 I won't bang it as hard. Excellent. I'd like to call the Amherst School Committee meeting to order on April 9th at 7.05 p.m. We're not doing Pellum. We're not able to tonight. I'd like to welcome all of you in the audience, particularly those of you who are going to be presenting this evening. I'd also like to welcome everyone in our television audience who have just come back from the polls. And I want to thank you for joining us for what I think will be an extraordinarily important session this evening. I would like the members of the board to take a look at the agenda. I think you already are aware of the main item on the agenda and how important that is. Are there any places in the agenda where people would like to devote more time than is allocated? If not, then I'm going to all again defer to Catherine for purposes of approving the minutes for the Amherst Elementary School Committee. Yes. Did everybody review the minutes, the Amherst minutes? Could I have a motion to approve the minutes of January 15th, February 5th, and February 26th, 2013? So I move to accept the minutes of the Amherst School Committee meeting on January 15, 2013 and the Amherst School Committee meeting on February 5th, 2013 and the Amherst School Committee meeting on February 26th, 2013. Thank you. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion or? Okay. There was one small correction on February 23, I'm sorry, the February 26th. In the welcome section, it should be until March 12th, instead of February 12th. And that's been, I gave that to Debbie. All right. All those in favor? Thank you. Great. Thank you, Catherine. I'm also going to pass around Regions, Amherst, and Palom warrants. We not only have your car keys, but we have your paychecks as well. So please make sure you sign those before you leave this evening. Announcements and public comment. I would like to say, I know we have a very important item on the agenda this evening. I'd like to take just a few minutes to deal with a couple of business items that have been brought to my attention. The first one has to do with, they both, they all have to do with how the school committee conducts or does not conduct its business. And I just, one of those that has been brought to my attention was the time that we allocate for public comment. And I just want to let the public know that we have made an adjustment in the website description of the public comment section of the ARPS website to bring it more in line with what our policy is. And I also plan on suggesting to the policy subcommittee that we take a look at our public comment policy as well. So I just want to let people who have been concerned about that know that we are acting upon your concerns. Secondly, there's also been brought to my attention that access to our agendas are not always possible. And I just want to make people aware that if you go to the ARPS.org website, click on administration, click on school committee, and scroll all the way down, you get to the agenda archives, which is complete and total list right on up to tonight of all of our agendas. And so I think unless I hear otherwise from folks out there in the audience, I think that is a fairly direct route to access our agendas right through the current agenda. So hopefully that concern can be put to rest. Finally, I just want to make a comment regarding what promises to be the highlight of the evening, if not of the school year. And just a personal comment, if I may. I hope that people who are watching out there in television land that you will inform your neighbors, friends, parents of children, and residents of the communities that we represent about this evening's presentation. This presentation is about teaching and learning the very heart of what we do as school committee members, as administrators, staff members, and certainly as students. I can't think of anything, even beside the budget, more important to pay attention to than this presentation this evening. And so I would request that you let people know if they're not capable of watching this, that they become aware of it and gain access to it online as it will be available. This is one of the most important hours that I think you can spend in preparing for acquiring more information about the experiences that your children will have here in the Amherst Pellum School District. So I just want to say that, put that out there, underscoring the importance of this evening's presentation. Maria? Thank you. So I have just a few updates, which I'll pass out to people, and I'll comment on a few, and I won't spend a lot of time tonight because I want to get right to the presentation. But I do want to acknowledge that we've been really fortunate that Amherst Education Foundation has awarded their grants for this year, and our schools are receiving and are having four of those grants funded. So you'll see on top, we have $20,000 that will be going toward the work at the high school, which is for the incoming ninth grade students. And the high school teachers will be working this summer to really think about the academic support that's provided to all students, regardless of which classroom you're walking into. And we appreciate that's a very large award. I know Mark can speak more eloquently if people have questions about the specific awards. But we thank AEF and the donors very, very much. We also have 13,800, which is going to all of our elementary schools in Pelham, Leverett, Sheetsbury, and Amherst, which is for LEGO Robotics. And they're going to be doing some work, I think, during clubs, during recess, and integrating into classrooms. We also are fortunate to receive $4,000 toward family university for next year, which the committee is quite aware of, that we have underway this year to be able to continue that work next year. And the high school science department received $11,225 to purchase some new technology, which allows students really to be visualizing, measuring, and graphing photosynthesis in real time. So people I know are thrilled to have these grants supported, and I know the relationship and the partnership with AEF has only strengthened over the past few years and just publicly thanking our community for support of our schools. A couple of dates that are coming up that people should be aware of. We have a Cambodian New Year celebration happening at Fort River on April 25th at 10.30 in the morning. We have African American achievement night, May 8th at the high school at 7 o'clock in the auditorium. And Latino achievement night, May 17th at the middle school auditorium at 6.30. I think there's just one other that I will mention tonight. Actually two others if I could. The high school chorale and hurricane singers under the direction of Anita Cooper. And if people have not watched our students perform, you're missing out. So you really need to go and see these young adults perform. It's quite honestly breathtaking. And they won at this point gold medal and superior ratings Friday at the, and I'm not going to know what Micah stands for. MICCA, State Choral Festival, Choral Festival. And both groups are going to be invited to perform at Symphony Hall in Boston. Which is a huge honor and recognition. And these medals are on display at the high school in the main office. So please take a look. And then I think the other congratulations, and I'm going to probably not do a great job with these students names. You're all going to have to help me. I'm looking at Mary. Is it Aliyah? Aliyah. Aliyah. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Thank you. Clara Dayhill Vow. Close enough. Thank you. And Ann Chu. Ann Chu. And Jonathan Simmons. Simon. Thank you, Mary. I shouldn't have just had you read this, Mary. It would have helped me out. For their medal and ribbon award winning performance at the Massachusetts State Science Olympiad. Congratulations on the whole team who finished 12th overall out of 45 teams across Massachusetts. Mark Jackson. The group was moderated by Captain Clark. Please stand up so we can acknowledge you as well. Sorry, you have to. If you're here, congratulations to the students. So thank you. So I hope everyone will take a look. And if anyone out in the audience wants to acknowledge anything else on this list that I'm kind of glossing over at the moment, please feel free. But again, there's so many opportunities to really acknowledge the amazing work of our faculty and staff and our students. So thank you. And before you all present, I want to just be able to say I thank our faculty and staff for coming. Often, they are very comfortable in presenting in front of students because they do it all day long. And we appreciate your willingness to come and present to the school committee. And this is a wonderful group who's 100% supportive of the work that we're all doing in the school. So I hope that you enjoy this opportunity. And there's no stress involved. So we thank you for all this work. I know I've been watching what's been going into this presentation and preparation. So thank you. So can I just introduce Dr. Ronda Cohen who's going to start the presentation. Yeah, whatever, however you're comfortable. Do you want it down lower? I'm going to sit, yeah. But the question is, will it carry enough? Jerry, do you know how to, someone can do the microphone? I won't be able to. It's all the same, I think. Let's see if that works. Just turn that thing and it should. Hold on a second. Thank you, Jane. We need a few more of these. We might need a few more. And we have both screens, so whatever works for people. Let's see. Are you getting sound quality? No, really. Jerry's going to turn it up. He's sprinting around. Let's try it again now. Okay, thank you for the invitation to present the teaching and learning update. You'll see tonight's presentation focuses on two subject areas, both science and mathematics. It's the outgrowth of work that began in the fall and in the result of the collaborative efforts of teachers, administrators, department heads, curriculum leaders. We'll begin by introducing who is here tonight. So we're going to start out, well over the past several months, I've had the privilege of working with my colleagues, Mary McCarthy, the high school department science head, Jane Moody, high school math department head, Dr. Ian Stith, the math science coordinator. To design the learning and teaching update, I'd like to publicly acknowledge the weekly meetings, the conversations, the insightful questions and data analysis that informed this presentation. Doug Slouder, Mickey Gromacki, Mike Morris supported our work as well as the questions we asked about our course enrollment, student performance, and demographics. Throughout the process, we've worked closely with the middle school and math science curriculum leaders. Finally, it's important to acknowledge our dedicated K-12 math and science teachers for the work they do each day to make a difference in the lives of our students. So we're fortunate to have a number of teachers presenting this evening, several on this slide. We're going to go through who's in the room. And I want to acknowledge that our middle school math curriculum leaders were not available this evening, John Newman and Steve Zea. Mary, do you want to introduce the high school science? Sure. Right here is Dr. Jim Jones, ninth grade teacher of ecology and environmental science. Tom of chemistry, Dr. Annie Farris, biology. This is Kathy McCarthy, no relative. Biology, Dr. Patty Blander, physics, and crop physics. Excellent. And also, Zach Humboldt from the middle school and the middle school science teacher will be presenting some information about some formative assessment work that's happening there. I agree. So the way we're going to get started is by looking at the science. We're going to share some information about the next generation science standards. We're going to share some ideas from our sixth grade program since this was the year in which we had departmentalization take place where that meant the teachers were teaching two content areas. We have our middle school information about formative assessment. And then there's a large presentation on our high school science program. I want to talk more about that and kind of how it's come about. But one of the things that is exciting about it is that I'm new and the question that we're looking at is actually about a program that started revision process about five years ago. So the idea of the collaboration of I was trying to understand and ask questions, but the way the questions get answered in the presentation, it really was designed from teachers being able to say, well, this is how I would explain how our courses are aligned and how has it impacted our entire program. And then we're going to take a break because that'll be a big presentation, pause for questions, and then we'll move into the second part of the evening, which is going to focus on our math program K-12. So with, all right. So the next generation science standards, these are the standards that are not yet, that are in a process of being reviewed. They are different from the common core in that there isn't yet agreement across the states about what they're going to be. Now what that means is that everyone is on hold in the area of science. What we do know from the early drafts, which is good news, is that at the elementary level, the standards are being written to be grade specific. And in the previous versions of standards, it's been things like what's a K to two or three to five. So for elementary schools for improving or aligning the curriculum, it's actually more difficult because there's an awful lot of choices about what to teach when. Now at the middle school and high school, it is very likely they will continue to be bans and that gives school districts the kind of the freedom to design courses on the sequence based on our programming and our priorities. The learning progressions is coming out of a research base, which shows how, like, pays a lot of attention to what science content would be taught before another and how over time that would develop. The science community is, I would say, building on or taking or barring the notion of the mathematical practice standards, which have been very successful in terms of defining the conversation nationally about what it means to understand mathematics. So they've developed some drafts about what it would mean to know science. What we're doing in our school district to support this environment where it's not yet clear what exactly to teach and what year at the elementary is we are moving forward with using, with focusing on nonfiction texts and science as a core. There's a group, the University of Berkeley, put together these materials that are both research based and focused on science inquiry and the careful reading of science as texts. So we feel comfortable that given what's available in the field that the topics they've chosen to write units on are core elementary topics so there'd be no reason for us not to begin to look closely at what's being released in the field. So now I'm going to have Dr. Stith talk about his experience with the sixth grade this year. So as Rhonda said, this year the science in the sixth grade has been departmentalized so there's a smaller group of teachers doing all the science. So just some highlights of what they've been working on. Project based inquiry science is a program that we've been using as a structure for the year. So that's really based on standard based curriculum and hands on activities, students designing experiments and really going through that process. Right now they've had 50 minutes at least of instruction for days a week. Next year we look to make that probably more like 60 minutes and the number of days is still to be determined however it should be more overall. And also just that now with the departmental model, everyone is teaching the same basic units across the different schools which is a change from years past. So we're having launching scientific inquiry, it was a unit, ever changing earth solar system and everyone including robotics unit as well. So I'm excited to talk to you tonight about some of the work that we're doing at the middle school in science. Specifically we've been playing with a program called Credit by Proficiency and it's something that has really resonated with the department and that I am really thankful that I got to have some experience with when I worked in Oregon. It being something that the state has really pushed forward as a way to really reshape and reform a lot of the way that we think about education. Obviously it would take hours to do it justice in my mind but I'll do my best to cram it all into five to ten minutes. That's fair, right? Sure, no pressure. Some things that Credit by Proficiency does. It encourages standards based teaching, it creates a guaranteed and viable curriculum, helps develop assessments, clarifies learning goals for students, facilitates differentiation for students with different needs and increases opportunities for students to feel successful. Part of the reason we started playing with this in the first place is because we have been asked to take a lot of time to think about formative assessment at the middle school and formative assessment of course being assessment that happens during learning to assess where students are as we go so we can better inform the decisions we make as we progress through a unit. But looking at formative assessment alone isn't enough. We have to ask questions that go with it. What do we assess? What do we do with the data from the formative assessment? And then how do we know if our strategies worked? And probably most importantly, what does it all look like to a student? So starting with what we assess, one of the challenges that we face is really sticking to the state standards. State standards often feel like a wonderful starting place and then we often expand upon them and then the next teacher expands upon them. Then the next teacher expands upon them. We end up with a unit that is in scope probably far greater than it ever should have been. And credit by proficiency really challenges a teacher to refocus on what the state standards are, what the essential learning is. And there are a million ways it does that, but one of the ways that I really am fond of is through rubrics. It asks you to create a rubric for every unit and to use very specifically the state standards to create an entire level of the rubric designed around understanding what it means truly for a student to be proficient in that unit. So really it's about defining what success means. What is success for a student in this unit? And you can read across where it says meets and you can see what it means for a student to be successful for sales based on those state standards. Now that doesn't mean there aren't opportunities for extension. There are still other things that of course become incredibly interesting, but those are going to go into an exceeds category. And while that is something that certainly all students are going to get exposed to, it never takes away from the fact that those meets are really where the most essential learning is going to take place. So how do we know if our strategy works? Well, once we have a good rubric, it's actually almost writes itself. So thinking then about the formative assessment, having really clear learning objectives makes it so much easier to formatively assess, because on any given day you can look at a specific learning objective and say, am I accomplishing this today? You know, how far have we come today? And after a period of time in credit by proficiency, a student would be given an assessment based on those meets criteria. And that might be adapted from the summative assessment. It could certainly be any number of forms, but a student is going to be assessed on whether or not they can yet meet that proficiency. Once they've shown that either they can or they cannot, we have to do something with those data. And this is just an example from my class, something I used a couple of weeks ago. They're readings. They're both about photosynthesis, and they both certainly contain