We did not meet on the first two meeting days. We plan to meet in January. Members of the department have been getting together to work on their curriculum. Many are working on entering data as they teach seeing as five members are new this year.
Monthly Archives: November 2018
11/13/18 Math Meeting Notes
Department has agreed to engage in professional discussion of one or two of the mathematical best practices (perhaps posing purposeful questions) by videotaping a few of our classes in the next couple of months. We’ll spend a half day – end of January, mid Feb. to view and discuss. This will be much easier to do than organizing visits and we will have a shared experience as a department.
11/13/18 Library Meeting Notes
During the Library Dept. meeting yesterday, we discussed how we have begun to execute lessons that revolve around the list of ten skills we identified last spring as the digital literacy skills we want each senior to graduate with:
- Proficient in citation software
- Proficient in evaluating sources, determining bias, verifying facts
- Proficiency in strategizing and executing searches
- Responsible tech ownership and device problem solving
- Effective communication with visual materials
- Digital citizenship: ethics, privacy, comportment, wellness
- Ability to identify best resource for information need
- Ability to collaborate and share digitally
- Ability to recognize and perform basic HTML coding
- Proficient in selecting reading material for pleasure and learning
In Lower School, Jesse continues to support 4s and Ks in decoding words and pictures. Stacy has been expanding third grade habitats project by meeting weekly, co-teaching and advising how to grow the research component. She is also Assisting fourth grade in building resources around their newly imagined immigration curriculum. Clair and I have scheduled digital literacy lessons with all four MS grades. We have completed our 6th grade lesson and will be conducting a bias/citation lesson with the 8th grade this week. In Karyn’s ninth and tenth grade six week Academy class, she focused on defining research vocabulary, and how to formulate strong research questions by utilizing context and content. We have set up monthly meetings to check in and support each other during the months in which we have no scheduled Tuesday department meeting.
11/13/2018 Learning Support Meeting Notes
We talked about setting up professional development for our department. There is interest in getting an evaluator to come and present to us and walk us through the most recent versions of specific tests, interpreting/reading evaluations, how to talk to parents about evaluations, etc. We have a couple of people in mind we’ll reach out to and see if they are interested and available in doing this later in the year. We also talked about setting up school visits and interdivisional visits throughout the year. For our next meeting, we will give the case study approach a try by bringing in an example of a student with anecdotes, work, or other evidence to puzzle through and discuss as a group. We will see how this goes and decide from there whether to launch a more extensive case study approach this year.
11/13/2018 History Department Meeting Notes
We met with the English department to introduce the entire humanities team.
After the share we discussed upcoming meetings and our plan to meet with the science department to discuss writing. The high school group left to set up their room for the open house. The middle school team stayed behind and we discussed the following:
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- The High School PD day and how we are continuing to develop the Democracy in Action class.
- The conversations we have been having on writing and how we could be more consistent and effective in our approach.
- Middle school history crew expressed interest in looking at how we teach writing.
- The rest of the conversation was on the best use of PD time for the middle school.
- The consensus was that if all the middle school core teachers could spend a half day together sharing curriculum across the grades.
- They also wanted time with their partner in the grade to look at their specific curriculum and work on what they want to fix.
- The challenge is how to find the time for the middle school teachers to all be together to focus on history.
11/13/2018 English Department Meeting Notes
Humanities “summit” – sharing names, introducing new folks.
English → planning for retreat in Jan/Feb. Decided on two half days, one in January and one in March April.
Rough itinerary:
January – defining what it means to teach social justice/activism in the context of a literature classroom, how to adjust for developmental appropriateness, some kind of mapping exercise to identify possibility spaces in the curriculum, sharing of a couple of best practices.
Spring Day – with a thought partner/group, developing a new unit/assessment for one of the spaces identified in Jan.
ACTION ITEMS: Heather to send Doodle poll with possible weeks for retreats
11/12/19 Ed Tech Meeting Notes
11/12: I’m away at the NEIT conference but will be meeting with my department the next week during another time.