That is now every time a student finished their test and did well. He said, "Can we FaceTime with Miss Borman?" I'm like, "Sure." Sorry about that, by the way. Um, so that that speaks to the relationships of the coaching that goes on here. It is not about simply sitting there and making us, you know, teachers
023have us sit through meetings. We're talking about the theory of what's happening. They're in there. They're in my And I know you're in how many classrooms? Many, many, many, many across every school. Um, so every time she would come in, we would do a lesson. Sometimes I would lead, she would allow me to lead, sometimes she would lead. Um, and it's it became almost u not a lesson for stooges, but it became very much where we were coaching each other on the fly where I might ask a question. And I think some of you in your instructional rounds have have come in during one of these lessons where I will say something and MJ will jump right in and be like, "What's another way to say this?" Um, so to I have a lot to
024say, but I want to go fast. This has truly been a like it's been a team teaching. So we finally finished our sorry it took us so long. Um, so I look back at this same cohort's uh growth from last year. So typically if you're not familiar with the IRA test, they score on a certain level. the test gets progressively more difficult as they answer questions correctly. So they'll start it, let's say in the fall that they tested at a first grade level. Their first set of questions would be at a first grade level and as they continue to answer right, it gets more difficult. They each have a target growth of 100% obviously and that is what a typical one year's worth of growth that a student at that level would make. So I
025looked at it. I had nine of my 20 students did not meet their 100% goal in fourth grade. Now, that's not a knock on anybody. It's very challenging. This year, all nine of them made 100% grade level growth. Six of which madeund over 150% growth. Three of those students are diagnosed with slicing. Three of those students have been in the country for less than two years. And if you're familiar with fifth grade math, it's all words. It is very dense about problem solving, about situational uh use of the mathematics. I've seen that those same skills transfer over into the reading that they've done because our reading broke is also pretty good. You can tell our you also Mr. also had some of the highest reading growth in the district. Actually, his median was 255% growth
026for his 90%. Um, but that's the point I'm trying to make. I've done this for 13 years, 14 years, something like that. Feels like an eternity. Um, but I had and I have seen good numbers. I have not seen numbers like that. I have never seen numbers like that. And yes, some of it is the art curriculum as you pointed to McKenzie being able to do targeted instruction. I haven't taught I learned about phonics instruction when I was in college. I taught fifth grade for 14 years. Having the tool kits to be able to address what I need to address has been the greatest thing I could have asked for. One of our biggest difficulties in fifth grade is how do I target a student who was reading out a kindergarten first grade level? I
027don't have those resources. I don't have those books. Through art, I do. And those are some of those kids and we speak about that 200% over that. Those are kids that are making two to three grade levels worth of growth in a span of seven months because we took this test in March. Um so it's kind of w and the like the goal of these coaches. I speak about this but there's also this woman over here Chrissy who lives in the Park Avenue basement which is why she has that cough. Um just kidding. Um, but similarly if I while I work with Mary Joe, Chrissy's in there and she'll be sometimes in the middle of meetings probably with some few people and I'll be like, "Hey Christy," I just mute really quick and I'll be
028like, "Christie, what do you think about this lesson?" And she'd be like, "Well, what if you did it this way a little bit? Give me 5 minutes. I can make something for you." And that is something we don't have. We we don't have time for in the the rigor of day-to-day the 30 minute lunch. That's really when I'm going to launch. We don't have time to do these little nuances. And having the resources of these coaches is truly one of the greatest aspects of this district is the people you see here and what they have done for us on a day-to-day basis. Can you say that number one more time? 2005. I have two questions. I just want to take a couple minutes to name the specific things that we worked on. Oh. Um Oh,
