001good morning everybody it is thursday april 28th this is a meeting of the curriculum committee of the darien board of education we are pleased to welcome keith keeler here to talk about social studies and dr tranberg will talk a little bit about what's going to happen over the summer in terms of curriculum our next meeting is scheduled for thursday may 26th and we hope to see you then so i will turn the meeting over to dr tranberg thank you good morning everyone thanks for joining us this morning uh we'll start with the social studies curriculum update and welcome to mr keeler thank you everyone good morning can you hear me okay with that all right perfect so um good morning uh dr adley dr tramberg or decline members of the board of education welcome um
002i'm happy to be giving a curriculum update on social studies this morning um the last time i was here was in the spring of 2019 at that time this is what we did we gave a program overview we looked at the inquiry process and we gave some curriculum updates i have found it very helpful um to always come back to this inquiry process though and i'd like to just take a brief amount of time to recap that because when i've talked with families and i've i've you know and i try to talk about the social studies it's really important to have that as a basis and an understanding for the rest of what we do so i'll start there just to give a brief overview of that and then move into some of the new
003work that we've done as a department so the inquiry process is really broken down into four stages within the inquiry arc the first of which has to do with questions and compelling and essential questions you can see on the slideshow here that i've given you some samples from our curriculum documents of what these questions are like the essential questions are timeless they're placeless they're more philosophical in nature our compelling questions are a little bit more focused you can see that there is a place and a time associated with them but regardless each of these questions doesn't have a singular answer there's a lot of a lot of different ways that students can take those questions and interpret and understand them and that's really what we we try to try to do throughout the social studies
004i have a short video that i'm gonna i'm gonna share with you now this is a student an eighth grade student that i met with earlier this week who was talking me through his civil war research paper and some of the questioning that he was gonna use and come up with to use for that okay changes the outcome so much but it does so i chose the topic how media newspapers effective outcome of the war which has to do with propaganda and for my sub topics i want to go into specific parts of that main topic so my first one was how was probably spread during the civil war like newspapers and pamphlets and different ways that people accessed information and for my second one i went with how much control of information did newspapers
005have because i know it's still biased today but there's more regulation on what they can say i wonder if that was a thing back then my third one i said what false information did newspaper spread like what did they make people believe that wasn't true my fourth one i said what strategies on both sides work to help them get the spread of information so what actually happened and what did they use and did this affect what happened at the end of the war and how the battles went and my last one i said how do they recruit soldiers on both sides because they probably use propaganda to make them believe that they needed to go to war okay great so this is a you know a student whose assignment is to investigate a portion of
006the civil war they have choice within what they want to do and investigate that and you can see the development of questions so that training of how do we question and develop good questions is something that we work on throughout the social studies with them these are sometimes questions that teachers ask and sometimes questions that students will ask as you saw in that video the second stage of the inquiry arc is has to do with developing discipline specific skill and concept building so before we can really engage in an inquiry and an investigation there has to be a background in sufficient understanding of material of content but also the skills that they need to be able to do that so i've given you a long list here i won't talk about all of it but
007i'll give you an example with the way that we look at political cartoons um this year this was a topic that i talked with a number of families about who were wondering how do we do this how do we use it how do we approach political cartoons our goal here is never to say this is what you need to believe because of the cartoon our goal is to really encourage students and teach them how to interpret those cartoons as you move through the 1800s they become more and more popular and are obviously something that you can see um all over the place today so when we look at political cartoons for example we might look at things like caricature size of um of the people who are being presented the way that they're being presented
008the tone of it the message of it you know one of the things i always used to tell students is to think of a political cartoon like a flip book and so as you go through the flip book what's going to happen 10 or 15 or 20 seconds from then as a way of trying to understand what's the author trying to convey to his audience or her audience so these are you know that sort of approach of how do we look at cartoons as necessary before we actually present them to students and that's what happens in the second stage where we're giving them skills but also necessary content to understanding the documents which comes in the third stage of the inquiry arc in this point we actually do the investigation so here's i gave you
009a sampling here of some of the the authors that students will read in grades 6 through 12. we're going to look at a variety of sources we're going to be doing this in a way to try to investigate and answer the compelling or essential questions that we asked earlier in our process the goal here again is to really get students to be critical thinkers we want them to ask questions and i always like to use the word interrogate the text so they're going to ask questions they're going to make connections they're going to try to see things that are you know what the author's trying to say and the way that they're saying it and this is a really exciting activity for us to do i can say it you know there's nothing uh nothing
010more thrilling i guess than when you give a student a text that you've used before in the past for you know several years and a student brings up something that you had never seen and that other classes hadn't seen um you know it's a really exciting moment and so that sort of thing is really wonderful to see in classes um but at this stage we're really investigating we're picking apart those documents and trying to understand them earlier this year there were some questions about you know well how do we come up with these sources where do they come from and i'll i'll pause with the inquiry look for a moment and just talk a little bit about well how do we come up with these sources what's the process the questions that we ask ourselves