similar elements here and there. But the one on the left is designed specifically for a student who has not yet shown that they meet proficiency and is designed on really reinforcing that meets criteria. So that student has additional opportunities to access that material. Whereas the one on the right is designed for a student who's already shown that they meet proficiency and therefore is designed to really emphasize that exceeds material. Well, not supposed to be black. There we go. All right. Probably most importantly is what it looks like to a student. First thing that it does is having a clear rubric for a student to look at really clarifies the information for them. Students, one time I didn't give out the rubric that went with one of these units and the student was like, well, why don't you give us the rubric? Why don't you give us the rubric? You know, it makes it, I think that the students find the information much more manageable and they can see it laid out in front of them. We've also had a really positive response from the special ed department that has said that not only has it helped with their working with the students but that the students have actually expressed less anxiety because they can look at exactly what it is they need to be able to do and the information is prioritized for them. One of the things that I love most about this is that it shows the students that we're not going to give up on them. That if they reach a point in the unit where often we might have just as an entire class moved on to extended information but they're not ready, that we're not just going to move ahead leaving them lost without the original information or the new information. That we really are reaching out to the students and showing them that whatever it takes we're going to get them this guaranteed and viable curriculum. In the end what that does is it really creates a culture of success where students are able to be successful either by reaching the exceeds or meets. It's really been an incredible process that we've had a lot of fun with at the middle school. Thank you. Moving right along we're going to move into our high school science program. What I want to remind people is the question that we set out in the fall that we said that we would answer which was to really take a step back and understand the question about five years ago there was a new ninth grade course that was developed and one of the things that happens that when courses get added at the high school is things are very integral and what it really does it has an impact on an entire program. Tonight is really going to be, you're going to hear from the teachers about what that course looks like. You're going to see kind of what our assessment data looks like and where we're going. So without further ado, we had several goals when we restructured our program. The first year of our sequence was 2008 to 2009. So last year's seniors were the first to go through four years of the full four years of the sequence. So what we were looking for was to have a common experience for students that would give them a good grounding in the core sciences. It's an integrated science that we're offering now so there's some physics, some biology, some earth science, and some chemistry. And we also wanted to set a foundation for the laboratory skills and expectations for writing formal lab reports and all the things they're going to be experiencing through their entire high school career. So this of course impacted our entire program and affected curriculum up the line 912. Some of what we did was replaced our ninth grade course, which at that time was earth science for most students with a smaller number of students who met certain prerequisites taking honors biology. So we modified that to be all students taking ecology and environmental science. And some of the standard setting organizations that we're recommending and emphasizing the importance of environmental literacy were the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Research Council which had put out the science education standards for our levels. At this time there was no MCAS in science yet but we knew it was coming. So that was part of our planning in revising our curriculum. And it was important to us to maintain elective choices for students and advance placement offerings as well. And as with all our curriculum changes, we keep in mind the social justice commitment of the district. In this slide you can see the previous sequence compared to our current sequence. As you can see the upper level options are still available that were available at that time. We did change in the ninth grade, if you look at the ninth grade, we retained some earth science content. At that time our earth science class was already a hybrid called understanding environmental change and it already was a combination of earth science and ecology so it was a smooth transition for us. This program change helped us retain some flexibility in sequence where students could select between college prep honors or other options year to year. And what they take in ninth grade does not determine what they're going to take in tenth grade and thereafter. So we were able to achieve the goal of maintaining the course options available. Both sequences had the option for students to take up to two AP science classes if they planned their schedule accordingly. So this was about five slides, which Rhonda made me reduce to one. Are we aligned? So there are three areas of state standards. One is content, one is mathematical skills and one is scientific inquiry. This slide is referring to which of the standards are covered in the ninth grade course, the new ninth grade course. So you'll see that there's bio, camera, science, and physics in the science content because it is an integrated course as it is introducing material in all of those areas. There's a significant amount of mathematics done in the ninth grade course by design and all of the mathematical skills in the science curriculum frameworks are covered. These are some examples of some things that the students are asked to do. And for scientific inquiry, the students are involved in a lot of investigation, authentic investigation on our school's grounds and working in the field provides a context for the ninth graders for studying science. So what is the course like? We're offering them a field-based science, all of our other sciences. Well, we can take students outside, it's not a routine part of the curriculum and this is a field-based science and students routinely go outside and investigate our local landscape. So the first half of the course is ecology, as listed there, and the second half is environmental science. There are a lot of benefits to having a field-based content, I mean course because it helps students become really good observers and it's authentic because it's in their own area and they learn about real problems that occur in their own area. They also are doing guided inquiry where the students are doing real investigations as scientists do and sometimes their data doesn't match each other when they collect things and they have to think about that and deal with some of the real examples of science that you would have to deal with. We wanted to increase the rigor of the ninth grade science course because we had gotten feedback that it wasn't rigorous enough and we also had seen that and along with that we designed ways to support students who would struggle and for each lab investigation that the students do, they have a guiding question that informs their work. I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Jim Phones right now to give an example of one such benchmark investigation. You do. You can take it out. Hello everybody. Thanks for having us. This is harder to see. This is clearer but this is bigger so I don't know. Look at the one you like. The example I'm going to show you is one of our investigations in ninth grade science. It's ecology and environmental science and this is the second half in environmental science and it's doing our unit on air pollution and global change so that's our context and we're investigating global warming and our focus question is Mary asked we always try to have a clear understandable question that passes what I call my Aunt Eleanor test. Could I tell Aunt Eleanor what I'm doing and she would understand it because she's an intelligent person but she's not a scientist. She's a nun. Our question is how much carbon is emitted? I thought this was a pointer. There we go. How much carbon is emitted by the cars that commute to our school so there's the parking lot there and there that represents a population of cars that we can go out and measure and observe. We see them every day. So the carbon dioxide emitted from them is a greenhouse gas and we're asking how much they put out the second half of the question is can our school forest absorb that carbon dioxide and it's been somewhat cut off but our school forest is right there, that's our study site so we go out there and we measure the carbon uptake by that forest and we've dubbed it the Amherst Regional Experimental Forest or AERF and so my dream some day is to have a brown and yellow forest service type sign that says AERF and then I'll know we've made it. Okay. So how much carbon do they put out and can we absorb it? So notice as Mary said it's a field based class, we're getting out of the classroom we're measuring real things in the real world. We think that providing students with context is very important. It's important because many ninth graders are very concrete learners to begin with at this stage in life. Also later on they'll be taking the other fundamental sciences and they will have some idea why is this other stuff important? Why should I bother to go in here and learn this stuff? So to answer the question we have to first deal with the cars. We measure the population of the cars we survey the cars and we divide them up broadly into less efficient and more efficient than the current CAFE standard and we also do some survey work how far do people live from school and we look at the speed limit signs and discuss how fast people drive. Our second expedition on the next day is we actually measure the CO2 coming out of the tailpipes of running cars and this slide shows you a CO2 gas analysis tube. The gas analyzers that we just won the grant for and that we already have a few of can't read high enough to actually read the car exhaust. So we need something less sensitive than those. So we use these chemical tubes. We also measure the velocity of exhaust coming out and by measuring the cross-sectional area of the tailpipe we get the volume. Volume times concentration gives us a flux and then we in a couple of pages of calculations extrapolate this up to a whole school year of carbon emissions by our population. These calculations the students do unit conversions they use proper scientific notation throughout and they round to the correct number of significant figures which are the mathematical standards that Mary was referring to that we're meeting. So the second half of the project is the forest we go out to the forest we have to estimate the carbon taken up by a full growing year of trees. So we measure tree biomass by measuring diameter and using standardized biomass equations. We measure leaf litter actually in ecology so the production of leaves we already know at this point. And we make a simple estimate of roots. We don't actually dig up roots and try to estimate how fast they are. And you can take it from me that there are no question free ways of doing roots and they're expensive and prohibitively time consuming. So we make a simple assumption. So we get the carbon uptake by our living plants in the forest but we're not done because the dead remains of the leaves and other materials are still respiring and returning carbon to the atmosphere. So we have to measure carbon dioxide production by the forest floor which we subtract from the carbon storage. And so we get a measure of the actual carbon uptake by our forest in a year in a growing season year. And we compare that to the car emissions. And the answer is no, our forest can't take it all up and the ratio between how many forests it would take to what we have is between 20 and 40. Sadly the answer isn't 42 but it's sometimes very close to that. As a result of all this calculating and all this measuring and all this discussing the students also write comprehensive lab reports in the format of a scientific paper. Introduction methods, results and discussion. In the honors classes they also are challenged to write a brief but very specific abstract that goes with it. And so in these reports they combine all the data, they synthesize it, they say what it means. We also look at some factors of say what society could do to reduce our carbon emissions based on some readings that we do, what are certain actions that that student feels are the most promising to take. Whether it be hydrogen powered fuel cell cars whether it be people living closer to school not commuting so far as they choose goes into the interpretive section of this thing. And these are of course read very carefully and that's our assessment of their knowledge and their learning in this activity. So there you have it. I hope a brief overview of one of our activities. Thank you very much. Hello. Is it there? The design work of Jim and also Nick Shaw shown from the right has been recognized by a number of external sources. The NEAF award that's the National Environmental Education Foundation they actually got this the first year out identifying our schools one of the 16 U.S. schools that was a national model for how to infuse environmental content into high school curriculum. And the grant money was used to buy additional data loggers such as you saw in the previous slide. And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts this picture is from that event when they were honored and the factors that were are considered for this award are innovation, use of local resources, replicability of the program and a focus on energy efficiency, energy conservation and renewable energy. And you've already heard from Maria about the new grant that's coming and Jim and Nick actually designed the lab for that as well. We really want to thank the local professors who have helped us along the way with advice, materials written to the newspapers they met with the superintendent to support the scientific design of the course and they've been a tremendous resource to us. And finally we have had other schools seek information on how to replicate the program. It is replicable of obviously using your own local flora and fauna which might not be the same. Such schools include Turner's Falls Athol and Sidwell Friends in Washington DC. You've heard about ninth grade as the core course. If we look at our other courses all are available as college prep or honors. We also have chemistry in the community available for chemistry. It's a course that was designed by the American Chemical Society. We have advanced, three advanced placement options and the electives are, with the exception of anatomy and physiology, are one trimester electives and they are heterogeneously grouped with an honors option for students. The core design principles of the courses nine through twelve in science incorporate the following pieces because of the many learning styles that our students have, we try to use multiple modalities be it verbal, tactile, audio, visual, interactive, whatever kind of modalities that we can integrate into a lesson and mathematics of course is the language of science so that's a component of all of our courses. In terms of technology, technology is actually part of our standards. Science, technology and engineering are all within the same standards from Massachusetts and we've gotten tremendous support from the administration I'll name Dr. Mickey Grimacky for this who's really understood the importance of helping our classrooms get and focus projectors and document cameras and available laptop cart for science which we've really found incredibly useful. In all of the grades students do labs in which they collect data and analyze their work and you've seen one lab which was the ninth grade example and now we're going to hear just from teachers of the other course for a little representation of how their disciplines cover the same design elements. So first up are Ms. Kathy McCarthy and Dr. Annie Paradis. Biology. Thanks. So this is a very fun lab that we do. The students tend to enjoy it a lot and we start out with a discussion of why cells are so small. Why are we made of a hundred trillion cells and not a few hundred cells or a thousand cells. So it turns out it has to do with efficiency in acquiring and exchanging materials with the environment. So we have them build a model of a cell. This is auger. It's kind of like a more dense gelatin like substance. So they cut out three different sizes of cells. The one on the left is three centimeters on all sides and the next one is two and then one centimeter on all sides in the surface area and the volume and they put it into a beaker filled with sodium hydroxide and there's a chemical in the auger that turns pink when the NaOH comes into contact with it. And we also have a discussion on how cells exchange materials with the environment through diffusion and diffusion is what's going on with the NaOH. So we wait about 10 minutes or so and then they take their cubes and they slice them down the middle and the zone of pink represents how far the sodium hydroxide has diffused into the model of the cell. So representing what part of the cell would get nutrients or oxygen, gases and if you can go ahead. So these are students just measuring and building the cubes and then they'll put them into the beakers and Kathy will talk about the data interpretation. So this is an example of a college prep part of a college prep lab it incorporates we're trying to incorporate as much math as possible extending on our rigorous math standards that the ninth grade has started they do graphing as you can see and they answer several questions. The important thing about this lab is that it's a benchmark lab and we do it at all levels. So AP does it honors biology does it and college prep. So it's a common experience we do ask different questions different levels of analysis definitely different levels of math depending on what what level you're taking the class at but it essentially gets at the same concept introduce Dr. Sharon Palmer who is going to talk about chemistry. I'm going to tell you a little bit about a lab we just did in two of my classes today so this is another benchmark lab that we do in all the college prep and honors classes and it's another lab where we construct a model of something and so this is a quantitative investigation of microscopic and macroscopic behavior of gases and it culminates our gas unit and so I'm going to do this on my honors class on Friday because we're doing the gas unit at the same time and so you can go ahead so what the students are supposed to do is they're supposed to make a model of a car airbag using household household ingredients so you saw in the previous slide they were using baking soda which in class I'd call sodium hydrogen carbonate and acetic acid which you see in your house is vinegar so this is sort of a model of the first chemistry experiment most of my students have ever done but they're revisiting it in a quantitative sense and so we give them very minimal instruction and some materials and basically with a variety of sizes of ziplock bags and these chemicals they construct a model of an airbag so they have to have something that when it's sort of impacted is going to expand by creating a lot of gas they have to do a number of calculations they have to figure out the volume of the bag they have to figure out because we don't tell them these things and I tell them you can't just look at the bag and see that it says a quart because a quart is maybe a quart of sandwich it's not a quart of carbon dioxide gas and so they have to measure the volume of the bag