029do you have more to tell? No, I know. I I I love cuz I never do that. Oh, wait. Really quick. I'm so sorry. I did have something I wanted to really share. Sorry, I'm all over the place. So, what I did is I asked three of my students, um, what has your experience been with this? So, one of my students is one of those level two uh level one laws. So, they've been here for under two years. and I changed nothing. And what he said was, "Mrs. Borman, she teach me fractions and she helped me a lot. She gives all the students confidence and courage to go in front of the class and show their work." I was like, "I didn't know how to do it adding a simple fractions, but she teached me
030to do it and now I can do all my work. She is the best teacher and she can teach you something." Um, I had another student uh very similar background. Miss Bourne explains how to do math that I don't know. She explains it in a way that I understand. So whenever I get stuck on a question, she makes me think about my own thinking. She has helped my teacher ask questions that help us think. And I I couldn't said it better than that. She has helped me learn to get these students to ask themselves questions. Does this make sense? And that's where we have to even see it in the writing. They'll write down like, "No, it doesn't make any sense." That metacognition piece, which I'm sure you're going to speak to. If I if
031I were to name the the teacher moves that we had worked on were structured you can see that there we are right the kids love it yeah um just to name the instructional moves we have used the structured student talk routines to help students interact with the language to hear it because you can't build your own metacognition until you start hearing what the thought process processes are Ian chose metacognition as his goal which is to help students think about their own thinking when they're problem solving. So doing the structured student talk routines the other questioning techniques flipping the classroom lesson where the kids are in charge and we remove the numbers from the problem so they interact just with the context. These are the teacher moves and we've been able to turn these into artifacts.
032So Ian through being very open to this process has helped us bring these artifacts to the other fifth grade teachers in the district. So this is not just happening in one room. So he needs to take a a lot more credit for that because his energy and his positiveness has grown beyond the walls of Park Avenue School and it is obviously been the highlight of my year to work in this room in case you guys couldn't tell. Thank you. And Ian, we're glad you you got over being shy about walking into the room and I'm getting nervous. Once I got up there, you guys are so friendly, all smiling. Want to bring up the Stadley group, uh, Mr. Sirlick and those who have assisted UT school. What we did this year, if you look at
033where it says strategic support on the right hand side, we know that if this is the audience and this group supports the entire district K12 that there are not enough of them to support the number of teachers to support the number of students. So we had to make you know some decisions around who best to support and we decided to go with four schools that we've been very strategic about. So Mr. Sir and friends, if you can please uh talk to us about the support you received and the the return on that investment. Sure. Good evening everyone. You know, I just want to preface it all by I will not be as entertaining as Ian, but I am super jealous of his hair and I hope you don't pull up a picture of me 32
034years ago because I've been in the district for 32 years. So, I definitely have hair of that. Just some of the things that we've been doing at Stavro is really focusing in on key pieces on the math curriculum and standards and same thing in language arts. I think in years past as a principal when we see our scores we want to fix everything. We bite off way too much than we can do. And I think K5 curriculum is so indepth and so deep. We try to fix it all in one in one school year and we can never accomplish that. And we've learned that throughout time. But we continue to keep trying to fix everything at one time. I think the coaches both in language arts and math has helped me focus in on key
035pieces of the standards and really help me diagnose that with the teachers and using the data and I ready and also using the art core the the we call it help our students individually and I think one of the key pieces to all of this is the collaboration between the principal the coaches and the lead of language arts and the lead of math. Dr. Me and McKenzie have been crucial in getting their coaches to help me and help my staff. At this point, we've really changed the thought process of our staff on asking for help. Instead of bringing in the help, they're asking for the help. We haven't had that in the past. So, our professional learning communities have really expanded to teachers asking for the key pieces that they need to help their students