011as we're doing this and you can see there's some sample questions up here on the screen we're always thinking about does this sort source meet our content needs so how much of this is related to the topics that we're trying to study with students is it tangentially related or does it really do a good job of teaching a large swath of the the time period or the experience of that time period so that's the first thing we look at we would then also look at what's the level that this is being written at or being being presented in is this something that's usable to students at their age level with support from their teacher whether it be supporting questions or some sort of preliminary overview of what the text might be or is this something
012that students can handle on their own obviously it doesn't do us any good to give students a graduate level text to their middle school classes so we're always really careful with that and then the third part of this is also looking at what's age appropriate what's developmentally appropriate so we want to be careful that the material we present to students is suitable for their age level so the the terms that are used the descriptions are they too mature are they too graphic are they appropriate it's a challenging thing because in the social studies we are exposing them to global events that have taken place many of them are not great and so we're really careful the way that we present this to students and really trying to make sure that we have materials that are
013are suitable for them while this is the process we go through um this is kind of when we're we're coming across something for the first time and i mean this with the in the most loving way possible to the 30 or so people in the two schools i work with a lot of social studies nerds who are really into what we do and so they spend their time outside of school listening to podcasts and watching documentaries reading to no end attending conferences and workshops so the fact that they would be exposed to new sources new new way new um material that might be useful to a class is fairly common um and so these sorts of discussions with these questions are something that happens often when we start to look at this there are however
014frequently accessed sources that we use so i've given you some samples here of what it might look like at the middle school and i'll show you the high school in just a moment here i have a list of some of our most frequently accessed they're typically like student magazines or short publications on a particular topic the one that i'll draw your attention to is the the last one on this list our newest edition that came this year is which is encyclopedia britannica launch packs this basically gives us age-appropriate middle school appropriate document packets so when you look for a particular topic within this within this site it would basically give you a listing of eight to ten sources that might include a photograph a map uh a chart a primary source a speech any number
015of things and so when you're thinking about you know this investigative process that we engage in this is really useful it's also a useful and a safe place that students can go to seek additional information if they're really interested in a topic at the high school level you can see here again these are some of our our most frequently accessed sources we've got a variety of textbooks that we use a variety of sources that we would go to so the choices program is an online platform that we would use for our world or american classes we have some new books that are going to be coming in with the passage of the new budget and we'll also have next year encyclopedia britannica launch packs for the high school but it'll be specific for the high
016school so we'll be able to search for high school age material which will be really useful as students are hitting the high school their their reading ability obviously is going to be much higher and so we also have there's there's tons of free resources that are really useful when we're looking for uh primary sources in particular and so there's an avalon project um is a really good one where you're looking at politics there's the the miller center out of virginia university that is a really good one there's the national archives and fordham university's um internet source book which is a really kind of far-reaching um place to go for these materials so there's we can access that and we can look at it and then again we go through that betting process to make sure
017that what we're what we're selecting and using with our students is going to be meaningful useful and appropriate this will bring me to our our last stage of the inquiry arc which is reporting out conclusions so you know one of the things that's really important is to understand that you know this inquiry process is really designed to prepare students for college career and their civic engagement in the future and so now that you've gone through this learning and you have asked questions learned background information investigated the material specifically you have drawn some conclusions coming back to this question and what do we do with that and this can take any number of forms and a lot of creative forms there's some synthesis pages produced by sixth graders this year there can be video presentations there
018can be more traditional papers which obviously are really useful as well on the top right here i have a short video clip that we'll try to play it's about a minute it's a little bit harder to hear so i hope it comes through this is a seventh grader talking about the um talking about the invention that she had a chance to investigate in the industrial revolution her invention fittingly for our morning meeting is corn flakes um so hopefully you can hear it and i would ask just just kind of keep an ear out for the end of it where the audio is a little bit clearer and you can hear her taking just kind of the basic information about this food and making some connections to the time period in the industrial revolution [Music] because
019he and his brother worked on something called like a health school so they helped your clients have to prevent a variety of ailments and one of the treatments was just so the experiment was like baking soda and delicious flakes they perfected this recipe and since they're so easy schedules so see if i can advance this she started to tie that into um what life was like for families during the industrial revolution and there's it's really far-reaching i mean it's a seventh grade project this is something that we could have really dove into and spend like an hour talking about branding and you know now we have individually contained foods and preservation of foods and all that went into that um so while i was watching this i really had to bite my tongue and not