they have to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that would take to fill that bag and then they have to calculate the amount of the reactants that they're going to use so it's mathematical but it's also a model of a real world application of chemistry and they have a lot of fun with it because they have to try out different ways of combining the ingredients you can't just throw everything in and zip it up fast and hope that it inflates so to figure out how to keep things isolated until there's sort of an impact and there's a little bit of they have fun with it because there's always a danger that too much stuff in the bag might blow up and so they always step back I always make them do it in the hood and you know so it's kind of a fun lab to wrap up a unit it ties up all the calculations it ties up all the concepts and it's a good way to review for an upcoming test and I guess that's all I had to say so I'm going to introduce Mr. Aaron Croff who's going to tell you a little about physics thank you thank you good evening we teach physics largely to seniors but there are some juniors mixed in with seniors and we teach all of our physics classes we teach AP physics as well as honors and college prep level physics all of our physics classes study basic basic mechanical relationships that we find in nature and so in our next slide next slide next slide there we go so in this photograph we see students working hands on and with computer aided data collection in this one so all of the students at all the different levels will be measuring motion and in this case measuring as they roll these carts down these very steeply inclined tracks how fast are they going and what rate are they accelerating so I just break it down a little bit in the next slide it's a hands on experience they're collecting data it's computer aided so it's telling them about the motion and then they're doing some analysis they're making graphs and they're given a model they're told a model or they read about it for the motion on earth and they're then asking the question of do our measurements match up to that data invariably there is some difference between the prediction and the measured values so they're going to write about it and describe what they've measured and what they expected and the ways in which they do and don't match up we also have science extracurricular opportunities available for the students teams is one of them it's often referred to as the jets because this used to be run by the junior engineering technical society it's recently been taken over by another group but their competitions in technology engineering aptitude mathematics and science and the students actually problem solve as a group so we have a number of different teams in the library on a Saturday or a Sunday coming in for fun and they problem solve together and they tackle different areas there's usually a theme could be biomedical engineering this year it was cyber security and the picture on the right is our all girls team last year that scored first in Massachusetts and first in the national division the science Olympiad you heard Maria mention earlier so I'll just say that it's sort of like an Olympics in that you participate in a number of different events so students work in teams and they each are in three events each teams in three events some are things you make ahead like a bionic arm and others are think you know they surprise you with the test or you may have to use a microscope to to diagnose something or perhaps it's something that you didn't learn in school and you decide the topic is ornithology and whoever takes that on learns about birds in advance so it's very challenging very interesting in this in the picture above on the left the students are preparing their thermodynamics entry where they have to construct a container that'll insulate a beaker with fluid inside and predict how the temperature will change over time we also have the apes nine club we've been running this is our third year it's apes and ap environmental science ninth grade so this is for students who would like to come after school and prepare to sit for the college board ap test so so far all the club members who have sat for the test have passed it with most of them receiving the score of extremely well qualified to high score the other clubs depend on interest of students and availability of advisors from year to year this year we have science club and we have environmental action club and we also have a number of students doing internships at one of the five colleges or other local sites students have studied the science of appetite they've they've built polymers they've done chemical research they've transformed DNA they're doing all kinds of interesting things with the mentorship of our local professors and we're very excited I think it was mentioned last week we're very excited this year because one of our students Shohini Kundu developed a project from the research he was doing at the Geosciences lab with Dr. Jonathan Woodruff on sedimentology and placed as a semi finalist in the Intel science search which is the most prestigious competition for this age in the nation we always as a plug we always welcome other professors who would like to mentor our youth but we'll now take a look at student data our other question was what trends are we seeing in terms of student data we're going to look at achievement we're going to look at enrollments MCAS is first as I'm sure you all know that is the required state exam students are required to pass one science MCAS exam in order to graduate the test is taken in 10th grade and the options available are biology, chemistry and physics the majority of our students take MCAS in biology with a significant minority taking it in chemistry in Massachusetts there was no standardized assessment for earth science and that was part of our decision making when we changed from having the earth science class but we did retain a number of earth science concepts in the 9th grade class because it's such an important core science there is an alternative assessment available for students with significant disabilities because the exam is administered in 10th grade our 9th and 10th grade curricula are aligned to the state frameworks upon which the test is based here's an overview looking back from when they did start to require a science MCAS over time so I will try the pointer this is my experience 9, 10, 11 and 12 does it show up on the other one? It doesn't I don't know I can't see it alright well anyway I'm not as techy as I should be so what the data is showing is a trend towards more students scoring in advanced and proficient which are the two blue sections and a decrease in the needs improvement and in the failing section here's biology data for 08 to 12 and as I mentioned the goal is to have all students scoring in the blue the dark blue or light blue so we're not there yet but we are getting closer if you look at the trend whoa look what it did instead of this alright so the trend is the red is going down and the blue is going up in biology but we do have some students who aren't making it yet I do want to say needs improvement in science is passing it's different from mathematics and English language arts in that respect so that's one thing to just keep in mind here's our chemistry data also you see a similar trend except that you see that no failures we haven't had any students fail chemistry related to the chemistry data most districts do not test their students in chemistry it requires a pretty high level of proficiency in quantitative reasoning and in 2012 only 1400 students in the state took the chemistry exam in contrast to 49,000 students who took biology so 75 of the 1400 were our students this graph is looking at subgroups from the most recent year 2012 and we're comparing to the state ARHS to the state those scoring advanced and proficient so that would be a combination of the two blue graphs blue bars that were in the earlier graph so in some subgroups such as students with disabilities or current or former English language learners our students on average scored twice the percentage of the state and others such as the Asian subgroup our scores were more similar to the state and here we're comparing ourselves to ourselves if we look at 2008 to 2012 obviously two different cohorts of students so we did look at the data in between the years to see what trends we saw and we do find the same trend of a growing percentage of students in the subgroups who are achieving advanced and proficient there's been improvement in the performance of our students in every subcategory with the largest gain in the Hispanic Latino subgroup followed by low income and students with disabilities the largest gap to full proficiency is in the subgroup of students with disabilities right here and then also if we look going to 100% there's a gap there as well so as an example 71% 71% of African-American black students are advanced or proficient but what you can't see on this graph is that the gap is actually in 2012 no African-American student failed however that gap is made up by students who did score needs improvement so they're not as far as we would like to see our students but it's not failing in terms of the state another thing to keep in mind and looking at the subgroups if there's a small number of students in a subgroup even one student can make a difference in the percent and these are all represented in percent a subgroup that's not seen on this graph is ELL English Language Learners and that's due to the small sample size the success rate of this group has varied from year to year last year we had no students in that category failed but in the previous years we have had students struggle so we do consider them a group that we are paying close attention to and we didn't include male or female here either females practically remained the same over the years and the males improved so we're now going to talk a little bit about students who have failed when we think about which students are at most at risk for getting a warning or failing grade we have small numbers of students who are failing but we do find that they are more likely to be in the high needs category this is a relatively new category only I think the past two years it means that there are students in more than one of the subgroups students with disabilities which I say I misspelled and Latino Latino students low income in English language learners so as an example well overall we have decreased our percent of failures from 6% in 2009 and 2010 to 2% in the last two years so in 2012 we had five students who failed four of them were female and one was male all 100% were high needs all were receiving special education services and two were low income one student had failed previously and was being retested and two were Latino, two were Asian and one was Caucasian all of the four of the students passed in February when they took the retest that doesn't always happen we sometimes have students who have taken it numerous times even three times if a student fails three times we can then apply for a waiver for them based on the cohort in their group so this was data from last year that we're looking at but I do want to say that our trend over time has been students with disabilities are highest group who would fail, they fail at the highest rate followed by Latino, followed by low income and in most years we didn't have enough data for ELL how are we supporting these students to move towards proficiency well one thing that's a challenge in science is that unlike English and mathematics where students if a student fails in English the next year they're taking an English class again if a student fails biology but they passed our course the next year they're not taking biology anymore and they're called upon to retain a long time until February some material that they already were struggling with but because by then they most likely a lot of them would be in chemistry in the community which is not aligned with the MCAS so we put other things in place and this is another unfortunate piece is that the state doesn't alert us as to who didn't pass until the summer at the end of the summer pass the time when you could encourage someone to go to summer school and parents, guardians and students are understandably reluctant to enroll in summer school in opposition that they might have failed so that's a flaw but we do have a summer school program that's available for them and specifically for biology and last year we also have ecology support available since all the ecology standards are covered in ninth grade for the MCAS exam we analyze the MCAS and we identify areas of weakness and we target those for instruction for the students with those for example open response questions we found the students have difficulty with and there are certain specific areas that we give them more practice in we did offer a MCAS support class during the year last year we do believe it helps students there was a scheduling difficulty with that because we had a number of students who were recommended for the course but very few of the students could actually do too they were also struggling in other areas and had other special classes that they were taking and it was hard to schedule so this year we actually weren't able to run it we've also offered support through Prism which is the after school program having a biology teacher and a special ed teacher co-teach it we do collaborate with the liaisons and other support staff in the building who work with students and have given them packets of MCAS questions and review materials special ed, ELL, middle school science teachers we also work with but they don't middle school teachers don't get the support packets from us they have their own MCAS that they're looking at but we also have the academic achievement center that is a directed study that we've also provided materials for and we did run a trial of having a Spanish one of our Spanish interpreters who's assigned specifically to science work with a couple of our ELL students who were also low literacy and they weren't ready even for the ninth grade because they came to us with ever without having much education and they passed part of elementary school and other thing we're keeping an eye on is the fact that some of our students complete their biology course at the end of the second trimester and they then also have to retain information for a few months so we have some review packets for them and Kathy and Annie are going to be offering some after school review courses for them as well SAT2 college board subject tests many schools do not require these students tend to take them only if the colleges that they're interested in are required that they take them so students that are applying for programs in mathematics and science are more likely to take these exams it's difficult to analyze because it's an optional test students are self selecting to take it and therefore the comparative information is hard to come by if we look over the years from 08 which was before we restructured right before we restructured to this past year we look at the number of students that are trying and taking the SAT2 tests in science we see a great increase in all of the subject tests there were two biology subject tests one with an ecological section that's specific and then there's a chemistry test so we our numbers have increased overall almost doubled from 67 total test takers in 2008 to 120 last year and the most significant gain you can see is in chemistry which is almost doubled so the graduating class of 2012 as I mentioned was the first to complete four years under our new sequence the students from this class would have begun sitting for the SAT2 exams in 2010 so overall we're seeing more students opting to take the college board subject tests in science here are some comparative scores again these are different cohorts because they're different years it's a norm reference test and the norm is different every year so this is just a snapshot of the three tests grades that preceded are restructuring and today so 2007 to 2012 we did look at the intervening years data to see if we saw trends and we do see a general trend there was one year that didn't match but the rest of them did our biology in both of ecological and molecular scores routinely exceed the national average and the molecular is especially high if you see what we're going to try to not fast forward this time with the average being over 700 and 700 is considered a very good score our chemistry does not exceed the national average but as shown in the previous slide we have a much larger number of students taking the chemistry and when you have increased the number you do tend to see a larger spread of grades and what you don't see is the scores that are highly able students are achieving so just as an example in the class of 2012 15 students scored over 700 in the chemistry SAT2 and the thing that's unusual about these scores are the way that we get the data is we get it by graduating class rather than the year the student took the test so this is why it says classes of 2007 to 2012 so students sitting in the school right now who have already taken these tests we don't have the comparative data until they graduate so it's a little unusual but we have their scores and we know for example for the class of 2013 that's going to graduate this year we know we already have 20 students with scores over chemistry three of whom have a perfect score of 800 so our scores are competitive you can't always tell from an average from an average advanced placement advanced placement or AP is an introductory college course that's taught during high school so this really depends on the college how that's leveraged when a student gets there some of credit for students to opt out at the beginning year of their science class in that subject some will give you general credit but want you to take their own science sequence and some do not but it's still a useful thing to have and taking an advanced placement course is an indication that a student is attempting a higher level of rigor and we do know that many colleges look for that we offer three AP courses biology environmental science and physics mechanics here's a similar slide in terms of what are our numbers looking like of students taking advanced placement science exams 2008 to 2012 again we see that there's an increase in all of the three subject areas and I think it's interesting to note that this increase in students taking these rigorous courses is occurring during a time when our student enrollments have been dropping since we changed our sequence we've been running more sections of AP biology and of AP physics and in addition as I mentioned before with the APES 9 club we do have some students in ninth grade who have prepared outside of school for the test without having taken the full AP course but they took e-colonial science and they prepared for the course test and the first year in which those students were tested was 2011 so the increase in test takers is correlating with students progressing up through our new sequence and this is just a visual if you look down at the bottom to 2008 the bar is all of the AP tests taken by ARHS students and the darker color are the science ones and since 2008 you can see that in 2012 we've moved to 50% of the AP tests taken or taken in science now as recently as last year here are some scores the AP does not make national data available they make global data available which includes national but it also includes everyone else in the world who took the AP test so I've included global tests in ARHS and at the top you see that a score of one or two is not a not a qualifying score three is qualified four is well qualified and five is extremely well qualified so again it's a snapshot of 2008 and of 2008 and 2012 so if you read across you can see that we are above the global and state averages for all test takers with most students scoring well qualified or extremely well qualified the average in most cases is above four another thing we looked at was