036go farther and get better. You know, we had students in this year in our last I must say IRA testing and you're not going to believe when I say this. They had 500% 600% growth. This is unheard of. We've never heard of growth like this before. And we attribute this to the coaching, the pushing in that a lot of the co math coaches and language arts coaches that are doing except there. So, I I don't need the microphone in case you can't tell. I know Mary knows I don't need the microphone. Um, so this is one of the things that the data does say about coaching and I didn't want it to go overlooked. It talks about the types of professional development and as you can really clearly see how coaching really when you get
037to that classroom application and that is what people have just spoken about and I do have to tell you um myself uh Dr. Cardona and McKenzie Maratti we have incredible incredible staff a very very small staff which Mr. uh which will show you um very small staff that are making incredible gains. Um one of the slides in your presentation is a slide um from Dr. Hisop at King Street who wasn't able to be here tonight. Um but the work that um Anna White has done there both at King Street Primary and Kingre Intermediate has shown incredible incredible growth. So these were I know that's in your packet but these were just two um excerpts from uh letters actually that Dr. Hislop sent to um cabinet um speaking about the support and one of the things
038that she asks every week I think to um Dr. Casemiro is please don't take my support away. So I just wanted to just highlight those two things because although our teams are small they are mighty and they are providing things for our students that our students need and our teachers need as you've heard from a teacher in the classroom and from a principal who's dealing with this every single day. So, thank you very much for um allowing us to be here today and talk to you. Thank you. Thank you. about to eat so something we did differently this year around assessment was we changed the assessment calendar so a lot of times I'll come and speak with you all about our summitive data for the year, our growth um and those are very important um
039overarching goals that we have as well as um analysis that we need to do. We have a lot of interal um benchmarks and other assessments that are conducted throughout the year. We took a critical look at when we were doing those assessments. Um I proposed change and it was met with mixed reviews in the beginning and so uh we met with multiple stakeholders including um principles as well as the um the CRC folks that you're hearing from tonight to move some of the assessments to December and then doing some of our final assessments in March. And for that purpose we are often looking at autopsy data. what happened for the year. We are now doing a a final assessment in grades 3 through 8 that are will also take the ESPA in May to to
040have um an a point in time where we can still do something about the instruction for that student. So instead of waiting till the end of the year doing our I ready and also taking ASPA and seeing what it told us about what what the student achieved, we're now in March and we can still make instructional moves to move that student's proficiency. So um I think that I've made some believers out of people, right? So, um, it's a challenge for teachers because they look at it as, um, okay, this is what people are thinking about my work this year for this student. But what we're really trying to shift is this idea that assessment is for the instructional planning for the student. This is not about numbers that we put in presentations to see always
041how the district is doing. This is about a student sitting in a classroom and what a teacher has to do in order to move that student as quickly as possible to grade level expectation. So, as we continue this campaign, um, you know, we're always open to feedback, but that was a big shift in the district this year, and we appreciate the principal and the departments and the teachers openness to try this. And to see the kind of results that we're seeing in reading and math for the growth for this year in March has been been fantastic. I thought that was my idea. Yeah, I know. So, There's many people. So, one of the things that really I just pulled it up in front of me because where we I gave you information in the packet.