020share a lot um but it was you know that was a this is a good example of like a short inquiry um there are some the students that i i shared at the beginning who's doing the civil war research his is going to take weeks to do some of them may even span longer than that bridging between quarters at the high school so there's a range of what we can do with that in terms of how long an inquiry process will take in the spring of 2019 i'll i'll kind of depart from our inquiry discussion and look ahead at what's new and what we've been doing then uh in the spring of 2019 i offered these as points that we were going to be looking at and moving ahead and working on as a department
021and you can see that reflected in our sorry in our professional development that we've worked on since then okay perfect so you can see it's broken out by year um in the 1920s school year we were looking at and working on differentiation inquiry in the social studies and diving into that further looking at how do we promote historical thinking skills for students how do we get them to think like historians and social scientists um you can see the the next set from the 20 to 21 school year the asterisks there are to indicate that it was a special year um you know in addition to our our work as a department and our historical focus on continuing with historical thinking critical conversations um and identifying priorities within our classrooms we were also overlaying this with
022how do we make our classes engaging for students particularly in the hybrid setting and so we were doing kind of multiple layers of learning there most recently this year we had a focus on writing and so we looked at writing assignments how they're constructed what are we asking students to do how do we provide meaningful feedback to students what does that look like looking at samples calibrating our expectations and also the language that we use and then also looking back at like a writing scope and sequence to see do we have strong vertical alignment within grades 6 through 12. outside of the content of this professional development i'll add that the structure that we use that six through twelve set up is a really useful one um one of again i mean this in a
023loving way to my department one of the challenges that i face when we have our professional development is trying to bring them back together after letting them work in groups in grades 6 through 12 because they really enjoy that time together to hear what's going on in other classes what does that look like there are parallels and content between grades six and seven uh and nine and ten and then there's parallels in grade eight and eleven and twelve but it's also really helpful as we get this kind of bridging of um this bridging between the two schools so our eight to nine transition there's a really strong understanding of from a ninth grade perspective what does the eighth grade tip and the eighth graders know it's eighth grade teachers know excuse me what the ninth
024grade expects and so we've been able to move closer together in that which has been really really helpful as well which brings us to our curriculum work um you can see the three different stages of our curriculum work here um this is the work that we've been work we have we've been engaged with over the last three years and more than that really where we're identifying the essential questions those priority goals the the key knowledge the key skills for each of these units where then then once we have that established which we do for all of our core classes start to look at the evidence that students are going to produce for us whether that be a midterm and final a paper a claim statement a synthesis page a research paper and then we'll look
025at our you know the way that we're actually instructing students in terms of the work we've done with western civ this is a sample in in the spring of 2019 this was a class that i had highlighted and it made sense to kind of come back and highlight it again now this is a class that has benefited i think from some of this curriculum work there's a focusing that we've had on our content on our skills part of it is a natural focusing that had to happen during our our hybrid year things haven't been that typical um so we're i'm excited to kind of the end of as we end this year and move into next year where things will hopefully be normal and all but i think that you know we'll be excited to
026see how that is still received by students we really work hard to ensure that this is a compelling class that's interesting and engaging for students because it's easy to look back at the past and feel very removed from that and i say that interestingly as a social studies department chairperson who did not enjoy history classes in the least in my high school experience so i'm very mindful of the fact that not every student will love it and so we really work on making it compelling and interesting to them and accessible that last piece on here the scaffolded approach the differentiated strategies um you know as a department we do this but specifically within ninth grade we're also really working to ensure that we meet students where they are that we are building in extra time
027and extra supports for some of the first and most challenging assignments that students will get they're challenging not because they're the first ones and that we're making them challenging but because they're encountering dbqs at the high school level for example or you know writing expectations that are now increased as they move from eighth to ninth grade and so we spend a lot of time teaching into that conferencing with students checking in with them building them up so that they can be successful and feel supported um i i feel anecdotally that i can say that um you know the the amount of inquiries i get regarding western civ are are very minimal um they're very infrequent when they come up and you know i'm happy to address issues when they do arise with families that have
028concerns about the class another area that's that's worth highlighting in our department is the work that we do around diversity equity and inclusion so you can see here i won't read them all to you i've given um four quotes from american history from texts and speeches that are significant each of which really deals with this idea of diversity and um and equality whether it be in the form of party or in gender or in race um you know it's it's an idea that is constantly put forward and you can see connections to this with some of our compelling and essential questions talking about the promises that america makes specifically this can be applied to other times and places as well is a worthwhile exercise it's something that we talk about a lot what does equality
