District Committee Summaries

The district DISC, Literacy, and Math Committees met on Monday September 18, 2017.

Below is a brief summary of each meeting.

District Instructional Strategies Committee

The DISC has 3 goals this year:

1. Evaluate the effectiveness and next steps for district PD/menu approach.
2. Create a 5-year plan to address standard-based grading K-12.
3. Evaluate the District Improvement Plan and the Teacher Resource Guide to determine support structures, priorities, and the communication plan.

Each DISC member will serve on one of the 3 subcommittees. The subcommittees began the process of determining priorities and outcome goals for the 2017-2018 school year.

The DISC is also reading Embedding Formative Assessment by Dylan William and Siobhan Leahy. We summarized chapter 1 this month. The DISC will be working with Ken O’Connor throughout the year as we research and begin implementing a district plan for standards-based grading K-12.

Literacy Committee

Elementary

Will begin by conducting an analysis of the current ELA Essentials for grades 1-6 and their alignment to the Utah Core and best practices in current literacy research. School representatives have been asked to gather specific information/feedback about the ELA essentials from teachers/grade-level teams in their schools to bring that information to our next meeting. The first few meetings of the year will be spent working on revising essentials and then we will work on assessments for the essentials.

Secondary

Prioritizing our tasks for the school year is our biggest objective. We will start by planning necessary professional development for our new textbooks. We hope to arrange a Pearson presenter for our October district PD. After this we will work on vertically aligning and solidifying our essentials for the curriculum notebooks. In January, we will start our tradebook selection from Pearson. We will finish the year by selecting assessments and deciding our assessment procedure for the curriculum notebooks with input from our departments.

Math Committee

The math committee is working this year towards the vision of all students receiving high quality math instruction which is in line with the district vision of students graduating from high school.

As part of this, we are looking at components of high quality instruction, based on the book Principles to Action. Each meeting we will discuss one component and math committee members will be given resources to take back and share at their schools.

This month’s topic was Establish Mathematical Goals to Focus Learning. We looked at four critical questions of creating learning goals/learning targets.

These questions are:

• What mathematics are being learned?
• Why is it important?
• How does it relate to what has already been learned?
• Where are these mathematical ideas going?

Once learning goals/targets are created, it is critical that they live through the lesson and are shared with the students so they can answer the four questions as well.

Elementary

Elementary focused the conversation around assessments, and how can we align to meet district initiatives. Standards are aligned to Go Math order this year and we will be utilizing the online platform more.

Secondary

Secondary approved the final outline for our PLC subject level meetings this year.  Each secondary math teacher has been sent a link to a survey requesting input for which PLCs they would like to participate with, and meetings will begin September 28.