Submitted by: Susannah Flicker

We met on 10/1 and planned for our focus for the upcoming year. We decided that we want to schedule a professional development as a department with an evaluator to help us develop our ability to read and interpret evaluation reports and test results, and work with classroom teachers and parents to more effectively understand student learning profiles and accommodations. We have since scheduled this with Dr. Anya Barak for 2/25/20 and will meet in January to plan for that session, as well as for the work we hope to do with our divisional faculty members afterwards.

We met off-campus, and one of the main topics of our discussion was the hiring process for the middle school learning specialist position. One of the main points of feedback is that departments, particularly our department, should be involved in the hiring process.

4/23/19: Harriet and I shared with the rest of the department some of our big takeaways from the NYSAIS Brain conference we attended 3/6-8. Jessica wasn’t able to attend this meeting as she was on the junior trip. We had a fruitful discussion about working memory, the interplay of reading disorders and ADHD, and dyscalculia. We discussed working with the math department and lower school teachers to share what we have been learning about learning and attention issues and how they impact math performance for students.

We discussed conferences and professional development opportunities and then discussed the structure of learning support in each division. This was in the context of Robin leaving the middle school and our goal of exploring ways to restructure learning support in the middle school and/or reinvent the learning specialist role to some extent. We ended up sharing a lot of concerns across divisions about what works and what doesn’t and how we see our population of students and their needs changing. We set our agenda for our next meeting: we’d like to create a written document of all of our ideas about this as a department to share with Phil and the senior administration. 

We had a fruitful meeting discussing specific students in all three divisions and collaboratively generating next steps for specific issues. It was great to put everyone’s heads together especially when talking about students that we had worked with through all three divisions. 

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.