042I know we're jumping around because I want to make sure it's interactive and and involved real humans in the discussion to um to center the work. But I think the the data also is outdated already because I already continues to happen. And what I'm looking at in front of me that you don't have on the screen, we'll get to the screen in a moment, is every single grade level, third through 5th, range, excuse me, 3rd through 8th, range from 133% growth through 150% growth in terms of the median. So if you lined up all the the the numbers from lowest to greatest, that middle number um It's not in there. No, no, it's No, it's not in there. Would be one. Like I said, it's because we pulled it today. I'm pulling it right this
043moment would be 143. So really exceptional growth from third grade all the way through 8th grade. Now because of the calendar change, our second graders um they don't take it only in math, but we're looking at the highest growth that we've seen in terms of ID data um in history. We're hoping and that in giving the assessment earlier, we're going to use that data in the areas of of deficiency to remediate to accelerate and then to really knock it out of the park on smart balance. So that's our hope and we're hedging our bets that that will happen. the data up in front of you and I don't want to read it to you but you can see the we're looking to improve um from fall to spring and you could see on almost all
044the slides a significant gain again you only have a small a fractional component on the map that's tested so I don't have a full denominator there because of the timing of this particular meeting um you're welcome to come over and uh see the computer after but the the Again, the strength of of the data speaks to the collaboration, speaks to the uh work with principles, the work with the department heads, and it it's paying off. Uh we Yeah. Go ahead. Talk about Yeah. So, grades three, four, and five, um we're looking at highest performing in terms of growth. So when it says metypical growth and I have it up there on the screen um in the packet it's not the word but up on the screen you look at grade three grade four and grade
045five. Again because of the timing we're we're not able to have math up there. But if you're looking at typical growth and then stretch growth. What typical growth is it assumes that every child should make a year's growth academically. in terms of stretch. That's your gap closing growth. So, it's what Mr. Wendell said earlier about having students who are grade one or grade two and and sitting in a fifth grade classroom in terms of their reading level and how do we close that gap? One grade level a year is not going to do that. So, how do we accelerate that? And that's the information that we glean from from I read and if you look at that typical growth and those are your highest performers at that time. Great Plain, Little Ridge, King Street Primary,
046Shelter Rock. Uh you had Park, South Street, and Statley all tied up for fifth. So you're seeing a lot of schools uh surface that maybe were not there uh last year, which is exciting. Uh grade four, Statley again, uh King Street Intermediate, Haztown Park with Ellsworth and Morris tied for fifth. South Street in grade five, Shel Rock, AIS, Ellsworth and King Street Intermediate. again lots to do with the coaching, the support uh across all levels. The stretch growth, I won't read it to everyone. It's up on the screen. Um but many of the same schools in addition to some others. So what we're seeing, what we know from our instructional rounds and our improvement process is that if we review the data and we disagregate by subgroup and we really look intently at the students
047and try to meet the needs of the students in front of us and then we go in and identify what do we see as a learner center problem. Is that uh corroborated by what we see in the classroom? Are we going to make some general generalized feedback? Are we going to be real specific? Do we return again after identifying a problem of practice in the classroom and find the same problem? Well, that's not good. So, we we would do another type of round. But getting really focused about what we're trying to see in the classroom in terms of practice has really helped. The action planning component of this data is one one set of numbers, right? But when we have data and we look historically and we see how students have done in the past,
048triangulate that data, now we're on to something. and and that's kind of where we're at right now is we're responding to the data in front of us, but this data is helping us plan to meet the individual needs of students. This is where the coaches um and department heads at the second grade level really push in and help principles and help teachers really hone their craft and to be um you know more specialized in what they're doing. uh the professional learning piece. We're currently working on a calendar right now and we're trying to really personalize and and provide some choice and flexibility in the professional learning. Um often times in the past was more where to implement something in terms of our programs that require a year-long type initiative. But what we're finding is the
049best professional learning is learning from your colleagues, learning from other schools. Where is something working at such a level that we should replicate? We're going to go there. We're going to think about it. What is Ian doing in his classroom to get the highest growth in the district? Well, let's learn from him. Uh this is what we're trying to really establish both the from a climate culture standpoint to a practical application of what we're finding in terms of the action research that's going on during these instructional rounds. You want to add anything to that? I was um I was just going to say we sorry we've done this work for several years. it it really began as an idea of like a systematic approach to how to um address problems of practice in the district