029mean who who decides who gets to be considered an american you know there's lots of discussions that we have that kind of get us into this idea of diversity and equity and inclusion in terms of what we include in our in our curricula we do seek to have an inclusive curriculum that you know it when i think about why that is it's really because we want to make sure that students have the most comprehensive understanding again if our goal is to have students be prepared for their college their careers and their future civic life having a more complete understanding of the past and different places throughout the world seems pretty essential to being a productive and capable and engaged member of of a community whether that be a local town community a national estate or
030a national community or a global community that idea of inclusivity though also extends that you know in our classes we have a lot of a lot of interesting and important discussions that take place and so we really work hard to ensure that our students are able to participate able to be a part of it and really find ways to interact with one another and be inclusive in that way i i hesitate to say to feel comfortable because i think it can be hard to have some of these discussions particularly for the first time our goal obviously is not to push them to be uncomfortable and it's more to make them comfortable in going into those settings and having those sorts of discussions um so whatever their own political beliefs may be whatever their own backgrounds
031might be whether they're regular at students special ed student students with 504s you know we are um you know wanting everyone to participate and be engaged and be a part of our our classroom communities and i think the the teachers in the department are really uh masters at that i would say in terms of other other new work that we've done this year we have also offered the first semester of our black and african american studies and latino and puerto rican studies class this is one that you likely remember the state of connecticut has has asked basically each high school to offer this course there was a lot of preparation and work that went into this and it was a class that the students who took it really enjoyed it it was a really interesting
032class and we're excited that you know that we were able to offer that we also were able to offer the blues and beyond which was a collaboration between the eighth grade social studies teachers and the music department where we had an opportunity to explore the history of african americans through music pictured here is the the group the presenters from the blues and beyond who were actually playing historical music and then tying it into contemporary music um it was uh certainly an interesting and engaging um presentation for students to be a part of right as we we closed out that experience for them so in terms of where we where do we go from here and what does our work look like as a department um i know that mr dr tramberg we'll be talking about
033this shortly but we're going to be certainly creating units of study and migrating those that are existing into eduplanet 21. we look forward to doing that in the in the future next year just as we had an instructional focus on writing um my my plan right now is for us to have an instructional focus on reading um you know one of the benefits of my position is that i have an opportunity to meet with teachers as they set goals as they have observations as we have mid-year meetings and end-of-year meetings and so it's it's easy to see kind of what are the trends where are the areas that we can still grow and develop in and help our students and it looks like this is one that we will will take up in the future
034um the last thing is i was just in a um a regional social studies director meeting earlier this week and got the um the update that the curriculum for the state's standards which are going to be excuse me the social studies state standards are still on target and still on track to be released at the end of the school year sometime in late june so we're excited to see what that will look like and you know that will be something that we'll have to really study and look at and then plan for overlaying with the existing frameworks without going too much into it the current connecticut social studies frameworks that we have is very it's a skill based setup um that's not changing that's still going to be in place and the content standards will
035be like an overlay with that um so we'll then see you know what are the what is the state suggesting and and making expectations around with different topics and levels of depth and study and things like that so with that i'm open to any questions that you might have or any uh clarifications that i can make thank you mr for that thorough um presentation i will open it up to question any questions [Music] can you hear me oh yeah that's better um i had a question or two on sources um first i was thrilled to see encyclopedia britannica back on the list because i assume that means i can dust off all my old volumes and have my children use them for research purposes fill the shelves again um the political cartoons and i appreciate
036that you did discuss that we've gotten some questions there's been some scrutiny or whatever the right word is um around those can you just take us back kind of to the the basics on that why are they such an important source great so in the connection that i'll make to start with um is i think there's a clear connection between political cartoons and the memes that students are going to be exposed to they're kind of a newer form of political cartoon if you will there's brief text typically the image is telling the story so you know how the message is portrayed has changed but that ability to have a i'll call it a visual literacy is really important um so i think they're exposed to those quick visuals throughout their day i would imagine most
037of our students particularly the older ones who have access to their own personal devices so that ability is a really important one i would add that that saying a picture is worth a thousand words is really true um and you know i i used to like to joke with my classes that you know we could spend an entire period or more just looking at a singular political cartoon when they're done well um there's a lot to pick apart there's a lot of meaning to find so just like we would interrogate a a written text a speech and really look at you know why did what was the point that was being made how is the point being articulated uh we would do the same thing through the political cartoons um you know so in the
038in the long term it's really about creating a sense of visual literacy and an ability to understand how messages are conveyed in different formats um and then in the shorter term specific to the class it's about understanding what did people see at the time what were they exposed to how did this communicate ideas um will be will be really important and without without maybe going too far into a history lesson um you know perhaps the best example would be uh what happened in new york city with tammany hall and boss tweed who um was able to take a a few dollars from uh the city of new york uh over his time uh as political boss there and the thing that really led to his downfall were the cartoons that were drawn by thomas nast