course enrollments what trends do we see our average number of course is taken by an ARHS is four years of course with an average some are above some are below but this is an average so our average has gone up overall and also in most categories a typical for your course is four credits you will see some numbers that are above four years so like 4.3 you might wonder how's it possible to get more than four years of science in four years there are a few ways to do that if a student doubled up took two sciences in a year if they took AP biology which is three trimesters so that's six credits if they added two trimester elective I mean one trimester elective and picked up a couple of credits that way as well so specific subgroups that are closer to three years are students with disabilities and Hispanic and Latino students our greatest increase has been in the African-American student group over time so in thinking about special education the students in special education have some blocks already taken with their academic skills classes and that's going to limit elective choices and we have by far a significant majority of our students are mainstreamed into our science classes we also have some separate science classes that are taught directly by special ed lesons and the average number of years of science by Latino students decreased slightly but the number of Latino students actually increased quite a bit so it's not a significant finding overall so we're pleased that our students are taking four years of science and on average we're now beginning to examine data related to enrollments of subgroups in specific courses for example honors versus college prep so that's work that we're undertaking now so overall going back to revisiting our questions what happened as a result of the restructuring of the high school program science program I think that you've seen that our courses are highly aligned with national and state standards I believe last week the members of the school committee should have received packets indicating where in which courses certain standards are covered each standard is covered and what trends have we noticed I think we can say that we see high levels of student achievement on average students are taking more science courses and as measured by external measures students are demonstrating high levels of competency in science we do have data to show that we're improving and supporting our at risk populations we are continuing to do this work through our intervention model so just close by saying what we're working on right now our current work our departmental goals vertical alignment we've put a lot of work in over the years to achieve a high degree of horizontal alignment meaning that teachers are the same courses are using the same unit objectives the same weighting of grade components the same mark assessments we now find our current work looking 9 to 12 to see if there's continuity and growth the students are progressing through the grades in terms of expectations application of skills and increasing proficiency we're also working with the eighth grade science teachers at the middle school on issues related to high school transition in science thank you thank you thank you we're at the we're at the we're at the between the science so you're prepared for questions do you like questions addressed to the entire group or how do you want to proceed does it matter why don't we start we go to Mary and I we'll see if it makes sense Mary congratulations it's really wonderful I know you cut some flak for the ninth grade science program to begin with but it's really shown to be a great success and congratulations and this I just hit three years on the school committee and this was the best presentation I've ever seen because it gave the background of core curriculum stuff it gave some really specific examples of how kids are actually doing things in the classroom and then it showed the data about what the results were data-wise so it was really great Ron is a good organizer yeah and what Zach mentioned about being really clear about what you're learning in each part of a course really resonated for me because I know my kids were in school they got really frustrated when they didn't know what they were supposed to be doing next and I think that's so critical and I'm glad to see all the work being done there as well so thank you Shibas to all the teachers do you feel you have enough face time with our students and is a trimester term better for accomplishing the teaching and learning goals than a semester system might be I know who wants to he's going to hear your opinion well other people certainly Jim Ben I think if you count the minutes this is what I remember hearing when I came because I came from a semester system and I remember hearing that if you count the minutes the minutes are approximately similar I think and this is I'm speaking for myself I think that you have a little less sync time if you know what I mean in the trimester system in that students have to absorb a lot of material you do have a longer period but there's only so much the students can absorb in a certain given amount of time so that's one thing that I find having taught in both systems and the other I think there's a lot of benefits for the trimester system for many reasons that I've seen in teaching and also having children here but I will say one I do have a concern as a department that has does have an MCAS that especially for students who struggle there is a gap of several months when they don't have contact with the subject area and they're expected to recall it so that's for me is sort of an argument that's a little more a semester it's kind of political I don't know but we need to decide thank you I think there's thoughtful people on both sides absolutely thank you anyone else comment on that stand up and speak up and again we know you're speaking for yourselves so it's really we appreciate your speaking to the issue I've only taught here I don't have experience teaching in a semester type of situation but thinking back to being in high school a long time ago one benefit of the trimester is that you have fewer students I get to know them quicker and also you spend less time on average settling the class down and getting everybody concentrated and focused but on the other hand there was a difference between the students who took the MCAS when they finished Bio in the third trimester versus the second trimester so I think there's benefits to both but it's hard for me to really say not having taught in a semester system I will say that we're beginning to look at the MCAS data, Doug Slaughter has been helpful on that and the data that Annie is referring to is that we do have just a very preliminary look at one year of comparing scores, MCAS scores of students who completed their course in T2, the end of T2 versus the end of T3 and the students who completed it in T3 which is when the test is given did have higher top scores higher end of the scale so it's too soon to say any more about it but that would be interesting to see. Thank you. Anyone else? Catherine? I just wanted to reiterate what Rick said this was has been so far a really comprehensive wonderful presentation. I feel both jealous that I didn't have this in high school and very fortunate that I still have kids in the system who are going to be able to take advantage of this and I joined the school committee as this was underway but I do remember lots of questions about it and I am just thrilled with the clear and thoughtful success of it meaning and to acknowledge the amount of work that's gone into this and just to get to Shabazz's point and you brought it up in the presentation about kids particularly kids who struggle I do worry about the gaps in terms of the trimester system and I know it will be an ongoing conversation but particularly when you're talking about first kids have the summer gaps so if you're ending in at the end of the second trimester you could go a very, very long time before you were sort of involved with science again and that seems hard to me but anyway thank you so much thank you and to all the teachers it was great so I'm not going to act on everybody else's sentiment I'm going to say the sentiment myself because before I became on the school committee you might recall my entrance in the public service was actually serving on the committee whose auspicious goal it was to make this report that you guys have seen so I'm not jealous I had something like this in high school I'm jealous I wasn't a part of your committee I got to sit here with these guys the data about the subgroup comparisons it struck me that compiling all that data together there was a lot of things that could have been teased out to try to answer the question of how well these subgroups are doing the first sense that I got was I'm not sure how big these samples are so what shows as growth or improvement could be one person or two people and it could be different from one group to another and it also occurred to me that some of these people might be in two groups so what to make of this data was hard for me to tease out and I imagine that there are particular criteria you'd like to tease out especially in light of the insight of whether or not it might be better to go to semester or trimester so that was the point but you started to make it we actually have looked at it a lot more deeply than we can present right here but just as an example saying that you don't know how many are presented and you're absolutely right but talking about the subgroups I'll just give an example in 2012 23 Latino students tested and 20 students, that was 87% scored advanced or proficient one scored needs improvement and two students failed so those two students represented a failure rate of 9% whereas in 2008 we only had 17 Latino students and there were 47% scoring advanced or represented 8 students and 3 students failed which represented 18% so there are a lot of examples some way to normalize this data can't do it what you want to see a school district doing is knowing what you want to see a school system doing is knowing their data they're knowing the students and that's what's evident here because it is not when we're talking about one or two students representing 9% that's when the numeric representation of the idea is lost other questions Shibas you mentioned that the state doesn't tell us who didn't pass a science test until the summer when it's too late for the student to be enrolled in a summer class it strikes me that there's two ways to kind of go with that and that's one how since we really know the student we don't necessarily have to wait until the test to come in how are we really doing to kind of really encouraging that whether or not they passed or not to improve their skills but then also the other way is perhaps there's a policy recommendation we as a school committee perhaps should be making to the state in regards to how can you maybe accelerate the time in which you give us feedback on these exams what do you all feel about that? one thing is with the common core and the park assessment that's moving to a model where we would get states, school districts would be getting immediate feedback because the exams are going to go on to being computerized so that is in the next few years you're going to see a change in the data in the currency I would have to say I appreciate your suggestion about the state that had state exams the regents exams in New York and by the next day you know how you had done on it but in terms of not letting students fall through the cracks we do identify students based on teacher recommendation and also working with the guidance counselor certainly students that are having trouble in the course would be highlighted and we would suggest or invite them to come to summer school whether they take it or not that is family prerogative but we do develop a list and try to offer it to all of those students so I want to thank everybody this was wonderful and very impressive just a couple of questions for Zach and it was I found your presentation the software you're using wonderful about the proficient and exceeds you and your colleagues have any information about how many students are going into the exceeds portion do we have any data about is that my understanding was that everybody obviously want everybody to be proficient and then if they indicate proficiency then the staff move on to getting some exceed so at various times you know students are showing proficiency they're just going to yell again so just give me hand signals now I know so I think it's you know I think that the at any given time you know a student might be at a different place throughout the course of the unit so we begin a course really focusing on those objectives and then as we go some students would start to bump up and then by the end hopefully you get lots of students who are really experiencing a lot of the exceeds material and part of what I have you know experienced is that the even the students who are primarily focused on really just meeting the standards often get such a strong foundation in that material that when it comes time to actually take the summative assessment they actually can perform fairly well on lots of the exceeds material as well and the summative assessment I assume does it have an attempt to get to the exceeds objectives? Yeah. Thank you. I wanted to ask too so Zach are we at the place now where you are the science teachers that have been teams having some conversations around rubrics when you're looking at who's at the meet and who's at the exceed to your kind of instruction are you doing that as an individual or are you doing that within your cohort? So that's something that we as a department have been really trying to tackle together. So it's and that's part of what's been so fun about the process has been It hasn't done a ton of work in a short period of time. So thank you. Can I ask one? And I'm just going to give a little bit of an elementary like here for a second. So two years ago or last year how many minutes of science did we have happening in our schools? Science instruction? Maybe 80 minutes in the course of a week and what are we doing now in the course of a week? The sixth grade? 200 and next year that will be increased. So I just want to say the focus on bringing science and social studies available for there later another time into the elementary day has been really focused this year. So I want to thank Ian and Rhonda for making that happen. Just to be clear that's the result of the departmentalization for sixth grade. Those numbers refer to the sixth grade we are on a trajectory to increase the amount of minutes available for science instruction at the elementary level. We're matching that with curriculum materials to use that time. Just following on what superintendent was asking so the curriculum leader for the department does that shift around? Is it still Kristen? Is it you now? Oh no it still certainly is Kristen. So does it rotate or is it by seniority? You know I have to That's what you have to say. You don't know that. Use the microphone. Use the microphone. It does rotate. Folks have an opportunity to apply for that position and it's really by interest. There's no seniority it's not the person who feels like they've got the energy and some vision and it's ready to kind of jump in. But as you can see there's a tremendous resource to this team and made it happen so folks are working together. Beautiful. I just wanted to in terms of the elementary school is this going to move down now to the fifth grade as well next year? The departmentalization? For the coming year we're only departmentalizing in grade six. To recognize the work that goes into departmentalization it involves not only curriculum alignment and collaboration but there are significant implications on how we can organize the elementary school day in terms of scheduling and the providing of resources and ELL and special education so we feel very comfortable with continuing with the sixth grade work. We can certainly explore the idea in future years for fifth grade but I know that was a question that was asked a year ago. Thanks. Trevor? It's not officially a question so I don't want to take time but I just want to make sure I understood that it is the departmental reorganization that has freed up these extra minutes but not specifically for science but just extra minutes. There was something about what you last said that I wasn't clear about. What happened at the sixth grade level is that by having teachers teach in two content areas what it allowed us to do across the system was to standardize the number of minutes in the four core areas so one of the things was that depending on the different schools we couldn't guarantee that students were getting the same amount of minutes for science or math and as a result of having that focus the schedules were carefully aligned. So that would be a very good benefit and plus for a potential region which is always sitting in the back of our mind that if that model is carried across the region we've now demonstrated how you can compare apples to oranges and get something better out of it. Ms. Beacon Rhonda tell me if I am. It turns out actually to have the number of minutes be appropriate between the four core areas it wouldn't matter if you were a teacher who was being self-contained what's possible is that when teachers at the sixth grade level are teaching two content areas versus four it allows them to go deeper into content so what we're gaining is the quality of instruction the focus in the subject areas. Any other comments or questions from members of the committee? If I may I would like to express my appreciation for the demonstration that all of you have made this evening to your craft to your art to your discipline and most importantly to the students that you work with it's truly exemplary I think the quality of the presentation and even more importantly the very clear quality of the work that you're doing and I applaud you for that thank you very very much I do have a couple of questions if I may one has to do with page five you comment there's a comment there a reference to the relationship between the alignment of the curriculum for the district's commitment to social justice and a number of times this evening people have made references to more detailed pieces of what I consider to be areas of social justice but I'm curious at this stage of your work what if any I don't want to call them conclusions maybe just observations have you been able to draw if any that are transferable to the work that you might be doing in the future in other disciplines in addressing the issue of social justice in the district is that a clear question I'm not completely clear but did you mean how well what started in ninth grade carry through? I'm just curious what you've learned from so far working with science and math particularly aggressively and I'm just wondering what you've learned from that work that's transferable or applicable to other areas of other disciplines is there anything? to other disciplines I'm going to throw the social sciences humanities I was hearing two questions one seemed to be about the social justice commitment which I might answer a different way and the other is how is what we're doing applicable to other disciplines or are there other disciplines we could work well with is that what you mean? well in Jim's presentation when he was talking about the carbon emissions he alluded to a piece where the students are studying their carbon footprint and they actually do some reflection on how could they cut down on their carbon use and that's part of being an active citizen and I think that's in alignment with the social justice commitment all of the core sciences incorporates some social justice pieces but in very different ways like my discipline is genetics so I mean not genetics biology but a lot of things come up in genetics and just as an example I'll give that for my students I have them read an article from Scientific American about is race real and so it's a scientific article but