Report: End of Year Curriculum Wrap Up

Transcript (~26 min @ 42:58)

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▶ 43:00 Speaker 2: Any questions

▶ 43:05 Speaker 2: All right. Hearing any, we can move on.

▶ 43:07 Speaker 7: So, I've been here several times on the last meeting in June to present data, to talk about PD, to talk about curriculum. I've been a part of the curriculum office now for several years, and I've always come before you, along with usually our assistant superintendent. And we've talked about all of these things separately. What I believe the override has allowed us to do this year that we haven't been able to really think about before is how are all these pieces intertwined? And as we're thinking about updated curriculum and updated PD and all of those things, we would be having a very different conversation if the override hadn't passed. And so I am incredibly grateful to the voters of Melrose to make sure that we have the resources that we need, and that this memo really clearly outlines the very concrete next steps. I think we've come before you before with some ideas and some wishes and hopes. Wishes and hopes don't move student data, so I'm going to be honest about what we see and why we see that. But also, we've worked diligently, at least over the past probably two months, as data's been coming in, as we've been getting feedback from staff about what do we actually need, and so that we could make a plan moving forward. So what you'll see tonight is a big kind of visioning piece. So when you think about that triangle, we're really in that upper portion of like, here's the big picture, and then July and August are really when we're going to nail down some of those details. So you have the three memos in front of you. I have a brief slide presentation to kind of help tie all of those things together. So, Miss- Sorry. Hold. That's okay. There it is. Awesome. So these are just a few high-level highlights that are listed here. The areas of significant growth when we think about our elementary growth, this year, both in ELA and math, we have our growth in K to five, 67% to 84% meeting or exceeding in ELA, and 72% to 83% meeting or exceeding in math by the end of the year. One of the things that I want us to be cautious about is the IXL data at the secondary is skewed, and I'm going to name it as skewed. We had some implementation concerns and challenges that we are working through. I actually met with the high school and middle school admin team today to talk about how are we going to use next year as our baseline when we get to the fall, right? So what is that going to look like for students? What is that going to look like for staff? And what's our role as administrators in helping to make sure that that messaging and that communication is shared appropriately? So, the data here is what it is. Ms. Driscoll mentioned earlier about the 15% of 10th graders that are meeting math expectations. While that is a frightening number, I do not think that that's accurate based on kind of what I've seen being in classrooms and talking to teachers. However, it is a number, it is a piece of data, right, that we need to take into consideration. But we also have about a third of our high school that didn't take the assessment at all. And so when you have a third of the high school that didn't take the assessment at all, that's really going to skew our number or percentage of students that are meeting or exceeding. So as you look at the memos, as you look at the slides, keeping that in mind is a really important piece of we're looking at skewed data to begin with. We're hoping that next year we have a really solid kind of new baseline to work from, especially as we think about the secondary campus.

▶ 47:08 Speaker 7: All right.

