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Math Department Meeting #4, 2/15/22

Submitted by: Pat Higgiston

We began the meeting with a math problem to get the math mind working!

We heard from members of each division about the work that we had been doing severally, with an eye on equity in the realms of pedagogy and curriculum. The MS faculty are visiting one another’s classrooms and reflecting together on choices they make in classes. Chris shared with us a project his students have been working on for Black History Month, in which a student presents on a black mathematician each time the class meets. This is reminiscent of the Mathematician Project and might be a good model to elaborate on.

In the HS, we reported on the outcome of our daylong workshop, articulating and refining the content of a two-year core sequence in the high school that we envision as being detracked, picking up on the work the middle school program has been doing this year with the 8th grade. We anchored the content for this class in the progressive and inclusive values we have made explicit in previous meetings. In brief, we’ve determined the ‘what’ and the ‘why’. Our next move is to discuss the ‘how’ — work for the spring trimester.

We looked briefly at the draft of the curriculum assessment tool and wondered if it could be made more concrete somehow. We will revisit this at our next meeting.

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World Language 2/15

Submitted by: Adele Pelz

We began the meeting by talking about the Summer Curriculum Working Committee and encouraging members to apply for this meaningful initiative and how it would build on our departmental work along with the questions we have been addressing about what equity and inclusion mean for our subject area and what they look like in our practice.

Building off of our discussion, we decided to begin to draft a list of guiding principles that we see driving our curricula in an effort to dismantle any areas of bias in our classes and create meaningful change in content and teaching.
In addition, at our next meeting we will be working on a template to document any examples of projects, texts, and resources that were launched this year.
This document along with the guiding principles should inform the work of the committee and will inform our end of year presentations.
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Learning Support Dept Meeting 2/15/22

Submitted by: Susannah Flicker

Learning Support Department Meeting Notes, 2/15/22

We discussed the summer curriculum institute and the approach that our department specifically would take in terms of contributing to a curriculum assessment tool since, in our roles as learning specialists, we typically do not create/write a lot of curriculum.

Our discussion brought us to the conclusion that our approach to this is twofold:

  1. Examining ways in which disability and neurodiversity is or is not represented in the curriculum across subject areas, and looking for tools and resources to promote more inclusivity in terms of neurodiversity and disability.
  2. Gathering and documenting best practices for classroom teachers and learning specialists that promote equity and inclusion for different types of learners and that counteract the deficit model of ability and learning differences.
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Performing Arts Department Meeting Notes 2/15/22

Submitted by: Aedín Larkin

Present: Nick, Susan, Damon, Carrie, Aedín, Joan, Deborah, Kalil, Kristina (remote), Katherine (remote)

We took some time to acknowledge the changes and their impact on our department. 

We discussed how the meeting time for our department is not ideal as we can rarely all meet together after school due to rehearsals. Moving forward and thinking about next year we would like the administrative team to look at our schedules to see if there is a solution to this.

Individually we have been examining our curriculum for bias. Due to the lack of frequency in our meetings (the last time we met as a department was in October), it has not been possible to have a collaborative group discussion about the steps we are taking to de-bias our curriculum or the tools and resources that we use. We would like to think about how to have these discussions as a team in a more creative way.

For our next meeting, we will try to find a time that works so that the majority of us can attend. We will share what we have been working on individually and discuss the tools we have been using this year.  

We spoke about the summer working group and we will begin to think about and gather information to share with this group.

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History Department-Feb 15th

Submitted by: Tom Murphy

We started by discussing our DEI goals. We decided on three areas: What we teach? How inclusive are our classrooms? How do we assess what we teach? For each question, we would develop rubrics. Next, we talked about the different types of rubrics we could use. Most of the discussion focused on the example I posted on the DEI resources document. Next meeting we plan on breaking into working groups that would focus on one of the questions.

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Science Mtg 2/15/22

Submitted by: Kelly

Present: Michael, Sherezada, Eliza, Daniel, Kara, Kelly
Absent: Jeanette

Our goal from our last meeting was to continue thinking about how our courses, classrooms, and curriculum can be designed for adjustability and variability (rather than “average”)—and how we can evaluate whether and how we are doing just that.

Building off of what we discussed after listening to the podcast last time, we started thinking about Universal Design by watching a video of a lecture by Sara Hendren, a professor at Olin college, that touched on many ideas about design and ability.

Here is the video that we watched: https://vimeo.com/134764010

We had a short discussion after the video, then spent a little time exploring the UDL Guidelines as one potential avenue for guiding our thinking in designing for adjustability—and a potential avenue (alongside tools more explicitly focused on race and other aspects of identity) for building a tool to evaluate our work.

In our next meeting, we plan to pull together different things that we’ve looked at this year to pass along to those in the summer work group.

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World Language 1/11/22

Submitted by: Adele Pelz

This meeting was mostly devoted to the one topic that was on everybody’s mind which was and continues to be Covid along with all of its limitations and effects on:

– our individual teaching practice
-our students attendance, performance and mental health in class
-our curriculum and program
-our thirst for socialization and contact
-our fears and frustrations
The meeting was sparsely attended due to illness and absence.
Looking ahead to continuing our discussion on equity and inclusion, our department is looking into attending virtually the Global Language Conference which usually takes place at Mohonk in the Spring.
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Learning Support Dept Meeting 1/11/22

Submitted by: Susannah Flicker

At our meeting on 1/11/22 we continued our departmental discussion about collecting best practices for equity and inclusion across the three divisions.

We discussed one example that was brought up concerning using practices in the classroom that truly acknowledge diversity among learners and explicitly discussing this with students regularly. This example specifically was about students who experience stress/anxiety around timed activities, and finding ways to accommodate this while also helping to destigmatize it for students and help them to grow more confident in their ability to handle it.

We then had a discussion about standards based grading in the middle and high school divisions and the ways in which it impacts students with learning differences specifically. We discussed how we have approached grading for students so that they are not graded based on their disabilities, and how to strike a balance between helping them to develop strategies and also making sure that they are being assessed in a way that truly reflects their progress and efforts.

Lower school faculty shared about messaging in reports concerning whether students are performing at, above or below grade level and the impact this may have on students and families.

We decided that in our next meeting we would discuss math support across the divisions, as well as groupings of students and how those are created.

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science mtg 1/11/22

Submitted by: Kelly

Attending: Eliza (remote), Daniel (remote), Kara, Kelly, Jeanette (for part of the time)
Absent: Sherezada, Michael
We listened to this podcast episode:
Then we had a good discussion based off of multiple parts.
One thing we’re thinking about exploring in our next meeting (and beyond) is how we ask students to reflect on both their work and their experiences in class—and how we listen to, get feedback from, and find out the needs of all of our students… leading to how we can design for “adjustable fit” rather than “average fit” in our systems, spaces, assessments, curriculum, etc—and how we can evaluate how well we are doing that.