039the people in the city of new york didn't respond to it really until they started seeing it and that was what brought to their attention something's not right here and that led to things changing in the city that's a historical example that's helpful was that one thank you so thank you and as a person who loved history in high school this is so exciting to me and you kept taking history classes um just a couple things i wanted to point out um bear with me i'll do three i'll try to do it in three okay quickly go for it one um just to add to the vocal cartoons because i know that was you know that that caused some deep conversation um this past year i think also the relation to our kids and things
040that happened was like charlie hebeau and why actions are taken and how images are so powerful and the lasting impression they have it's a great chance for us to educate our kids on what they might encounter and what feelings might stir up and what do these feelings mean and how do they inform actions because you know if not you don't understand why that is so important in the news when you see it in contemporary news so um i really like the work you're doing there and i i love this quote you have in here comprehensive view the past towards preparation for full participation in our democracy again i'm gonna go back as the govlogic here that um that's really what we have in our mission statement too that we're preparing kids to participate um in
041their democracy because we're handing the future over to them we're not really telling them how to participate but we're giving them the skills to participate knowledgeably based on facts and their opinions they and conclusions they draw um are their own so i love to see the department really encouraging um kids to to learn how they feel based on the information they see so kudos to you all now western sioux [Laughter] and my question is as we prepare children that's a tough course again i have a soft spot for it i know sometimes it might not feel like it dr adley but i really do um i wonder it is such a comprehensive class there's so much to cover and it really does inform of how we got to our participatory democracy why we think you
042know why we were formed as a country why we value it so much why it needs to be defended part of that is writing defenses writing um you know doing these papers the big assignment at the end and i'm not sure if that's changed too much um but are we talking with the english department and the history departments 6 through 12 to really prepare kids because that is a big jump in the type of work they've done in middle school the high school and i actually think that that paper then prepares them for the high school work to come yep but it it can be a lot um depending on your skills as a reader and a writer and a researcher so are we are we bridging that gap through both departments because there are
043linguistic skills and historical skills that need to cover so um yes there are there are ways that we are are collaborating with the english department um i will say it you know i don't have we had a formal meeting with the 6 through 12 english and social studies together to do this no um but you know when you look at it at the middle school level because of the team structure and the team setup they have that wonderful opportunity to be able to talk as a social use teacher and an english teacher about what's coming up um and what's on the horizon and how can we support each other and so that does happen quite often at the middle school level um there are also points where they're reading a text in english but then
044they're writing a companion piece in social studies um and so there are ways that we try to make the approach somewhat interdisciplinary and reinforcing those writing skills through them when we move to the high school it does tend to be more separate quite honestly but it is something that mr genosko and i have talked a lot about and you know we've we do like the idea of trying to have something that would come bring everyone together more i think there's lots of times that that sort of collaboration tends to be somewhat informal you know our learning connections room the physical space that we have between the two offices at the high school level does allow for a lot of cross-pollination and so you can often find teachers doing it but it isn't as explicit one
045one challenge that we're also somewhat faced with is that what we ask students to do typically with their argumentative style of writing does tend to be a little bit different than what they're expected to do in english um in english they're um well let me not talk too much about the english department let me stay focused on my department um i think you know we have kind of a clear vision for what that should look like and really teach into that um so there it is supported by what the english department does but it their their approach is also a little bit different in the way that they do it it's certainly something that i would be um you know i'll be happy to follow up with mr janosko on and and talk about further
046because i i do think there's value in that but like this year as we had our focus on writing i felt like we really needed to do that as a department before we started to introduce others into that because i didn't i wanted us to really be in a solid place um feeling like we know what writing looks like six through twelve before we start to get influences from other places and start to look at what that looks like no and so i completely appreciate that and maybe the best way is then to base it in the history department i guess what we had heard over the years is kind of parents coming to us saying this course is so overwhelming and it's it has so much and our kids have never written this way
047so part of it is maybe setting parent expectations like you're right i've never written this way so it's a learning process yeah um but i i think maybe if um or i would just say if you haven't already that that message seems to still drive through and we had a covered interruption so maybe it's changed this year um of do kids really know the skills they they at the end of the year they really want to know how to do it but in oftentimes kind of at least what we hear at the board level is they've never had writing like this before they don't know what to do so food for thought it could also just be anecdotal yeah no i i do appreciate it and that you know that's part of why our one
048of the last um the with the professional development that i listed out there one of the things that we did take a look at was the language that we use because it it does you know writing is a very personal thing in many ways and so we we kind of have to teach students a formula for it but then when they get good enough we say we'll break the formula you know you don't that's not the formula isn't necessarily where we want you to be we want you to start there to understand the fundamentals and then go beyond that um but i i think you know when i when i look at six through 12 and i can see that there are you know there's a path that we take from grade 6 through grade
