Committee Meeting Summaries

District Committees met on April 16th.

District Literacy Committee

Elementary

The Elementary DLC discussed:

• PD Opportunity w/stipends for Wonders & other support materials
• ELA Essentials – took feedback from schools and GLM and will continue writing/revising ELA pacing guides/Essentials & creating assessment to align to essentials
• Standards reports – discussed summer work that will revise standards reports

Secondary

At the Secondary DLC meeting this month, the committee focused on addressing concerns from teachers about aligning texts. The committee understands the need to choose books to purchase from Pearson. We are working this month on finalizing those choices in order to make a purchase next month. We are also getting to work on a gap analysis for the curriculum notebooks to assess what work needs to be completed over the summer.

District Math Committee

The District Math Committee met and discussed the structure of the committee. Members were in favor of continuing the mini-PDs on effective instructional strategies for next school year. The PD for this meeting focused on building procedural fluency from conceptual understanding.

The following are some take-away thoughts from the professional development:

• Procedural is a process, the conceptual is tying in the real world application where you can extend the understanding
• The underlying mathematical idea is conceptual; the steps to get there are procedural
• Fluent doesn’t mean fast.
• Fluent means flexible, they have multiple strategies.
• Go Math! and Big Ideas support conceptual understanding to build procedural fluency. Each member of the committee has access to the professional development and can assist anyone at their schools with questions regarding conceptual and procedural concepts.
• During Elementary and Secondary breakouts, Elementary Committee members reviewed the responses by grade levels and concluded that the majority of teachers were satisfied with the pacing and assessments with a few minor adjustments. Updated pacing guides will be available next month.
• Secondary focused their discussion around placement and student choice in the various math classes.

District Improvement Strategies Committee

The Committee continued their discussion of Standards Based Grading. They worked together to determine definitions, quantity of standards, differences between Elementary and Secondary and how to maintain consistency for all while handling differences as well. They discussed the difference between ‘Standards Based’ and ‘Standards Reference’ and started discussing implementation plans. Next time the committee meets they will work on defining components of Standards Baselong-term and on long term planning and implementation of Standards Based Grading within the district.