▶ 47:12 Speaker 7: So, we actually did a lot. So as I kind of sat down to think about what we accomplished this year, I was really impressed with the work of our dedicated teachers and our administrators that worked with them. We completed a year-long true pilot of a program, and we had not done that in several years. So 15 teachers taking on UFLI as their core curriculum for phonics instruction. In K to two, we had teachers in every building. We had teachers at every grade. And really this momentum of us moving to that next year is because of that group. If they would've come to me and said, "Mel, this is not what we think is best," we would've had a conversation about that. They are the ones that are the driving force behind this, and they are now the experts in their buildings that are going to help with implementation come the fall. The other piece that I want to highlight is the immense amount of work that was done by the program review and selection committee for math. Math has been a topic in this chamber for several years. We talk about it at MCAS data. We talk about it at mid-year data. Math has been a challenge for us to figure out kind of what is that fix that we need to think about, and curriculum and high-quality curriculum that meets CURRI in Ed Reports is kind of fix number one, right? So you'll hear me reference Reveal. But the reason we went with that program was all of the work that the math program review and selection team did. We met several times over the course of the year. They had great discussions. They were a super professional group that could disagree with each other respectfully and challenge each other's thinking, challenge my thinking. So I was really proud of those two accomplishments as well as the others that are listed. So you'll see for next year, if you can go to the next slide, Ms. Connor. Thank you. We really have four main pieces of curriculum that we're implementing for next year. So we have UFLI Foundations, which is going to be our core program at the elementary K-2 for phonics only. We are not throwing out MyView. We are not getting rid of MyView. MyView is the other strand of the Scarborough's Rope. So phonics is that first word recognition strand, and then we have all of the background building and vocabulary and comprehension. That's where MyView is going to support us best. You've heard me talk about Reveal now several times. I've come before you and talk about our math program. It is going to be the first time we have one consistent program, K through Algebra 2 or Integrated 3, whichever pathway students are on. The math team has looked at this. One of the major reasons we went with Reveal is the amount of built-in Tier 2 tools that we have at our disposal, both digital and just lessons teachers can pull and say, "Oh, I have all of these students that are struggling with this, and here's a built-in lesson that Reveal says that I should try first to adopt to try and address some of that." So working with our staff to make sure they're really trained well. We were lucky enough to be able to train every staff member who'll be teaching math before they left for the summer. So everyone walked away with their teacher materials. Everyone walked away with initial training. We have a group of train the trainers at the elementary level that are becoming our experts, and then the whole secondary team was trained. One of the more quiet changes that Ms. Tsoutsos really had a strong handle in was moving to MyPerspectives for our entire middle school. So middle school ELA has also been a data concern for us for many years. And really thinking about what does that look like as kids are transitioning from the elementary to middle school, and really thinking about what is aligned with what MyView is. So MyPerspectives is the next level up for MyView. And we had a pilot at the sixth grade, had buy-in from educators there. It's standards aligned, and the units will be able to provide some flexibility for teachers to still be able to do book clubs and those kinds of things that they all love and that we find really valuable for kids. But they'll have some really concrete standards aligned units with essential questions. And then lastly, this also was kind of quieter. We know we have a gap with our multilingual learners. We had been using curriculum from 2010. There are new standards that were released in 2020. So we were using curriculum that didn't match the updated WIDA standards. So we'll be moving to Vista Higher Learning next year. Our MLL team were the ones that chose that curriculum. We looked at three, and that was our kind of winner. What we loved about it is-- So if you're not sure, I'm also the MLE director for the district, and that's also part of my role, so I work closely with the ELL team. And what we loved about it is that it has a dedicated newcomer curriculum that's differentiated by grade span. So if you're a nine through 12 student who's just arriving at the United States, who's coming to Melrose High School for the first time, there is a curriculum now completely dedicated to you when you're in your ELL class, that's going to help with some of the non-academic language that we need time to develop, but also supporting with curriculum standards that are more appropriate at that grade level. What we had before was a ninth grader would show up and they're using materials that a fourth or a fifth grader would have, and that just doesn't feel good. So this is a dedicated newcomer curriculum, along with a curriculum for levels two through five. All right. So what does this all mean? So we took the PD survey that we gave to staff. We had 173 participants in the PD survey. In the years that we've been giving it, we've probably had between 50 and 60. So we had over triple the amount of people fill it out, which is awesome, and gave us a lot of really good data about what do people actually need and not just what do they want to see in PD, right? So we asked very specific questions about, like, "Where is your skill gap in ELA? Where is your skill gap in teaching math?" With choices that they could select. So with that information, with our data, with our curriculum review, we came up with the four pillars of professional learning for next year. So obviously, Tier 1 and 2 literacy practices. So what is the whole group getting? And then how do we help support those gaps for each of those two subjects? Targeted subgroup support, thinking particularly about our multilingual learners and our students with disabilities. And then equity-centered instruction, but not just academic, right? So how are we helping with sense of belonging? How are we helping with social emotional success? All of those things. So all of the PD you're going to hear about next year will be centered on one or more of those pillars. And they also tie directly to our goals of the strategic plan and school's individual school improvement plans. And then lastly, this is a slide that just ties the data back to the PD pillars. So what data did we use to identify what those pillars would be? And you can read about that. And then if you want to go to the next. Here are our next steps in our implementation timeline. So in June and July, we've put a pause on PD being offered through the district so that we can get a better sense on where are we in comparison to DESE's high-quality professional development standards. DESE has 10 standards of what high-quality professional development should be. We want to align ourselves with what that is. Leadership team is going to do a book study on resetting some of our MTSS systems. So MTSS is multi-tiered systems of support. And then the PD committee is meeting throughout the summer to really finalize what that PD needs to look like. There'll be a relaunch of staff PD starting August 3rd. There'll be opportunities for people to sign up for PDs like we traditionally have had before, along with a full calendar for the 2026/27 school year. We're looking at leadership and teacher leaders. One of my favorite PD opportunities of the year is our MTSS day. So we bring everybody together, we talk about what MTSS needs to look like in each of our buildings and within each of our content areas. And then we're deep into planning for our August 31st and September 1st return to school PD days that I'll bring before you, hopefully in the next month or so. So that's a lot of information. There's a lot of information and specifics in each of these memos. So there's a memo about our PD plan, there's a memo about our end-of-year data, and a memo about our curriculum review. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have.

