Committee Meeting Summaries

Academic Committees met on April 15th.

Science Committee The science committee created a Student Profile Draft. This profile will be a guide for the rest of the committee work and help focus on essentials for our students. The Student Profile reflects the district goals of increasing graduation rates, teacher clarity, and developing active learners (self-efficacy). The profile includes knowledge, skills, and dispositions such as mathematical representation, questioning, engaging in argument from evidence, and designing solutions. The Student Profile will be reviewed in the fall after the SEEd standards have been adopted.

Improvement Strategies Committee Great progress today! We reviewed rubrics that were created in previous meetings and selected one to use district wide. We will continue to edit and refine it – but we have a rubric that we all agree on across all grade levels for Standards Based Grading in PCSD.

Literacy Committee After reviewing with school teams, the Secondary Literacy Committee met and further reviewed common assessments in 7-12th grades for submittal to the Curriculum Notebooks. The new Curriculum Notebook 2.0 required additional review for clarity. The committee also discussed vertical alignment and will holding summer meetings with a larger group to facilitate better alignment in the summer.

Math Committee The Elementary Math Committee continued the discussion on potential changes to the common assessments currently used in grades K – 6 for Math. The committee determined that because we will be exploring new programs for the 2020-21 school year, and because the current assessments were chosen and vetted by teams of teachers, it would be best to proceed without making changes at this time. Teachers will be encouraged to take assessments via the online platform so data can be utilized to help drive instruction. Additionally, teachers who attended this year’s NCTM conference shared insights and resources they learned while in attendance. Daphne Budge shared a process for making sense of word problems, Tanya Miner showed how to use a abacus to help students develop a rich understanding of numbers, and Jennifer Heldenbrand discussed multiple formative assessment strategies as well as how to help all students find joy and success in math.