050and identify them. Um I've never seen it um work so well as it did this year and I think I would like to point out Chris Roach and Dr. Barco, I think she's here as well, of the work with the chiefs around um how to bring departments and buildings together in order to action plan appropriately for the needs of the staff and the students. And so I think this is a very intense um on your slides, I believe it's a little it's not as um outlined as this. We changed this a bit before the meeting just so you had a better glimpse of the amount of work that this is. We're hearing great results and how everybody had such significant changes in their practice and things like that, but this is incredibly deep work being
051done by both the building leaders and the department folks. um this is hours and hours of prep being in the classroom and then following up with PLC work with with the teachers and then also on an individual level. So I just I've really seen collaboration in a way I haven't seen it before. Um and it's been incredibly productive and only the students and teachers are benefiting. So I do want to call it out to everybody in this room who's done done a fantastic job this year. Thank you for that. if you could uh just go to slides 34 and 35 and yeah just pause for a minute and ask if anybody has questions. Yeah, sorry about that. Well, I just want to say we don't have that slide, right? That's what I just said. Like
052we changed it a little bit before the presentation just so you had a little more information. Happy to We'll PDF this and PDF and send it back to you revised. Thank you. Sorry about that. Does anyone any other um any curriculum committee members have questions? Any other board members have questions at this point? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. One question. One question. Um what are the schools that have have presented? Can you just uh reiterate what's the schools who are presented tonight? Yes. That's Mr. Serick is Stanley Ruff. We had um uh Ian, Mr. Lundo from Park. We had KSI. We spoke about K Street Intermediate. Um did you talk about anybody else? The strategic support schools where people have provided the most intervention within the district of working with staff and students is really
053at park, Ellsworth, Statley, and King Street. kind of just if I could just end back where we started in in many uh ways an infographic just talking about the the way to improve schools in a school district is through building capacity building um efficacy but also replicating success stories and sharing stories of success so that you build believers, you build those who are buy into a vision so that you can be successful. And I think when I look at this, this is K5, but I look at seven instructional support staff and you can see just in the visual, they're supporting a lot of places, right? And so we had to make some targeted decisions. We would love I know they would love and and the teachers have requested so many of them. Can you please
054come to our classroom? We simply don't have that capacity to do that. So we had to make some decisions. And the the good news is they really want the support. The leaders want the support, but we can't. Uh, and then look at the secondary, please. Next slide. Again, enormous. There's just not enough staff. But despite that, we continue to see gains, um, stretch growth. We're seeing gap closing growth that's going to help us move the district forward. Um, I I just want to thank everybody back there who's in attendance for all the hard work, the extra hours, the weekends, everything that you do. our schools are better because of you all and in essence really appreciate it. So on that um if you have any questions we're happy to answer it. I have a question
055not a question but a comment um based on what Mark Gab is briefed on on the u math uh more words than word problems than just numbers. I think um it's something to think about for the future as you're talking about statistics or numbers to see in the progression of it. I would like to to see somewhere down the road what a transition between that instrument instructional in the classroom to where how well they do in SATs because when you take the SATs the math portion of it is is what you're teaching right now. That's exactly and I would like to see how transition into that and see if it is working. It's a great point. We'd love to share that when that time comes in a few years. I'm sure there will come back
056some successful alumni. Any other question so neither. Thank you. I appreciate the presentation this evening. It's very very helpful for us to sort of understand the work you guys are doing. Um just sort of on the other side of things, there's been a tremendous amount of success this year and I thank you all for the work that you've done to create that. Are there areas of this pro of the ARC uh core program that you feel maybe are not meeting the needs somewhere or that you have to adjust or or amend? Yeah, it's I'll just answer that in in in that I don't think any program is enough. I think no there's no program that's a panacea it we teach students we teach students to meet the needs of the students in front of us
057and we have to teach those academic standards and the progressions thereof but to the extent that it's lacking I don't think so but I think what what has to happen is much like a master teacher you need to know where to go if the child's not at the grade level I think art does an exceptional job of that but no program or curricular resource because that's really what we have never should something be viewed because we're locked up using this. No matter what, when I come in your class at 10:13, I better see you on this page. That's not teaching. Um, so I I don't looking at it's a very effective program from what the research tells us. Uh, during the last year's um the year before, excuse me, when they when this was vetted