04912 with writing and so when i look at 8th to 9th grade in particular this civil war research paper is in a lot of ways a really good preparation for it the expectations around what their thesis look like is similar to what they're going to be expected to do in the high school level they the research is similar in the sense that they're looking at multiple sources they take notes with the same noodle tool system that we have in middle school and high school so there's a lot of ways that it's paralleled and i often times will also tell you know one of the nice things popping in and out of classes i will oftentimes after an eighth grade class say to a teacher you know you can also let them know this is what
050it's going to look like next year when they ask this question again or you know this is what it looks like in ninth grade and i can also tell our ninth grade teachers don't let them tell you that they've never been expected to do a works cited or a citation page before because that's that's not true i i've been in classes where they've done that um and so i i often also just one last thing i say to the middle school teachers a lot is tell them save your stuff from this class you'll be able to use it again and look back at it you know as we end this year and get feedback on those papers it's something that i hope kids will kind of make a few notes of my my future to-do
051list so that they can make sure that they learn from the from their work and grow in the future that's great thank you so i'm going to go back a little bit to the to what mrs best touched on um the the environment this year has changed a little bit in terms of there's a little more parental involvement parental scrutiny perhaps of what's what's in front of their children um i feel very strongly that teachers are not robots that we should expect teachers to bring their a-games at all times and we hire the best of the best in this district and we are very lucky to have the people in front of our children that we do how do you manage as a department chair the autonomy of a teacher and respecting their expertise in
052their fields but also you know maintaining some the standards that you expect so talk us through that process a little bit so i think you know thinking about some of the work that we've done with our curriculum is maybe a helpful place to start that you know in that curriculum document there are those essential and driving questions that teachers will use there's a core of content that we're expecting teachers to all access and there is a an essential skills that they're also going to be expected to have covered at their classes um so with that as kind of like an agreed upon um our agreed upon curriculum there is room for us to have some some creativity and i agree wholeheartedly that you know the hiring process in this district is not an easy one
053and we really do hire high quality candidates and i it's one of the things that i ask a lot when i go through the interview process with them is you know what are your other interests and you know what what excites you about the work that we do in the social studies um so for a teacher to say they're you know they're not that into it would not be a teacher that we would be hiring um so i think having that set agreement gives us that room for creativity and i love to see it and you know teachers will come and see and talk with me if they're particularly this year if there was concern about you know am i am i taking this in an okay direction um you know so we have some
054of those sorts of conversations to make sure that we're we're kind of aligned in our thinking with that um but i you know i think for our classes to be interesting and compelling and for our students to really like our classes and get a lot out of them particularly when there are electives um you know where students can choose i think you know we have to make sure that they're you know that there is an element of creativity that's what students will remember um that's what's going to really stick with them and how they're really going to grow let's have another super quick question sure um how many students chose to take the new class that was offered um this past year we did offer it i i don't know the number off the top
055of my head i want to say it was in the teens there was a good amount of interest yeah it was a pretty pretty decent number we also did offer it at the at darien high school and also at fitch academy thank you for the questions well so again i'm just gonna you're gonna have to indulge me slightly anecdotally but i know there's been some questions about why these courses and yes the state of connecticut has said these are course offerings you should do um these courses are elected elective um so it's great to hear that students have more choice we've talked a lot about choice and voice both at the high school and the middle school level um these are all high school level courses at this point and kids who have um really
056satisfied some of the basic core courses so i love that we're giving students more choice in voice in terms of history and i will say the anecdotal part of this as someone who is self-describing taking as many history courses as i could in government in law it was not until my senior year of college that i even had the choice to look at at the time it was called american history and it was just more knowledge in my tool belt of understanding how our democracy was built and so i just think that our kids are really benefiting by just giving them more information at this time and i think that we would do well as a district to really acknowledge that we've embraced this we have kids are interested in those tools and we're providing
057them with it again it's not changing their course government in you know u.s law and gov it's not changing their core study in western civilization but the idea that we are giving students opportunities that i didn't have almost you know into my 20s and someone who's searching out options i think our kids are really um at a benefit and it really goes to the department that they were able so quickly to get this together and give our kids this opportunity so thank you i think it's exciting thank you anything else all right thank you yeah i've just mentioned that that academic i we'll call it freedom but but it is but that i have a professional judgment of our staff crosses not only social studies uh across us all disciplines uh where that is exercise
058and are actually dependent on that as a as a medical component of of developing these courses and experiences because i very much appreciate the fact when you put on the table the opportunity for our kids to uh experience uh these other courses and other diverse uh perspectives and things that that's very helpful i do want to just ask one question um may there have chris or otherwise of keith because it might be pertinent to it may be pertinent to uh other disciplines you talk about the state coming in with new guidelines and frameworks right so what does that really mean in the sense for us as or for a discipline do we have to accept all those frameworks do we have to accept everything they suggest or otherwise or high big level has gone like