it also addresses race as a social construct and I think all of the teachers could give examples of their own way that they integrate such concepts into their daily work I know that Patty does something when she's talking about Einstein anti-racism work and it's a much bigger conversation but I would say that people are attentive to it I know Aaron weaves in women's role in astronomy when he teaches astronomy so there are many multiple ways of doing it some of which are content and some of which are pedagogical and are you calling on everyone and are you recognizing what you're bringing to the table and are you recognizing your own privilege that you're involved in it that are beyond content so I would say we were attentive are we as attentive as we could maximize probably not areas to grow for all of us I think in that area in terms of do you mean collaborating with another department your other question I'll say my question for interdisciplinary work for another time because I could go somewhere else on that I would say feel free to email me that we didn't cover other questions that arise I'll be glad to get back to people my other question has to do with the 10th grade bio and the interventions that you're making by the time a youngster gets to the 10th grade I'm curious what if anything you need from us to help you with more aggressive intervention prior to a youngster getting to the 10th grade and also in the 10th grade what do you need from us to perhaps I don't know if stunt is the right word but to prevent a youngster from getting all the way to the 10th grade and then needing that intervention what do you need from us to help you do that that is a really good question which I will also see if something immediately comes to my teacher's minds well I knew Rhonda was going to go there what would you say math problem math problem well one thing that one thing that seems acts as a divider in some ways in the sciences is mathematics because oftentimes as you go deeper and to certain sciences the more complex problems involve more mathematics so it is important that people get a solid grounding in that facility in numeracy as well as literacy so I would say that that would be a piece of it I think we certainly appreciated and benefited from the intervention funds that became available at the end of last year in terms of it enabled us to run an additional section of ecology which was it's a full course but it involves some remediation and it involves some students who weren't able to get through the course the first time because they weren't ready and it helped us put something in place for transition for students coming out of 8th grade to try to help get them ready for high school so a lot of things come down to money and we always welcome funds Yeah I want to add if I could just to that too I think the focus on the Pre-K 12 alignment of our work and intervention when students are struggling and early literacy mathematics strong curriculum and alignment as well as intervention and the ability to use data well so that we can identify when kids are struggling so all of what you were all talking about we really and it's the work that we've been doing in teaching and learning to bring this coherence and a systemic way of intervening with kids I think that's where we make the difference so that we're starting at Pre-K we're not starting at 8th grade 9th grade but there's resources clearly connected to a lot of this work so next budget cycle Michael I've been uncharacteristically quiet I just want to respond to the the social justice piece because that was I'm the social scientist it's clearly important that we're doing the foundations and the learning the presentation is fantastic but I just want to underscore what you were talking about weaving in the other questions about race and role of gender and stuff because I think although you need to know the foundations and have the strength of that I get excited to hear that there's also the other part because going to school and just learning the stuff without seeing the world around it I just wanted to commend you because I think that's what makes this kind of education rich beyond just really competent and strong and I think the kids deserve richness so thank you I think it does involve attention because all of us when we apply to the district that topic of social justice and how can you contribute and I think we have to police ourselves to be really attentive to that when we develop curriculum so it's just a piece thank you you actually reminded me that I wrote a question on my paper too about that social justice thing when I first sat on the committee some of you guys might remember one of the first questions I asked was in reviewing what our goals are to the curriculum this social justice piece always felt too touchy and feely to try to quantify and you very well articulated you know it races a social construct social injustice are both you know a perception that's both what you think it is and so there's the potential for different people to measure that differently so when we are describing being thoughtful about whether our curriculum is responding to social justice we ought to be responsible enough to define what kind of categories we are responding to so what you described as being a good citizen and why that why that would be considered social justice should be just that answer of why and the other applications of social justice that's a quick understanding of why that's considered social justice taught to the students taught to the school board, taught to anybody who peruses what the curriculum is how that has to do with social justice I just wanted to point that out anyone else thank you very very much should we take a short break how about a two minute break so that people can thank you very very much thank you so much we don't have oh here we are okay thank you all right part two okay we're going to take a look yes we're going to take a look really at our for our math K-12 we're really focusing in this presentation you'll see on the 6 8 6 9 band of work what's interesting about this presentation is that I am absolutely confident that my colleagues Jane Moody and Ian Stiff all three of us have worked a lot on these ideas since September in terms of developing and understanding so it's really what it represents a lot of different people weighing in on a complex issue which is how do we ensure that our students coming from the sixth grade going into the high school have the highest quality kind of most rigorous math curriculum so to ground our work our kind of test or criteria criterion that we use to say are we doing the right thing we want to create a program that's rigorous, meaningful and coordinated standards-based and engaging curriculum for all students and that we look towards understanding and watching the data on how many students are prepared to succeed in advanced math courses in the high school and things that we look for is our research based curriculum materials the extent to which we are differentiating our instruction our commitment to professional development in the teaching and learning of mathematics and then there's criterion based assessments that's been added and it's not something that I'm going to go into great detail in but it's an important idea to begin to get a hold of is that nationally and also at the school level and in classrooms what we're looking at in order to assess student learning we're taking specific standards and developing tasks to understand does a student understand is able to know that skill and at what level so that's a shift in the field in the sense on being much more careful and thoughtful on what does it mean to be proficient in an area so we're going to start with giving you some information about what's been happening on our year one of implementation with everyday math and we're going to have since Dr. Stith has been leading that work he's going to speak to this so some highlights of the work from this year that myself and the math coaches meet weekly to do a variety of things including just organizing all the materials required for the first year and also dissipating issues that teachers are going to have with upcoming units and so forth so the math coach and I are really trying to be in front of a lot of those topics and then there are the math coaches and I again are making different materials to help the teachers transition into the new program including giving them tips for what things are upcoming in the unit different ways to organize their thoughts around how to approach a unit and pointing out different ways to differentiate and also how to use the assessments in a better way so then also the math coaches this particularly this year and I've been working on connecting the intervention more with the program so this is an ongoing process that we're going to be refining over the next years but really making a concerted effort to connect our intervention program with the core curriculum more intentionally and also along with this it's important that we have all the digital resources organized and that's an ongoing process as well but making everything organized for teachers to find and they're not searching for things when they need them and so forth it sounds minor but it's actually a big important topic so then again some things that we've been working on this year just with teachers are how they actually planning their lessons and we've been working with them both at the district and the building level pacing this year and sort of as Rhonda talked about with the criterion based assessment that's another part of everyday math that we're still working on what that really means and how to implement it taking advantage of all the differentiation resources and being able to just logistically make it work in a classroom and then also taking advantage of the huge amount of technology resources that come with everyday math and that's still an ongoing process but we are making sure that we have a lot of information in there so there's just some general things that there is a lot of appreciation for the technology and also the amount of quantity and quality of the differentiation options that are available for teachers and the supplemental resources that we've also purchased and there's also just more learning around how to use the cyclical nature of the program particularly the math boxes and how that prepares them for a systematic way and then there's also working with parent communication is another topic and that's connected with homework and we've heard to study links and home links and also the unit letters that go home with every unit describing to the parents what's upcoming in that unit and then we've been doing for most of the year a structured coaching model so that the coaches have access to a sub so that they can work with and the teacher team can work with itself more effectively around particular topics in that grade level there's a variety of issues that they worked on over the course of the year so that's been an improvement too that the teachers all have access to the coach in a scheduled way okay so this is how we go about doing the math review and the first thing that when we look at curriculum materials as you might recall last June we said that we set a target that we would identify curriculum materials for grades six and seven and that we wanted the consistent the same publisher to eliminate the amount of kind of teaching to support the transition work so before you go looking at materials it's very important to understand the context in which you're working and so given the timing of the common core standards it's important to kind of keep in mind that that's impacting what's available in the field and also our review process it's important to understand that now the standards are clearly they're separate from grade seven and eight what happened was in the earlier version of the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks is that they were once a band seven and eight was together and then they did kind of an artificial separation and one of the claims that would be made is that it's repeating eighth grade is repeating seventh grade the new standards seventh grade is seventh grade and eighth grade is eighth grade another change that is significant is that 40% of the algebra standards that were in high school are now in the middle school that's an important piece to understand for our presentation and what we're going to be recommending because what it means is that the country is shifting what we need to teach in middle school another aspect that's come in is that modeling is actually a conceptual category within the teaching of mathematics statistics is playing a much clearer role in teaching and then this other piece which is the park assessment the partnership for assessment of readiness for college and career that's going to be that test that half the states in the United States will end up taking in two years so that's also informing kind of work in the field about what should we be doing in the middle school and high school levels to prepare students the other piece of the equation is that we'd want to understand what is our data telling us now about the context of Amherst public schools so we're going to take a look at our advanced placement student performance data and we have a very nice story to tell and it's very interesting this evening how we've matched the science review with the math because our data show that our Amherst regional high school students are actually among the highest performing in the state as represented on performance on the BC calculus exam so what's interesting about these represent what this information is publicly available on the DESE department of ed website where it calculates where who's taking the calculus courses so as a percentage of the number of students in the high school we're at 4.2% turns out the BC calculus course represents three trimesters which is equivalent to two college level calculus courses we'll step back for a minute and remind people what is considered in the United States to be high school mathematics it's four years of high school mathematics which is in traditional terms people would say algebra one, algebra two, your geometry your trig, kind of pre-calculus that is the standard we would say if students had met the standard they were successful in that model then what high performing school districts do is they have the three they have calculus offered in that fourth year we actually have 4% of our students taking two years of college calculus in our program and we're succeeding now our number is a little bit for full disclosure there's another exam which is the AB calculus course which is also considered a very high measure the school districts would love to have that number so we have our AB course so if you combine the students taking the AB which is one year of calculus with the BC that number is about 5% of our students so and when we look across the state we're still in that kind of high group of school districts that are offering the AP courses now another piece of data that we'd be interested in is how is our MCAS so our MCAS shows that our 10th grade performance is 87% are proficient in math in 10th grade that means 13% are not so when we look at system level work what we want to ensure we want to watch that number because basically you want all of your students to be proficient so we're in a school system which we actually have data that show we're doing quite well are we meeting the needs of the most advanced students yes we are the question is are we meeting the needs of this larger group and we're going to give some data that suggests that we have places where we can be improving so for example we know right now 13% of our 9th graders are taking pre-algebra and that's I think I think we figured out was like 40 it was 33 students but it's a large enough group that that's middle school math content being taught in 9th grade now here's some information about low income if we compare right now the students who are in 10th grade are taking a year long algebra course in 10th grade the second year of high school 50% of those students with more than 50% are low income if we compare that with what's the number of low income students in the calculus courses it's 9% so we know as a system that we want to look at what are we doing within our organization of courses to ensure that all students are actually accessing and succeeding in our math courses we also know as a piece of data that we've shared before is that our current in the high school our high school is offering 11 courses in 9th grade math for incoming our kind of our outgoing 8th grade students now they're doing that to be responsive to the needs of students which means our middle school program which is the result of our elementary program is we have students in lots of different places in terms of being prepared for math courses this background is important as we talk about what we're going to propose for organizing our 7th grade math our 7th grade math program we did check our data and similar to the science groups that our subgroup performance like if we compare our subgroup performance with the state we do better than the state generally speaking however here's which relates to our national data is that in the state of Massachusetts 70% of Latino students are in mathematics at the 7th grade level so that's achievement gap our numbers aren't different but what we are in a school district which is very committed to in terms of actually changing that achievement gap and part of what this work tonight is about showing is how do districts go about doing that so we're going to talk about our process and what we've been doing so we started out the three of us meeting in September and part of our mission was organizing other school districts we wanted to understand what content what math content was being taught in middle schools we wanted to understand what are the instructional materials that districts are using we wanted to understand the grouping practices leveled, heterogeneous we wanted to understand how acceleration is happening we wanted to understand intervention models how does helm work so we had quite a ray of really wanting to understand what are the best practices what are other school districts doing so it's important to be reaching out to our parents and guardians and teachers and students to be understanding our current program before we kind of went in the direction of these are the materials we need to change because it was a much broader question to look at so Ian's going to speak about what we did in our conversations so we reached out to a number of school districts referring to the type of topics that Rhonda just stated just based on schools that were recognized as high performing on the MCAS and so forth some of them were based on similar demographics you know we can't find something that's exactly perfect but we were able to do some comparison with low income levels and school size and so forth and then there's also the MSAN districts that we have the ongoing relationship with so just in a sort of anecdotal way some of the things that came across as we look through talk to all these school districts is that everyone's struggling with the same kind of issues that we are in terms of reacting to the increased standards that we from the Common Core and also dealing with you know how to really make that transition from elementary up to the high school and get kids prepared for what courses they want to access when they're in the high school and it's a complicated problem and everyone is dealing with it in their own way and they're all struggling with it right now so there are some things that turns out that there's just a variety of ways to access this and there's many schools that have different levels in the middle school and there's a lot of schools that have heterogeneous groups in the middle schools there's a lot of schools that are using I should say there's many texts that the different schools use and they're not really a dominant middle school text that we were able to identify and you