Instructional Council Meeting Notes – Nov. 8

Nov. 8, 2021 In Attendance: Ron Twitchell, Karen Brock, Todd McKee, Clay Bingham, Anne-Marie Harrison, Michelle Eldredge, Suraj Sayal, Alex Judd, Doug Finch, and Kerry Crockett

1 Secondary Course Requests Todd McKee

Summary No Course Requests

2 Professional Development Course Requests Karen Brock

Summary No Course Requests

3 RISE Data Review Ron Twitchell

Summary The State Board is having problems with their servers, so they’re having trouble getting things up and running. They’re in the process of changing how they present the data and how they report it. Their plan is to put it on the Data Gateway. They’re moving to Tableau which is extremely powerful. I’ve been letting principals know that it’s hard to get information out of Data Gateway. If they go to the reporting in Rise, they need to go to My Settings and change the reporting period to 20-21. It only gives limited information. You can’t drill down to a student level yet. Anyone can get on to look at Tableau Public. You can look at any of the schools without a login. You can see comparisons to other schools in the district and in the state. For the next one, I have to go incognito in the Chrome browser to have fewer problems, and to not mess up their database. I go to: tableau.schools.utah.gov Go to the LEA Folder. I am limited by what they allow me to have access to. It’s up to about $20,000 for us to buy a bundle to be able to allow our principals and administrators to have access to this information on our own server. If we had our own dashboard, principals could call up their information with some training. I shared proficiency scores with all of the principals. We’re not as far down as some of the districts because we came back to school sooner.

4 Use of Adopted Curricula and Assessments: Social Studies Judy Rose

Summary Judy is sick today

5 Acadience Letters Judy Rose

Summary Judy wanted to make sure principals know they need to send Acadience letters to parents. Ron T: We got them sent out.

6 Weekly Notifications: Are They Working? Judy Rose

Summary Judy is concerned that weekly notifications are not being read as we are getting lots of questions regarding information posted there.

7 Good news on Early Literacy Plan Results! Michelle Eldredge & Anne-Marie Harrison

Summary This is a very important program to get kids reading by third grade. The state has a reading goal every year and it’s 60% right now. Chart shared showing students who meet typical or better progress in the year. Each district had to set two local goals. We have to meet one of the two local goals. Our district was 74% on the state goal and also met both of our local goals. The teachers really need to be complimented on what they did, especially considering the kind of year we had.

8 Review Initiative Chart Anne-Marie Harrison

Summary I’m hoping we can talk about 1 or 2 initiatives each meeting. This document keeps us on track and helps us to be more informed about each of the initiatives. Topic: STEM – this item has had a lot of questions. We don’t have one united focus this year. We have a document that shows our plan for this year. I think we need to remember that this is being pushed by a certain part of society and also being pushed back by people in support of the arts. We include the Engineering Design Process and 21st Century Skills. We wanted schools to have a list of STEM learning opportunities. We want it to be what schools want it to be. We provide supports and invite schools to participate where they want to. To-Dos Anne-Marie will work to learn more about space labs for STEM Two weeks from today: Michelle covering Reading Difficulties Grant

9 Credit and Demonstration of Competency Todd McKee

Summary At the beginning of last year, we worked with high schools as to how we were going to issue credit. We used 9 items to demonstrate competency: 1. Receive a passing grade issued by a teacher in a course; 2. Continue to work with a teacher beyond the end of the grading period to earn a passing grade; 3. Complete a paper packet (HS); 4. Complete a Provo Online course (eSchool); 5. Earn a passing score of 70% or higher on a final exam in a district-recognized credit recovery course (HS); 6. Earn a passing score on a test at the Granite Testing Center (HS); 7. Receive a passing grade in subsequent grading period in a sequential course, e.g. mathematics as determined appropriate by the teacher; 8. Receive an ACT score in the appropriate content area at or above the College & Career Ready level; or 9. Produce a collection of evidence/work that meets the state standards as assessed by a school committee. We want to continue with these items adding “as determined appropriate by the teacher” to item 7 and dropping item 8. We also need to update from Granite Testing Center. These items are set up as pass/fail only. A lot of this moves towards standards-based. To-Dos Todd will update this list with noted changes for this year.

10 PD Day survey data Karen Brock

Summary Sharing data from October 19 PD Day. We had 560 teachers complete our survey. That’s roughly 75%. The chart is typical of how our teachers respond to our PD days. Overall, most people agree they got something from our presentations. Comments from the survey: 1. 30-40% are asking for more time to work with PLC 2. Secondary elective teachers are asking for time to meet with their job-alike colleagues 3. 15-20% would appreciate choices and shorter sessions 4. 10% of secondary teachers indicated that the PD is a repeat 5. Last year teachers had MORE planning time.