059inform or what flexibility we have or otherwise yeah just i'm happy because it's common for other things yeah so we we still do have you know when the state releases this um you know we we have to first start by studying this um and really looking at what makes sense within you know within the work that we the classes that we have um we're not bound to it it's not um you know something that has to be exactly this way the change doesn't have to happen immediately um you know certainly we would want to give it good consideration i think i haven't had a chance to look at some of the guiding principles that are being used in the construction of the of the content standards and they are very much aligned with what i've
060just presented here so um i would think that when we get it we would i would think there will be no surprises that we would say wow we were totally off with what we were doing or we never included anything like this um my hope is that with all the expertise they have in the state there's likely would be some um some additions that we would make that might be interesting for our classes though thank you i'll actually elaborate it on that a little bit more in my presentation coming up okay great so this is fine yes okay i just elaborate on one point also just the differentiation and access i'm just key that i may just add to that um the opportunity for that for all students it happens for students with learning differences
061by accommodations and modifications within all the different course offerings and also um happens by the differentiation opportunities of the different course offerings in terms of team 12 classes lab classes and comprehensive classes and i know everyone's familiar with that but i just wanted to to really focus on that of how that does really ensure access for all learners and finally i'd just like to save a major i just want to uh thank keith for his leadership particularly in this domain and particularly these challenging times i'll say for your courageous leadership in some ways um and your responsiveness of your staff to the community on the issues that have come up with that it's not easy in these times and we recognize that and we appreciate your steadfast study leadership thank you thank you very much
062and i will extend one more thank you to the wonderful departments at both the middle school and the high school who are tremendous professionals and do some really amazing work thank you thank you for being here this morning mr keeler dr trammer thank you and good morning i'll be strategically and intentionally brief and then glad to dig in um wherever yeah you would like me to uh so thank you to the board for general generously allocating many resources to the work that we do in the summer so i thought that this would be a good look at what our focus is going in to summer of 2022 so we'll look a bit at eduplanet the curriculum website and what our focus areas are and i have the theme that i hope will come across as
063this is about consistency and clarity and communication because all three of these touch on on those points and a little photo there of our dei team in action so those are the members at our our last meeting so first eduplanet 21 which is our new curriculum management platform this is a significant lift it's not a shift in how we approach curriculum because it'll still be through a backwards design model but we are creating and migrating thousands and thousands of pages of curriculum into a new platform for many reasons and one of them is so it looks consistent across all disciplines in all grade levels so as a teacher going in to look at a unit of study or a parent going in to see the parent facing side no matter what they're looking at they're
064going to understand that this is the stage one which they'll see which are the essential questions that mr kirlo referenced enduring understandings the knowledge and the skills uh and the actual standards and supporting standards that go with the unit uh we're also participating eduplanet offers a course planner so if parents just want to know what happens in this unit of study they can read a one paragraph description so they know for this period of time this is what it looks like and if they want to know a lot more like the specific standards they can go in and understand at that next level so with our year one this summer we have a lot of back end platform to build so that means making sure we have all of our courses loaded up in eduplanet
065all the standards are there and since this is customizable they've loaded all of our vision of the graduate principles as well so every single unit of study from pk through 12 will highlight where it's connecting to the vision of the graduate ultimately and this touches on something that mr keeler referenced on mr genosco during his presentation when we identify a specific assessment in a unit of study as a a measure of one of those pillars or attributes we want to make sure that follows the student so we have a portfolio of their work so that will connect to eduplanet and the vision of the graduate in a really nice way so long-term transfer so the one of the challenges of that we've faced this year uh is thinking about just the facts so we heard
066a lot just teach the facts um in education it's really about the transfer so yes i know for kids especially it feels like there's so much learning and recall but we're doing all of that so they can transfer that knowledge to new situations so all of our curriculum has always been designed by understanding by design long-term transfer so we teach for transfer we're always looking at not only what is the value of knowing this right now but what are you going to do with it in the future and why is it there so the the work this summer is making sure we have those the long-term transfer identified in all of the grade levels and content areas we are going to work on trying to get two units for every single course in grade level
067and every discipline into the platform this summer so that's a big goal but we are going to try to do that and there's also a professional development platform on the back end so jay mctighe who's one of the creators of understanding by design there are videos of him talking teachers through how to create a unit and we can also customize those things and build their own virtual professional development and it will keep track of teachers completing that if we want to utilize it that way as well the curriculum web website i was inspired by mrs klein's department so we overhauled our curriculum page try to create one landing page for all of our curriculum information uh because you can there's many clicks to find things at times so this hopefully reduced the clicks for people
