Superintendent's Update

Transcript (~9 min @ 29:28)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 29:27 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: a motion to close please so moved second made by miss Casatelli seconded by miss

▶ 29:34 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: McAllister grand discussion all in favor opposed that motion carries unanimously and we are moving on to the announcements of the superintendent of

▶ 29:42 Speaker 2: schools Thank You Mr. Driscoll a number of things I apologize as you all know it's been a little bit busy so not everything made it onto paper in terms of previews tomorrow DESE will release the MCAS they will not deliver children's individual score reports to us until October 24th and at that point we take them out of the DESE packages restuff them into envelopes and send them home so it's a little bit of a labor-intensive process one of the

▶ 30:17 Speaker 2: things that you all should be aware of is this is a very different instrument and DESE is doing a lot of education publicly around how this is so different not only has the test changed the scoring has changed there are also no accountability this year for K through eight excuse me three through eight only for high schools they are they need the year to transition they've had three different exams in four years and they are struggling to transition to some

▶ 31:02 Speaker 2: sort of comparison none of us know how they're going to do that but and in that effort they decided no accountability this year for elementary and middle schools only for high schools and then they are supposedly going to reset the baseline in 2018 and begin moving forward then we'll have more information for you when we present on November 14th but it's important for you to know that this is a very different outcome and a very different process than we've done for 25 years purposely so on desi spot it's a reflection of changes in curriculum instruction changes in expectation a major concern of desi's is college and career readiness and whether or not the 10th grade MCAS which is the competency determination that children have to pass graduation is really telling colleges how ready kids are or are not so it's a long-term view of how we get a better exam that is more valid and reliable as a predictor for college and career readiness so lots of information coming forward on that better news just want to share that tomorrow not tomorrow the 25th Winthrop is having a what are they calling it unity day it is national bullying profession month and workup is going to have a unity day everyone's going to wear orange and they're going to do a project connect and that's where they make the

▶ 32:45 Speaker 2: paper what's that thing called you know the chain the paper chain and they're gonna see how long they can make the paper chain with all approximately 402 students I think is what they have currently so it'll be a lot of fun for Winthrop and I hope they get a lot of good coverage out of that another matter is the same collaborative communities are applying for the radar grant I think I shared that with you recently radar is the resource allocation and district district action reports this is a new new tool that DESE has created most of us excited about it as excited as you can get about more data mr. O'Connell's laughing at me about that but it gives us a lot of very good data much better data than we had not only about our own district but comparisons to others it's better than the other instrument that they had had before we've applied for the grant because we felt where there was more strength in numbers we would put forth a project to them about how to improve inclusive practices and an inclusion of students what would be our metrics what would be our methodology if we get the grant we will know in November I'm sure there's a lot of other communities also applying for the grant but we felt that as a collaborative we had a better chance the last thing is competency based education I've been in meetings with our partners great schools partnerships over the past couple of weeks we've been assessing where we are in our work what we've done so far it was a very very busy summer we did professional development in June twice in August in October and we'll be doing it again on the PD day in November at this point we're drafting scoring criteria for habits of learning the arts music communities and PE are developing scoring criteria for their proficiencies stem is just beginning to review the CBE framework and work on standards and

▶ 35:03 Speaker 2: indicators as its humanities and what we're hoping is by mid-year we can pilot the habits of learning and based on conversation I had today with great schools partnership and dr. Adams we're going to shift our work a little bit and try to get to the more practical piece of CBE the abstract piece is getting people a little bit bogged down and we think if we we shift to the more practical piece people will have a deeper understanding and we can cycle back to the abstract piece so that's where we are in CBE just as a other side note in CBE our five people can't five person team came back from the visit to San Diego very charged so a lot of good things so a lot of things they didn't like we have yet to sit down and debrief they think there are some things we can adopt at a low cost so I'm looking forward to hearing about that and as I was sharing earlier tonight with Mr. Selm I'm participating in a technical advisory group with competency works and I Nicole we're trying to write a better definition of competency based education and I'm one of about a hundred people across the country who are participating online it's a very interesting experience I'm used to being in room a room with people wordsmithing to the nth degree and everything is being done on a Google Doc so it's a whole new world for me so those are the updates on those matters any questions for the

▶ 36:40 Speaker 7: superintendent this McAllister grant could you just explain the shift from

▶ 36:42 Speaker 4: abstract to practical with so you practical so when you're doing

▶ 36:47 Speaker 2: competency-based education you have to if you've remembered Becky's presentation you have to write out figure out your content area proficiencies and then your graduation proficiencies and when you're figuring out your content area proficiencies you also have to write your scoring rubrics so that we all have the same language what is meets expectation what meets exceeds expectation as you can imagine with any group of educators that can get a little

▶ 37:20 Speaker 2: argumentative and so and we could spend a lot of time in the weeds so we decided that maybe what we have to think about is moving back to what are the practices that make up competency-based education how do you implement those actual instructional practices in your classroom what do they look like and then circle back to the abstract around the scoring rubrics and the proficiencies per se it doesn't mean we're going to stop our work in that area we're just going to flip our priorities thank you additional questions for the

▶ 38:02 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: superintendent seeing none thank you very much next on our agenda is this the consent agenda which tonight contains the following the school committee regular meeting minutes of September 26 2017 the MHS field trip request build on