▶ 57:07 Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Ms. Acevedo, and thank you to the committee- ... and the co-chair. We really appreciate sharing the interrelated strands here so that we can understand the full picture rather than taking them one at a time. So if anyone has any questions, we'll open the discussion on any of the different pieces.

▶ 57:27 Speaker 4: Mr. Harmon. I'll start off with a question around the IXL testing that you said there were some gaps there. Mm-hmm. I'm just curious about that and wondering two things. One, if you could explain a little bit more about that. I'm wondering, it sounds like there's some scheduling issues that arose with that. Is that the source of why we have one-third without getting results? And the second question is, we had MCAS this spring. Was that an issue also with MCAS, that we saw less people taking MCAS during that period as well? Do we have a sense of what that number looks like? I think I'm searching for reliable data and where we- Yeah ... need to put that in our mind.

▶ 58:06 Speaker 7: Absolutely. So MCAS is a little bit different because we have it as a graduation requirement still. So now even though question to remove the need to pass MCAS as part of our competency determination and as part of our graduation requirements, you have to sit for MCAS in order to graduate. So our participation rate is relatively same. It'll be interesting when they start releasing data, and we're able to look at was effort and kind of how was our scores this year versus last year versus the year before, right? And so, that's one of the things that I'll be looking at closely is, is the effort or attention to detail going down at the high school because it's no longer a requirement to pass MCAS to graduate. So that's one of those pieces. The other piece we kind of contended with was at the high school, we didn't plan early enough last year. So we were telling teachers when they returned from break, "Here are the dates that we want you to put this new test into place." And we ran into AP testing, we ran into final exams. We ran into kind of all of these other pieces of things teachers just had already planned before they even left the year before. So we've already started putting our assessment calendar together. We added things to the staff calendars that if those that want to take a peek can, those kinds of things. So we've been much more strategic about timing. And one of the hopes that we can think about, one of the shifts we're definitely going to make at the secondary. Elementary, I think we're okay. I think we're in good shape. The teachers and staff have a routine. We're going to keep what's called the flex diagnostic at the elementary. We're going to return to a more traditional benchmark at the secondary. So there'll be designated periods of the day where all students will be taking the benchmark assessment, and we'll have a slightly altered schedule for the day. And we'll do that for both ELA and math. What that'll also eliminate is that need for being on at 10 minutes a week in what's called the diagnostic arena to keep their pinpointing up. So we're already addressing where we saw some of the challenges to see if we can get some reliable data. I think that also thinking about the fact that this is a standards-aligned assessment, it's not only just giving us information about how students are doing, but it's also giving us information about how our curriculum is aligned to the standards, how teaching and learning is going in classrooms, particularly amongst our subgroups. Are we starting to close those gaps and those kinds of things. So the IXL benchmark doesn't just kind of assess where students are, but it's also giving us some other information, and I think if people better understood that, some of what we heard as negative impact on students is going to kind of help Maybe not rectify itself completely, but it's going to help make headway in that mindset piece. You're also adopting a group of fifth graders going to sixth grade who this is just what it is. I go online every day, and I go and do some of my IXL work. And as that goes up in the grades, that's also going to make an impact. Mm-hmm. Our math data in MCAS has been okay, but our subgroup data has not. So we're seeing that trend translate to other areas. And then with new curriculum, this also gives us an opportunity to use their assessments to see how are we doing more holistically. Whereas all of our assessments at the high school were teacher-created because our curriculum was teacher-created. So there's nothing wrong with that, but sometimes having a more standardized approach can give you more information, and more valid information about how students are doing.

▶ 1:02:18 Speaker 4: Thank you. Mm-hmm.

▶ 1:02:26 Speaker 1: Mr. Kelley? Sure. Thank you very much. I've kind of got a question, and maybe this is to the superintendent, but in some of the surveys here where you've got the deepening teacher knowledge, where they want more help, I think they need a little bit more help it sounds like, and also some of the surveys it looks like around math. How would we measure that the teachers are getting what they need to implement this stuff and that they're feeling comfortable and if there's a point maybe in the year where you'd assess like maybe we aren't doing enough to help them or we're on the right track? How does that all come together?