068and when eduplanted comes in it'll reduce the clicks even more so if you go to our district webpage and click on curriculum you'll see everything that you need from that home landing page hopefully and that's a work in progress and shout out to michelle lopez for making that much more clear and the third piece i wanted to talk about were just our focus areas for this summer so with beyond edge of planet uh what we're going to do is our new and any changed courses which we've already discussed those were approved i think in our november or december meeting of the full board so those are the new courses listed that we are going to build and they will be built in eduplanet um elementary math is going to be our focus for uh what
069we're going to take a really close look at so we have math and focus as our primary instructional resource we just want to be clear for teachers that just because something is the primary instructional resource does not mean it's actually the curriculum so it's a book that we need to bring to life we want to make sure and empower uh teachers to not feel like they have to be stuck in that book to deliver uh dynamic instruction to students so that's our focus area in that arena differentiation there are several words in education that have been just overused and therefore excused and i think differentiation is one of them there's not a better word for it yet so i'm still calling it differentiation but in the third stage of our units we are going to
070make sure that we articulate what the differentiation is going to be especially for students with learning differences i know families have heard across our country that the answer is differentiation and that is a big part of the answer but we want to make sure we're articulating how we're doing that it's not just going to be an idea it's going to be operationalized um in the planning so that's a part of that and the same for enrichment opportunities within those units of study and back in 2019 i believe we were contracting for some help with our physical education and health curriculum so that also resulted in hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents that are going to be organized and rolled out for next year as well so we're going to make sure that that is
071clear and we'll provide pd for our pe teachers as well so the health came first and then the physical education just in time for the state of connecticut to roll out a brand new health and physical education framework the good news is the framework that we used with our outside consultants at the time used the national framework that connecticut referenced in developing theirs so we're not misaligned and it's very very dense and there's no way that we could ever cover everything that's in any framework and so this goes to dr adley's point uh earlier every discipline has standards and hopefully a framework for us to rely upon we make a choice based on what is there to develop our curriculum in a way that we think is going to prepare students uh so we prioritize
072the standards and we have the opportunity to do that in each unit of study we have prioritize and supporting standards when we prioritize them that means we measure and assess them in some way if they're supporting that means we want to make sure they're part of the teaching and learning that happens within the course so that's how we're approaching that and that framework is relatively new when we're reviewing it and we'll do a crosswalk with all of the new materials that we have there's also plenty of new legislation that i'm sure will come up in the policy committee of optional and recommended and model curriculum so the state is stepping in more than they ever have in the past with providing examples of things it would be i shouldn't say unlikely but i'll say it
073for now it would be unlikely for darion to adopt state-created curriculum that would not be something i would expect unless there's something that we haven't thought of before but that's not how darian has been before and i don't think that's where we're going thank you for that questions for dr tranberg i just have an operational question it sounds like this migrating into edgy planet 21 it's a huge lift as you said how does that work is it a responsibility of a core group of people is every classroom teacher doing part of it how operational is that working that's a great question so i remember i worked in a place once upon a time where we had a group of people that did all the curriculum and we all the teachers this is when i was
074a teacher we just called them the curriculum elves because we didn't know where our curriculum came from uh so what we're doing is we are very fortunate to have curriculum leadership team but we're also identifying teachers in every department and across grade levels at the elementary level that will take the lead in the eduplanet side of things and eduplan it's not just about inputting information into a digital platform it's really doing a close it's taking a close look and asking really important questions about what's in the documents so we'll have teachers that are trained we're offering our first session next week and then we have another session the week after that so they'll the people that are trained will work with other teachers who are writing curriculum over the summer because if when teachers don't
075have ownership of the curriculum that they have to teach there's a disconnect and sometimes it's it's not something that they look at as important so that's our strategy to do that that was my the point behind my questions i think the more people get involved in it the better the whole process will be thank you i have um i guess some questions on edge planet also it sounds like it'll be a great tool or resource or organizing organization of resources um when it's fully functional did i see that it's 2026 when you'll hope to have everything 2026. that's and i don't think it's it sounds ambitious at times but i think it's doable and the reason i think it's doable is as soon as we get our first round through this year uh getting to
076know the leaders and the teachers as i have in the past few years they're going to want everything in there as soon as possible just because it's going to be very useful to them right and for it to be useful to parents how do we envision that playing out and will parents need to become eduplanet savvy or would it be like you go to the website the curriculum website and when i click on a particular department i enter the eduplanet world without even being aware of it exactly you wouldn't even know so that it'll interface with our website so when parents click on curriculum and go to a course they're leaving durian public schools website but they actually match the look of our website as well so it doesn't look like you're on in a
077new and different place okay so they customize their page to match us okay terrific that sounds great i think you know so much of our conversations around this table is communication with parents and this hopefully this will streamline and help the community so i'm grateful for you all for doing this incredible lift further questions comments all right thank you all very much for your time and motion to adjust okay public comment oh sorry sorry sorry i'm ready to go um is there a public comment anybody in the audience no anyone in person nope okay no answer raised on zoom thank you now maybe adrian