know that just reinforced that we need to make it work for us and to draw out what they are doing that is reassuring to us and what is working and then also there's not just one right way to do this you know that we really have to make it work and a big part of that again is connection between the middle school and the high school in particular so that was another thing that came out of work talking to the other school districts that they all recognized that was a problem some of them were able to work with the middle school and the high school together and some were not everyone was in a different place of starting the high school work so I think that we're in a good position there as we've been thinking this through in terms of how we might change things at the middle school and what the impact will be years from now in some cases for those students and then also what can actually work practically and logistically and what we're prepared to implement in a time frame at the high school so that's very important another thing up there but we I reached out to John Starr at Harvard who has done work with Algebra and again that similar kind of conversation just around that people around the state in the country are struggling with simply in some cases just how to label courses in the middle school and what the implications are of giving a specific course a certain name and what that really means for that student moving forward and how that connects to the high school so for example labeling a course in a middle school Algebra it might mean that it actually covers all the Algebra standards it might mean that it's some sort of middle school version of Algebra and there's a huge variation in what people actually how people label those courses so that is an impact as we compare ourselves to other districts too because it isn't just a simple question of are you doing this course in the middle school it's more complicated than that considering the variation and he also just talked about how you know that everyone is struggling to really better define what Algebra in particular really means even with now with the increased standards as Rhonda said more than 40 percent of the old Algebra standards being middle school content so it's forcing us to really question what are the right things that are in middle school what are things that really should be in the high school and these are all current topics being discussed at the moment. So we have in front of you a diagram that represents a way which we imagine we can be organizing our math course in the seventh grade. So here's how the model goes the top arrow represents one math course and the bottom arrow represents another course and the concept is that we want the courses to be parallel enough in the sequence of content so that students could actually move what we're looking for and when talking to districts that have been successful at having more students take advanced math courses we're telling us is pay attention to what you're doing to allow the transition. Are you creating for example a summer course that allows you to move up? Are you being careful about your sequencing so that it is possible and how do you use perhaps like an intervention to allow that movement and that that would be a design feature that if we paid a lot of attention to that it also will allow us to more closely align the intervention work. So this diagram also represents that there's an extended window opportunity for movement and that's the idea that when you have two courses is that you don't want usually the beginning of the course it's the easiest because they're closest but if you're really you want to look for where the places where the transition places that allow that to happen you wouldn't want it just to be able to say well if students are doing okay at the beginning they want to make a move. So that's this idea of an extended window it's aligned and that the intervention goes with it. So we're going to share now do you want to go back? You kind of got it. We're going to come back to that. We're going to move from one class to a transition point. What it could be is that let's say we had course one and one A and let's say the course one had more rigorous content and what we want to be able to do is make it possible for the students to actually move into that more advanced course because they were exceeding expectations in the one A course. So and it also means that if students were in a more advanced course and they were not meeting the criteria to be in that course they could go to a course that would be at the pace that would match their ability to learn because what we want to go do is make sure that students are in courses in which they're being challenged or currently in place in our district is that at the high school level there's doubling up which would mean you would take four trimesters of math in one year. So one of those semesters you're taking two math courses. Now there's also a self-study option that has criteria about what it would mean to do self-study. So it does in this case require a 95% test average from your current course. There's a portfolio that's representing concepts and skills. There's an 85% on a final exam and there is a requirement that the student work with a teacher or parent guardian with strong math background. It's my understanding that if there's been a case in which there might be an issue about where that support would come from is the district has been responsive to not kind of keep students out of that opportunity but that is the current design for the high school. At the middle school we have a practice that was in place only recent actually in the last three years 6th grade students have had the opportunity to take a high stakes math exam to determine whether they are eligible to take Algebra 1 in 7th grade. Now high stakes what that meant what that means is that students sat for an exam and they had to get a certain score on that exam and that would determine whether or not in 7th grade you took this in 6th grade you would go into an Algebra 1 course which means you did not take the first middle school math the 7th grade math course. So that's what currently we're now going to offer some more information about what that practice has kind of risen what information we got back. So as you might imagine there's been concern shared by teachers parents and guardians about the high stakes exam. One of the things about this exam is that the content is not taught in school. So it means we're asking students to sit to take a test. We haven't prepared them for it and then they get a number to say whether or not you would be in an Algebra 1 course. The other thing what it's done is it's created a strong incentive model for parents families to seek out out of school tutoring to be able to pass this exam. There are equity issues related to that there's also that we I mean when we listen to the teachers the 6th grade teachers they get to observe the student frustration of taking a test. We have experiences in which kids have taken the test not passed it. Their parent has paid for tutoring over the summer they have taken the test again in September have not gotten the number to be in the course. And so that kind of as an educator watching and knowing that story that is an unintended consequence of the high stakes math exam. Benefits Students in 7th grade Algebra 1 do appreciate the rigor and challenge and the opportunity to take geometry in 8th grade. That's one piece of our story. Another piece is that math teachers they are teaching two courses simultaneously. That refers to in 7th grade there is an option when you're in the 7th grade course to do the honors option which involves doing extra math homework and doing extra assignments. As the classroom teacher organizes the class there are in that period time when the teacher will spend time specifically with the honors options. So it's an interesting piece but I mean it really from the perspective of teachers it's a design piece that they are actually teaching two courses with the same students. The honors option is self selection so that has also implications on who's selecting to do honors level work. The other piece is that we are all recognized that the middle school curriculum has to be updated and revised because of the new common course standards and the rigor. So we can thank Betsy Dinger she organized student feedback there were some focus groups on a couple what was done before on March 19th to hear what students were saying about their experiences in the 7th grade. So one of the things that we can see in their comments are that they are appreciating their teachers their appreciating hands on learning and challenge. They also recognize and they comment on having standard expectations for all students. So the students recognize well if you're doing honors work you're being held to a higher standard for homework. So it was interesting that the kids were pointed back and they're also commenting on the pace of instruction and so it's interesting like we take our cues our youngsters know what it looks like to be in a classroom when it feels like it's a good fit and when it's not. So it is interesting data to hear from the students what they're talking about. So one of the comments from the non-honor student was instruction often does not feel useful when it targets honors level work. And vice versa an honor student had mentioned the pace of instruction can feel slow. So we're going to propose something that would be different from what currently exists is that the courses being offered next year there'd be two courses there would be a grade 7 math and there'd be a grade 7 math advanced. To determine the placement we would use multiple measures of student achievement we would use the MCAS information that we have from the last few years from grades 4 and 5 we would look at the map assessment data which is norm reference we would use the end of union assessments from everyday math what happens over the course of a year the students have been doing open response questions and we'd also have teacher recommendation. So when we look at this data we say given all this information we have about our students why would we need to have students take another exam. And that question came out also in our feedback we had parent nights with 6th grade parents and with 7th grade with the 6th grade parents were genuinely asking if you're doing all your assessment why do you need a separate assessment so I think it is a very valid question we would say that we actually have the data to make the recommendation. Now I want to go back to that important diagram. This is a really important to kind of understand what we're talking about. So one important idea is that to determine what we're going to teach in the middle school it is a combination of 7th grade and high school standards. That is what high performing school districts do. You actually put some of your high school standards in your middle school program. What we want to do in the work that we would be doing this summer with the high school is to be figuring out and identifying what would be the appropriate high school standards to put in the middle school. What we're imagining now if we look at this picture is that there would be an advanced math 7 and there would be a math 7. Now here's a really important point. We want to have the students when they finish middle school to be able to be on the trajectory for calculus. So at the very beginning of this presentation there's four years of high school math in this country. If we want students to take to offer the opportunity to be prepared to take a calculus in that 12th grade it means we have to compress four years of high school math into three years. So the work that the high school is doing and this is why it's been so important from the very beginning that Jane was working with us was we wanted the assurances and the thinking about how would we design that high school to be able to get those three years of math four years of math in three years but students who were not necessarily in that advanced 7 course could still take that calculus course. Why? We want to extend the window of opportunity for movement. So this is what's anchoring our thinking about how to do this well. Now the other part of our kind of our model is that we will be able to identify the students, let's say it's 25 to 30% that are in the 7th we don't know the number until we look at our data to see who's couple things. We'll have the recommendations in June. However we want to keep in mind that in the first four to six weeks of next year in the middle school is that there could be determination that a student could be moved to the more advanced class or vice versa. So it's not about saying this is the end dollar be all but we would move forward with our first recommendations about the placement right? So we kind of get that piece started. There's another piece it's the intervention. We go back to our core ideas that what we are setting our school district to say is that our criteria in math courses is that students are in rigorous math content. That's that we want we don't our goal is that we don't get phone calls in our advanced class that my child is not challenged and we also don't want to get phone calls in the advanced core in the regular 7th math that my child is not challenged because then we have not fulfilled our responsibility which to have engaging rich in curriculum. So to ensure that that happens we are looking very closely at our model for intervention at the middle school in the 7th grade for math intervention because here's what we have to make sure is the 7th grade course is a rigorous course and that if teachers have students which we can predict who would be struggling we don't want the teacher to feel like I can't go I can't continue with my program because I'm struggling with a student who doesn't have the background to keep up with the program. So our and the reason this matters is there's two kinds of intervention. We have done the work of ensuring that we have we have materials that are that we use to when we've identified the student is weak in fractions. We have a research base they're called math navigator materials which we call gap. We go and we help the student learn the fractions they don't have the background knowledge. You need another kind of an intervention to support students in the classes which means I'm in a class right now how do I succeed today with today's responsibilities. So the intervention piece that we want to expand in which we're paying a lot of attention to is that second tier of intervention. We need to have both to be successful to make the model work. So this is why the design considerations has involved and the work that's going into this is how to make the middle school schedule work because we want to be able to be able to show that we can have students move between the two groups which is an implication for scheduling. We also in terms which is we were not ready to do the selection of the text yet because now we actually know what it is we're looking for. We are looking for texts that are going to allow us to have two courses that run parallel. That's going to be an important factor. We're also we're also have to we're working with the six grade teachers on the selection criteria in terms of the multiple measures and then there is the school home communication with parents in June. There's the family and the communication and outreach work to help people understand what it is we're doing, why we're doing it and how to ensure what are like it is a big idea and how do you in lots of different venues help people understand what we're what we've proposed. And then the other piece of work is that we'll begin it's actually begun in the sense that because from the onset Jane has been right by our side to seeing can we do this but the work worth working with classroom teachers this summer to see what should be in the middle school that work is going to that's going to be like our front line work for next year in the summer. So right now it interesting, similar to when I was here talking about when we were looking at the elementary math textbooks interesting in the field of mathematics there isn't really long lists of middle school math curriculum options and we've called that we do due diligence to see what are people using. So right now we are in a fast track to understand which of these sets of materials are most closely aligned with the common core. I can say that one thing that we did find is that one of the set of materials for sure is that they are they in their way of organizing the changes is they offer a way in which a school district has access to every year a new set of workbooks that students use but they're updating it annually and they provide you the electronic resource. So they are managing the changes by basically making contracts with the school districts. We're going to go with you as the changes come forth and our job is to see how much of their claims right now. Everybody who writes something will claim that it's common core aligned. The work right now that's analytic, working with math teachers, working with the math coaches Ian and Jane is just really having people look closely at what's going to give us the most flexibility because we because they're close they were already aligned to the state to the common core. Let's see, so there are goals are is we've got to be able to identify exactly what standards we're teaching when our core math techs we're on a fast track. This number three is making sure that our math courses are transparent that would be when I say transparent not just to you is that an ordinary person can know what do I learn in middle school what like right now navigating the 11 courses at the high school. We could put it on a piece of paper but that's on a transparent process if there's 11 different options on what you would take in ninth grade. So it's really being really clear for kids to understand I learned this this comes next and this is what I'm doing and then it's the it's the intervention program. So our professional development that is that we are working we we heard tonight about the embedded professional development model we have going on the elementary level doctors doctors it also does work with the special education department he's working right now with a study group with kindergarten teachers to identify and create authentic assessments for kindergarten. We also have teachers that are going outside of the district in one case Kathy Fosson is doing really wonderful work on common court for little people and so we're having two math coaches and a second grade teacher go into that training. We also have Ian's working with the middle school they're there they're bigger project about writing across the curriculum is he's been working using the mathematical practice standards and the writing to make a connection to that work we also looking for we're going to use some grant funding to still allow to have teachers attend the summer math program at Mount Holyoke which is about developing deep ideas about mathematics and then we are partner we are still part of the partnership of Western Massachusetts math and they offer like July 1st and 2nd an institute that brings math educators together so so we're basically we're paying attention to any organization that's working on these problems to ensure that we're best informed in making these decisions and so we're going to hear from Jane because she's been working quite closely with our high school department this year you're wondering if she was going to give me a slide so our focus this year has been really on the common core practice standards which are the habits of mind for mathematically proficient students so for example it would be persevering in problem solving making a justification for an argument those types of things so the administrative team at the high school has been great they've supported us during late arrival days to work as a professional community learning community around the practice standards so I've taken some stuff that I went to a conference