▶ 1:03:05 Speaker 7: So that's the work of the PD committee. One of the standards that we're not addressing right now from DESE is how are we effectively measuring our own success of giving PD, right? So, they see it two ways. They see it through student outcomes, but they also see it through impact. And so how are we making sure that the PD that we're giving is impactful? That's one of the things that Michelle and I have been talking about quite a bit, and what are the measures and the metrics we put in place. Do I have an answer for what that is sitting here on June 23rd? Not yet, but will we before we walk into school on August 31st? Absolutely. So the PD committee is meeting four times throughout the summer. We meet virtually. It's one of the only contract committees that will continue to do work throughout the summer just so that we can make sure we're constantly prepared. And that is one of the questions that we have is how do we know what we're doing is working beyond the student data, right? How do we know? And that might be helping survey teachers, that might be some focus groups we talked about, and just lunchtime conversations, having people that are on the PD committee have those lunchtime conversations with people about, "Oh, I know the three of us were in this great PD together. How are you implementing it in your classroom?" I think that's one of the big things that from the negotiations that piece around the impact the PD is having in classrooms and how you're applying that information is going to be important for me to look at, right? So whether it's through more formalized walkthroughs or when I'm just visiting classrooms, that's going to be something that's at the top of my mind is seeing how is the PD we're providing to everyone being implemented within their classrooms, and then how are things that people are taking also working that way. Okay. Thank you. Mm-hmm.

▶ 1:05:16 Speaker 4: Yes, Mr. Harmon. I would also just call out again the literacy efforts that are included here, the pilot. I'm really grateful for the teachers that took part in that pilot and gave the district the ability to build on it. I think that's so important to call out. There's been such a directed focus at literacy again, and it's spelled out in this memo as well. Could you talk a little bit about this next year and dig a little more in detail about how that rolls out to other buildings and what that involves in terms of PD and other elements that have to be in place for that?

▶ 1:05:48 Speaker 7: Sure. So we've already also been able to train any teacher who wasn't part of the pilot on UFLI. Ms. Churchill has really taken the lead on that. She became an early UFLI adopter and said, "All of my K to 2 teachers are going to use it, and we're going to see what the data says at Horace Mann." Right? And then she offered for teachers to take an optional PD last January, so January 2025. That's where we got our pilot group. She's now trained anyone who wasn't part of that pilot group, all general education K to 2 teachers, any special education teachers that wanted to come because even though they're using specialized instruction, it's important for special ed teachers to understand what tier one instruction also is happening in the classroom. And we're working on getting the language to be the same. So whether it's a tier one support, tier two support, or tier three support, let's all use the same thing for King Ed, Magic E, Silent E, Vowel Consonant E. What is that language? So there's that piece that's already happened. So we've already done that. I was able to purchase through override funds the workboards that are recommended to go with UFLI. We're also looking at UFLI as our intervention source for Three through five, who are not quite ready for multisyllabic words. We're looking at a couple other programs for kind of kids that are in that grades three through eight range, who still need phonics instruction but are beyond simple words, and that's where UFLI stops in working on multisyllabic decoding. We're also able to have two reading sp-- Mm, Ms. Berman, you're going to have to correct me if I'm wrong, but two reading specialists at the elementary. We have an additional reading teacher at the high school, and an additional reading teacher at the middle school. So those have all been investments that we've been able to make. In addition to the curriculum, is actual people who can provide some tier two interventions, so that we can strengthen our tier one and tier two. And then I've been also working closely with Directors Kerbaugh and Chase to make sure that what we're doing is aligned. Right? So we wouldn't want special education to be offering professional development that doesn't go with the plan that we've laid out. Yeah. So those are all pieces we have kind of coming together to really focus on literacy. A lot of this year is going to be returning to that idea that everybody is a literacy teacher. It doesn't matter if you're teaching wellness, or you're teaching business, or you're teaching math. Everybody is a literacy teacher, and how do we get back to those practices that we once had as a district to really make sure that we're supporting our students the best we can.

▶ 1:08:51 Speaker 4: Thank you.

▶ 1:08:55 Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you again for coming, and I wanted to just wrap up by saying thank you for taking this integrated approach, looking at the data, helping us understand how the data are driving decisions, both on curriculum and investments that we are making as a district, as well as the support for teachers and professional development and learning. We look forward to seeing you again in July or August, and hearing more about the translation of the vision and strategy into that learning and that PD plan, which we will vote on at that time.