058through some of the other uh districts that were using it, it received uh pretty high reviews. But again, much like every other program, it it has, you know, uh areas where the kids still don't have and our district has engaged in other professional learning around the science of reading and cultural literacy, which is giving them the overall understanding of reading development and so that they can make the instructional choices that would be outside the program that best meet the needs of students. The fact that the students are reading about science and making making it fun at an early level where they're reading about reptiles and really the expository text is really exciting. So hi, I'm Linda Christian. I'm the curriculum assessment specialist for ELA. I didn't think I needed that. So I agree with what
059everyone said about there's no perfect program. Um, and what we want to do is build teacher capacity and teacher expertise. So, we're doing that with ARC with Hill. And one of the things that came out of the work this year was a teacher need. They needed um to, you know, they have so much coming at them right now. So, they really needed more clarity around learning targets, standards. So, one of the things that my role did along with SCOP and my ELA team is we put together a companion doc for teachers to go along with each unit um actually units and consume in the in the works right now, but um that companion doc is helping them. It's a clip version if you will for when they need something really quickly to pull out of
060it. Um and that came directly from teachers. So, that was a direct teacher response. So, and they love that document and we're it's actually turning into more than that. It's turning into where they'll say, "Can you highlight this for in the ARC manual for us so it's quicker for us to grab it for students." Um, and if you want to see what that looks like, I'm sure we can get that to you as well. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you. Michelle. Um, so just I'm looking at the staffing comparisons with Norwalk and it looks like it's like 26 and a half positions. How many have we considered for the upcoming budget? Like how will we address that at all as far as how many positions is that Kelly? Yeah. Oh, are you referring to like right
061now? I'm looking at a comparison of Oh, it looks like they exceed in general education, teachers, instructors, par you know, you've listed this this uh chart here that shows how we are un unstaffed staffing. I'm sure that's what you need as well, right? So, I'm I'm wondering how have we addressed have we addressed this in the current budget? How many positions would address this? Well, I was just going to say the the the part that struck me in that particular slide was not necessarily the the FTEs at the top for general ed teachers, but the specialist line, which is really those providing the uh support both on a coaching side, but also the intervention. That's where I know Dr. Cameron talked about it. A an attempt to add student support specialists and I think we
062talked about that at one of the meetings. I think it was fourth fourth, right? Yeah. So, I think what you saw is in the preparation of the budget that was requested was the restoration of some of the positions that we lost uh such as the instructional supports such as parent educators to support at the kindergarten level other resources to help our teachers and students to become more successful. um as we're going through the budget process right now, there will have to be decisions that are made um regarding the are we able to add those positions in. So, it's certainly um our goal to support our schools as much as possible uh with with the resources that we receive. I had one more question if you don't mind. I when we had implemented I think it
063was the reading program it was like K through three but we had gone actually purchased four and five and we sheld it for a year. We've implemented that. Yes, that's correct. And what about did we purchase were we were we looking to do six, seven, eight? I know we had talked about that would have been a dream. Did we do that? Right now we've done K5. Okay. Just K to 5 in both reading and math. So the information you saw on ARC this evening is regarding reading, but we have made changes to the curriculum in math as well as Okay. Thank you. And that's been rolled out K5. Uh Michelle, I think you're the slide that you're referring to. I think what they're trying to do is compare the fact that Norark has got more
064people and we got less and we're put we're doing a lot more or close to that with that short period. Yeah. I just want to know the numbers four we're looking for. Thank you. Any other questions? Just to clarify to the math curriculum, although we we finished rolling out K5, that curriculum is K12. So that's it's rolled out. Thank you. Do you have a question? I know you guys are. Yeah. Mr. Janelli, I don't know if she ask question. Mr. Janelli, do you have a question? Hello. Well, thank you so much. No, I don't have a question. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much everybody. U before everyone leaves, I just want to say thank you on behalf of the board of ed and our superintendent and everyone that you have came out
065and gave us great presentation and we thank you. And to the two young ladies and the young man that helped me with my packages coming up the stair, I want to thank you. Thank you very much. Now I know your name in [Music] Okay. Thank you, Mr.