last summer that the nctm the national council of mathematics teachers put on and I've taken some of the materials their readings on the practice standards and we've done readings within our math department to try to really understand and unpack the practice standards what they would look like in the classroom what types of tasks would support the practice standards and how would we assess them at the end of the day so we've done some work using a case study that began with how do you plan what kind of tasks could you identify what kinds of questions would you ask what would the classroom look like all the way through assessment and through that work we have been actually practicing with each other so we've identified some tasks we've looked at them and said well could we change them just a little bit to incorporate some more of the practice standards and then what kinds of assessment questions would we ask to get there the reason why we've been focused on the practice standards is because that's what's new to us the content is there it's just a reorganization of the content so that's really we really need to norm ourselves around the practice standards before we start looking at curriculum so our we've also used some planning tools that we've implemented into our classroom and come back and sort of discussed how that worked and how well the tool helped us foster the practice standards in the classroom so our next area focus we're not going to leave the practice standards because they should always be incorporated into all of our work but our next focus is really working on the content standards with special attention right now to the 8th and 9th grade sort of alignment coming through for the summer work that we're going to have to do so Jane you're going to be a lot more popular within the next year on the presentations because the real work is going besides the alignment which sounds like that sounds like that has some kind of idea you identify which standards go where and how they get organized but one of the things that we're putting a lot of thought to is this notion of cohort so when a school district is transitioning math from one when you're reorganizing your sequencing of courses you always have to keep in mind where are these 7th graders in the process of transitioning so for example our current 6th graders had everyday math and they'll have the new program so that will be a different experience a year from now so that's a different cohort then we have another examples that our current 8th graders are going to go into the system that still we still have going on our current system in the high school by next year we will maybe in a different conversation what makes sense for the student so that's an important piece in terms of being very responsive and thoughtful to what the students are right now so I just think it's a very complex set of ideas and changes but what I would say is that the way we're going about do it is it's like methodical and thoughtful because what we're keeping center is what's the student going to experience we had an interesting question from our parent and said would we just keep everything just the same for next year because we did some changes in 6th grade and my answer to that is a couple things is that there's no question in my mind that our students benefited from the standards based math curriculum in 6th grade that set us up for a much more kind of consistency coming into our 7th grade and the other way to think about this is that our district has put resources to impact our mathematics and our students to have a really wonderful experience next year we're putting in the new resource why would we wait we're putting in the support the intervention is that we wouldn't want to wait another year if we actually have the ability to make a difference for the cohort of students so it's in this bigger things we can all predict in like the next 7 years there's going to be changes in the field but as a responsibility is that we always have to think about who are the students today yes the country we haven't figured this all out but we have a responsibility to look at what our cohort of students and create the best possible resources and math experience possible now we are going to say our next steps are which is that we are working very very around the clock right now to see which of the materials and we'd be able to come back to be able to say like which materials and why but we're not there yet we are looking at curriculum work for this summer in June and into the summer and then tonight this is a recommendation to Maria Garrick about that we would we are recommending that math 7 be the course offered next year in math 7 advanced and I will just end on saying is that by putting these two presentations together there's something that's very common between them is that in both departments the way in which we're approaching curriculum is saying how do we ensure that we can provide a guaranteed viable rigorous curriculum aligned for all students and we're using data to figure out how do we improve the system it's a systems level work to say what's going to benefit students over the long haul so I was it was really wonderful to have the science kind of analysis work prior because it also helped set the stage of what a district does to make the movements that would make a difference so that's our presentation thank you very very much thank you questions comments Michael so I'll just start by saying it's impressive and thank you but I have a specific point slash question so the first thing you were saying that you consulted six our six way teachers did you want to shoot spring yes okay so we so here's what we did we set up first I personally went with the principles and then out of the principal idea was the idea to post at lever it to do a parent evening that the was invited I then and being invited to come visit shoots very to catch up but technically they were invited and so but the reality is it just I think you had a lot of different things going on but the concept is in terms of our vision right now we've also been reaching out to the common school like we're we're ensuring that anybody who has students coming to us has the information that we have that's one piece and the other thing we're doing is that it's very important from our perspective is that when we're looking at negotiating kind of what we can get in terms of resources in terms of materials is that we're going to make sure that we count the number of teacher kits to really let the the publishers know that we have feeder schools and we need to be able to provide access to our different schools so they know what it is that we're teaching in our sixth grade so and I would say once we figure out what our training is is that anybody who's connected to us will be certainly invited to participate in the training that we're doing and that we are we're working with a much larger cohort that any of our other like they're just smaller we're we're actually working outside but we're definitely I will make sure I visit and set up an evening for shoots Barry so the questions can be answered okay thank you I guess I would just follow up yes that was the perfect great answer um so just my sense is you know time by regionalization and so even if this speaks to more cohesion so clearly that's a point but even if we were to regionalize you know there was discussion about sort of not necessarily like we just talked last week about that sort of throwing the curriculum to the wind but sort of figuring out how you transition over time so as long as we're thinking about the way you described it where even if we were regionalize at elementary level that we might be differing for some short period of time over transition that that's doesn't I mean she's first not making it easy lots of different ways but you know it's I think it sounds like you're trying to figure out how to bring people along get to the seventh grade place with enough stuff so thank you yeah and the other thing that we're thinking about is that earlier Ian mentioned that one of the things in the field that's really tricky for us is we can call a school district and they say it's elder but but no one knows what it really is that the way we get through that conversation is that people identify what standards are being taught so when we can say these are the standards we're teaching in sixth grade and by the way we're going to take a seventh grade standard and put it in sixth grade not today but that would be a trajectory because that's how you do as the students raise and proficiency you're able to move the standards down generally as a general practice but anyway if we are transparent on which standards we're teaching because of the way this is how we're organizing our work in the field is that presumably there are lots of ways for students to meet that standard and so we can be transparent on here are assessments this is how we know that our students have met the standard you can figure out how to do it and I'm just in general when we are working with any of these kinds of decisions it's really important on our end is that we get the best possible number of resources for the least amount of money so even the work when we go and we look at these other sets of materials one of the ways in which you approach this is you let the publishers know what another vendor is charging which is how we ended up getting the everyday math materials is that we kind of make sure we know our work and say you know what we're tied on our resources or this is the so that we try to really be very careful with our resources and we are sensitive to the elementary schools that are smaller we will share anything we can like anything and make the other thing the district is investing in on our end is the curriculum mapping software which will begin to be a place that it is web based that we can make what we're doing transparent so you're welcome other comments or questions I'm saving it for you you always get the last word I want us to be clear with regards to the recommendation for these two classes in seventh grade math one could see a scenario where this winds up with a challenge that this is somehow creating racial, ethnic or income tracking which we've had an experience in this district once before I'm hearing the the prophylactic addressing of this in terms of you know that there is these multiple ways in which multiple measures of who will be in one and who will be in the other and I'm also hearing I'm also looking at and hearing your presentation around this graphic of trying to have strong content in both classes such that folks can move as appropriate and one isn't the slow class and the other one isn't the good class but rather that they're both good classes but they're they're proceeding a different pacing with different goals and if one finds if one is in one area needs to go to the other because of where they are there's the possibility for that kind of movement and I hear that as a way but in terms of why make this shift we pride ourselves on being data driven but what's presented here is anecdotal program feedback and anecdotal student feedback what is the research telling us as to why we should rec why you would recommend us moving in this way as opposed to differentiated methods of instruction that could be maintained without separating kids out into these two different classes so part of so part of the there's research that would suggest that ability grouping benefits in mathematics and there's research that suggests that it doesn't that heterogeneous grouping is the way to go so when we look at where our system if I had a choice in education would I have peer would I would say I'm biased to this grouping and I bring that bias because I know high quality instruction that you can have content and students can access this then I look at where we are as a system right now and I look at where we are we've already we've already failed in some ways not in some ways we failed because if we look at the range of students who are currently in sixth grade I'm looking at a pragmatic issue so we could be in a school system where we don't have a purely heterogeneous math program in the middle school the reality is in terms of the pragmatics of it being successful I'm not when I look at where we are right now in terms of what's been available I don't see the feasibility I would love to be able to propose it so it's really about looking at the range right now and what I can say is that in sixth grade is a high-stakes exam fits into the qualification of significant issues about issues about equity it is hard to suggest that that assessment is a fair and equitable way to determine who would take an algebra one course and a geometry course in middle school on a trajectory in high school that would afford chances so it's a very it's like a case that we would want that if we were doing our work we'd look at that first to go from that level how this system has been orienting itself to a complete heterogeneous move in school systems to make the moves to make the changes on where we want to go you've got to do it in a way that the system can be successful with it so what the model represents is to kind of remove some of the barriers that actually was making it very hard because if you were not in that geometry course in the middle school your likelihood of ever learning with that student who took geometry in eighth grade I think would be very very low it'd be hard to conceptualize how that could happen so what I hear in your statement is actually things that I'm very I wouldn't say just me we have sat and we've had conversations about the importance of access and equity and high quality instruction the other piece of this is that we want to recognize in the field the teaching of mathematics what it takes to skillfully do that well we can consistently read the research that says that as a field we are not sufficiently prepared to actually meet the criteria in the field which would be to have high quality math instruction so it's not a perfect solution I would say that all of us are very very sensitive to who's where and what can we do I know that we're interested in finding cases in which if there's anyone who can actually be and we can provide the resources this model allows us to do something we actually couldn't do given the other model I'm not seeing a logical way to have actually done that in a way that I could be authentic to what was going on so we've actually made visible and transparent a practice that we don't see an argument that's needed to continue and we would love to be able to have classrooms where all students are together we are making a choice and we are not interested in a 50-50 we're not interested in putting as if you could arbitrarily decide that 50% of the kids should be in one class and not the other so the reason why I use the term criterion referenced kind of the assessment is that if you're going to be in that advanced course there's going to be criteria to stay in that math course so that it's like for right now it's kind of like when we also said that everyone struggles with this if there was a magic bullet or if there was a way to do math education well we would have cases of it so I would say we're setting ourselves up for a trajectory to be something you're proud of in a number of years but this is the messy part this is the part next year where we're working with this I also need to commend our 7th grade and 8th grade teachers presumably because our 7th grade level next year in this model will be teaching two different courses we've set up new curriculum materials and they will be working with students who are at different levels the other piece that we've also talked about is that in that advanced course there has to be just as much there has to be differentiation no matter in your advanced course or not because there will also be in an advanced course some students who are more advanced so this is not a notion of oh that group is all that that's going to be the easier to teach it really is about designing courses where the criteria is is it challenging and rigorous for the students in the class and if not what are we doing about it and what are the supports are we putting in place same in both but one of the following understanding the importance of language what I'd recommend to your recommendation is to rethink the term advanced and maybe think about the term vector and so you'd have a seventh grade math and a seventh grade math vector it's a nice math word I learned a long way but I think about the diagram you showed with all of the arrays going this way and that way being able to move this way boom that way and it made me think of vector analysis but anyway but just some other word that doesn't necessarily that really gets at what you described and that is a way in which to have strong rigorous math and a seventh grade challenging to all students in those particular classes and enabling students to move where it works best for them I think the language and it is a wrestling term one of the things that we didn't say explicitly that is getting lost in our terms and that is not widely used in middle schools is the notion of honors because there isn't honors there's your course expectations so there aren't some students in that same class the other thing to be aware of is our current model is it necessarily equitable and if we were to look to see who is doing the self-selecting to take the honors portion of the seventh grade course we're not going to see our sub-groups making those choices so the reality is that this isn't what we have right now what we're looking to do in a system is to actually change the dynamic of a difference we are certainly we'd be happy to entertain some other word besides advanced and see if we can come up with another term because I do hear the Latin language that's connected but it also gets connected to the word honors and it's like oh so they're advanced so that means I'm not so I think that's an important feedback and see if we can find something else we are making some choices right now to call things like math seven or at some point a math presumably something that allows the flexibility to get the standards that go in the course without having to change the name because that allows us here is what we teach in sixth grade we're increasing the rigging by putting the additional standards without changing everyone's thinking about what we're teaching in a middle school program so I like that so we will definitely see what we can come up with that's a good one two things I just want to appreciate the exchange I think Shabazz's question was right on and I appreciate your response two quick follow-ups one is I would agree with the choice of words I was thinking about that and it struck me in terms of the high school we have college prep and you have it's a piece of what's the other alternative but there's a positive connotation to college prep as well so you're not doing plain and better so I think that was something I was thinking as a noneducator I just want to this is mostly to get clarity because this is a big deal I get the inequity of the high stakes test part that makes total sense but it seems like the other part of it was on the one hand you were saying that you prefer the heterogeneous in that if you were starting at the right place you could achieve a four year trajectory but earlier you were talking about the current that basically the teachers were teaching two classes because they were doing extra stuff just so I understand it isn't that doing the extra stuff heterogeneous thing we're trying to differentiate and maybe not the best way so if you just tease that out because it would be helpful so currently in our current honors model we have heterogeneous grouping and in a sense we will still have a notion of heterogeneous grouping in these two courses what we're doing in a sense is narrowing the band so in order for teachers when teachers are developing skills and learning to do something that's very complex which is if I have 25 learners how do I ensure my instruction impacts all of them and they all come with different experiences the problem is more complex when students have very very different backgrounds in preparation because of where we are in our math education system at the elementary level so what I'm trying to do is we're narrowing the band a little bit to make the notion of differentiation to be more doable and more successful before we go on this is an incredibly important conversation that I do not want to do anything to curtail but I want to say that up front but we are approaching 10 o'clock which is far beyond what time we're supposed to be at so I'm going to ask for a motion from the committee to extend the time of our meeting so that we can take full advantage and I know people have been here a while but we also value what you have to say and I want to respect and value that very very clearly so just to be clear about the qualities I'm going to ask for a motion to extend to a period of time contained within the motion make sense Trevor? I'll make a motion we extend this meeting for at least another half an hour to hear what so I'm hearing 1030 is there a second? any discussion? not hearing any all those in favor of extending the meeting please raise your hand thank you very much again a value he woke up you better come up with questions and comments we're in real big trouble here Lawrence? no I'm just abstaining I have to get up at 5.30 one abstention comments and questions I have one comment if I may and maybe it's more to the audience out there than it is to you being and I don't think there's any surprise a very strong advocate of regionalization pre-K through 12 I can't think of a more important conversation amongst many similar conversations to have than this one but what I find incredibly frustrating about being on the region is a personal reluctance to intrude upon what is the domain of the Amherst Elementary School Committee I always feel a reluctance to go beyond the 7th grade and ask questions or make comments having said that I'm going to go ahead I'm going to go ahead and please tell me if I'm wrong but I always find mathematic conversations about math fascinating because I'm not a mathematician I always feel like I learn a tremendous amount from people who do know about math it's a very unique way of looking at the world and I think it also involves a very unique understanding of the use of language an understanding of language language acquisition decoding and ability to use language appropriately in the right context conversations about math always seem to me no matter how good they are lack of context and that context is language which for me goes back to pre-k and I guess what I'm pitching is as confusing as it may sound a pitch for regionalization because I think this conversation needs to take place within that broader context of pre-k through 12 we're talking about 7th graders out of context we're talking about 6th graders out of context it's a continuity there that I don't think we talk about in a concrete way it's very abstract if we talk about it at all and I think given the importance that our country is placing on mathematics and the development of mathematical skills and ability and transferability to the real world context regionalization takes on an incredibly greater importance to me that this conversation must take place when we meet again as a committee a pre-k through 12 committee so that we can talk about this not just in terms of 6th and 7th graders but pre-k, kindergarten 1 through 5 and so on that's just my pitch it's not a question it's a comment but I thought this was I always feel that I'm being elevated to a new level of mathematical understanding when I participate in these discussions or participate in these opportunities to listen to people who know what they're talking about thank you very, very much but I do think that context is missing Trevor thank you and this solemn discussion about mathematics and being accurate I want to make sure that we correct and remind everyone that we unanimously 100% mathematics voted on k through 6 and so I don't want to put words in your mouth but just to rephrase that as in a conversation of how a k through 6 region would feed into a 7th grade in a line this way rather than choosing our words to have folks think that it was the other way I just wanted to make sure I threw that in especially since we mathematics and language you have to be accurate may I comment on that I know what I meant and what I meant was pre-k through 12 so let me finish please what I meant was pre-k through 12 we may have voted for a pre-k through 6 but I still but I still believe that the proper context to have this conversation is a pre-k through 12 context not a pre-k through 6 and a 7 through 12 that's what that's where I'm coming from I want to comment Mr. Chavaz when he brought to the surface underlying kind of what's this model and kind of why there's an aspect of it that's problematic is that it's really going to be really important for you to understand what the principles are about why for right now in this time why this is a helpful move here's why next year we're not going to be perfectly successful with this I can guarantee you that the first year is going to look different from the second year but if we understand and ask questions and continue to probe what are we trying to do in our system what are the tools are going to allow us in this model with flexible grouping but what does it mean for a middle school to have flexible grouping when there's real real complications with scheduling and teaming because our notion at the middle school is a team structure so the kinds of complications that go in to make this happen for next year is that one model could be that a classroom teacher in seventh grade teaches one section that is this I'm going to call it the A group and the B group so they're vanilla and that would put us in a situation where 25 only 25% of the students could be in the A group let's say there were four sections and 75% would be so the only way we could make a movement and have the students move is that we either have a situation where a teacher had a classroom that was much larger than the others that doesn't meet our criteria of flexible grouping so the kinds of conversations we've had to talk about is that if students were in the B group which is say the B group is the smaller group what would it look like if they came from different teams if you're following the logic then that actually would give us more flexibility that we could add one more section we could have one teacher who teaches two sections of a B class so I'm giving that as an illustration a complication to take an idea that's rooted in the belief not just the belief but in the understanding that high quality math instruction is about having teachers who know how to meet the needs of all students we're trying to create the conditions to have that happen sooner rather than later to be successful because ultimately if we're not I can assure you who is going to miss out the quality of the experience of what students have in the middle school so we have always concept like our conversations have always been where do we want to end up and then what are the right now what have been the barrier what has been a barrier that's allowing it to make it very difficult to kind of stand through what we know would be good to design a program so I do consider this a piece of a much larger agenda or commit I wouldn't say agenda it's a commitment in this school district to remove barriers of entry to all of our courses can I just in and I'll just preview it's probably our May so this conversation around six seven eight sets up a larger conversation for nine through twelve and it then creates different opportunities for the number of options going into grade nine and then we come out with whatever that might be a sequence for probably the following can I say that that's a lot of work but that's where we are because everything we're doing here is now setting up for changes and shifts is that fair to say it's really this is very hard massive shifts massive work on the part of the teachers and the organization to make this a reality very few districts would undertake this kind of a change and in this period of time in particular we'll take the change or the time frame just a quick question since you mentioned that Maria so Marc has left but a year ago I believe he said that he had given the math department at the high school the task of looking into rethinking finding some kind of center that would be between the traditional pathway and the sorry my daughter is in it now yeah IMP thank you is are we stepping away from that or are we where are we at with that just for sure so who would charge us to go to one pathway yeah one pathway right sorry yes that's right yeah there's one pathway yeah the charge was really to go to one pathway so the pathway needs to support the common core standards so that's our charge but it's a much more as you can tell complicated issue because we really had to start with you know all the way going from K to 12 so next year is really implementing some of the middle school changes and then the hope is the following year that we'll be able to implement the high school changes and then I have a follow up and I think and what people can't lose sight of is that even if there's one pathway it doesn't mean differentiation is lost exactly yes you still be having the accelerated courses students entering into the AP courses but with many less roots to get there yeah and so this is a May discussion we have coming up and I can kind of hold it because what's been going around the community is that that one pathway is all IMP and there's a lot of concerns that that's going the wrong way we haven't even started looking at curriculum yet so I'm not saying that IMP isn't something we would look at but there's a lot of curriculums out there that support the common core standards and so you know as we've done our work and we're ready to start reviewing curriculums then we will be going through many curriculums to decide on the best fit one kind of take away one way to kind of to kind of begin to understand like what does this process look like is that just like at the middle school we've been saying that we have to identify which standards are being taught in seventh and eighth grade and what portion of the high school standards would presumably make its way into the middle school when we go to look at the high school program it's the same process of identifying which standards and how do they get clustered together and why is that and what it's going to be a very interesting process because remember that idea where we have the four years have to be put into three years of a course so you have to organize things we also said something like it's pretty common that if you want to support advanced students in math that they want to double up if in fact you only create a sequence that you have to do the first thing the second thing and the third thing is the way we set it up to double up so we have to design not only we have to take the four years and put it in three years look at the opportunity that we could have a course sequence where students could take two math courses simultaneously and not disrupt their developmental ideas in mathematics so that analytically is the work that the high school has to figure out which is actually a parallel process to what we're doing at the middle school so this is a precursor to how a school just sets this up based on standard that's why that notion I say this word like standards based it's actually the tool that allows you to ensure that you're going in a logical way for kids so that's why we're not just like we couldn't even look for materials till we figured out what we needed we can't figure out and who knows what's going to be in the field by the time the system is ready and there's an interesting part of this is that there's something advantageous to see what every day more people are getting into this piece about how do you create high school level math materials that are aligned to the new standards so there is a little bit of your weight and you there is a piece about you basically that's why the cohorts really matter it's you meet the needs of the cohorts and then you look what's the most thing available because I guaranteed you I said I couldn't promise you that every day math would be here for a decade because we knew that there were too many pieces moving but it was the best thing available from last year and even today if I had to make the decision now we would still say nothing new because this field is a little bit waiting to align your curriculum with the assessments Thank you very very much Thank you very much and now you need to sleep Thank you for staying I really appreciate it Thank you very much Thank you members of the committee for spending time we're going to skip over policies until the 23rd we do have to accept gifts Rick there's an Amherst and then there's a region so Rick could do both one at a time I move for this region I move to accept in-kind donation from John Vance to the high school athletics high jump standards is there a second? discussion in favor carries unanimously for the Amherst school committee I move to accept a donation from Colin and Bridget Rue RUHE to support Betty Affey art scholarship fund for $100 is there a second? all those in favor? thank you Michael a quick update on the regional school district planning board should we talk fast? please do a few hours ago I thought it was good so there's three pieces just to frame it so we met last Monday the thing to hold and know is between now and June 30th the focus of the work is really dealing with two things the regional agreement because we based on funding we have to get the legal work done by June 30th so it's crunch time in terms of looking at stuff we have a process of dealing with some of the core issues like governance etc and then the other key component is the educational plan which has to get delivered to the ESC which where he is going to take the lead on and then confer with the educational committee and then we have a new version in terms of timing actually I know you've been invited to these things before but these actually might be more important is we're having two meetings where we're going to basically look at the regional agreement so the comedians are going to be doing their work coming together we'll look at one draft June 1st which is the Saturday we're going to have a big multi-hour meeting then we'll come back with additional work and then if we need to do June 26th but the idea is somewhere by the end of June by June 26th we'll have essentially all the concepts that are wrote so we'll have comprehensive document it won't be in legalese yet we're going to then send it to the lawyer for that but the idea is it will come out of that so that's sort of like the time part just the process piece this is a little complicated but what has come out in checking with the lawyers is that as Trevor pointed out there was unanimous agreement to create pre-K, 6 region, but for 3 towns the regional agreement is going to be written so that Shoot'sbury could join in by right so what we learned from DEC is that if Shoot'sbury were to vote in December of any year it could then join in July subsequently so for example if it voted in December of 2013 it could join in a new pre-K, 6 region July 1st when everyone else starts to start together and that would hold for any year the thing that DEC said was in writing the regional agreement you want to have a limited window where you do that by right so it was suggested in the 3 years so that it doesn't just apparently there was one region where it was 20 years it just got extended which is crazy so after the 3 year window Shoot'sbury didn't act in the regional agreement but the complexity is that we're writing the regional agreement so that it's good for 3 towns and if Shoot'sbury voted it would something that would kick in for 4 towns so that's sort of the process DEC would approve it in December or January this year and then presumably it was approved the region would start July 1st 2014 so this is a 6 month implementation stage so but the town meetings don't decide the fall yes in November or Amherst Home the vote would be in November and then Shoot'sbury would have till December 31st to vote and just to clarify in Amherst it would be a townwide meeting it would be a townwide meeting and then the thing that's most important I think for this body is in the last few days there's been these working groups that we focused on so Governors and Finances but there's a lot of other issues that need to be in the regional agreement if you just look at cost allocation to the central office so right now region Amherst Home I'll share the cost of the central office so if you had 2 regions you've got to figure out what's the cost allocation between pre-K6 and 712 and so there's the way this is just the complex part and then we can disconnect so there's a lot of specific things that we need to get written into the regional agreement by June 30th the hiring process the cost allocation there's a whole bunch of things that Kip and I were saying we need to make a launch to us to figure out what it is you're writing in the governance issue which is and we've talked about this before once the pre-K6 region gets created there would be school committees to then appoint to us so we'd have to change that that timing does not have to be June 30th in fact what we would probably do is postpone that because it's only as a so if DESE approves the new region in January of 2014 there's still 6 months period where the regional school committee this regional school committee would have to come up with a plan approve it have the towns amend it and be in place for July 1st so it was 6 months before we were out of compliance so in terms of sequencing with the regional school committee the idea would be to identify the issues that need to get built into a regional agreement now and then again we could save those changes because when we amend our regional agreement in spring 2014 we would just do it whole you know all together but we want to identify it for getting it into the pre-K6 regional agreement through June 30th and then and so the last thing is KIP is going to work with Andy Steinberg who's the chair of the regional school planning board to figure out what the timing the process is which it's only been a couple of days of identifying this stuff so but the key would be this body here is going to have to approve stuff and buy into some of the changes whether it's cost allocation and the hiring to pretend all that kind of stuff so we just have to figure out the timing by which that gets figured out and gets brought forth here so there's some coordination but we haven't quite gotten it but some has to be budgeted in 30th and then we don't have to amend it till the spring so that's the deal thank you Michael I just had two little pieces one is just daily how detailed the regional agreement must be borderline minutia and so Michael's point about three categories of governance, finance and education are one way of beginning to identify where certain items go very detailed items go and also can by categorizing them also see linkages from governance to finance and so on and so forth but it's really getting down to the details now the second point is that I think it would be in the interest of the regional committee as a committee with all due respect to all of you as individuals that we wait until after all town meetings have taken place because the composition of this group could change by as much as a third depending upon how town meeting votes go so I don't think we will be coming forward asking you to consider a proposal but it will probably not be until after June 1 thank you Michael any questions Michael if not then as I said we will put off the policies for the 23rd I will send out an email to members of the committee from possible dates for us to convene unless you have calendar items motion to adjourn second second all those in favor we are adjourned thank you very much thank you