Week-3-Meeting+Notes

Team Meeting-Thursday, March 25th @ 9:30
Conference Call via Skype. Group met for one hour. All members were in attendance.

Discussion:

The group discussed the fundamental problem for our school data and how our instructional goal and vision can work to solve the problem. There was an in-depth discussion about the school schedule and ways that we could potentially maximize the current structure to implement a targeted professional development initiative. Sue's response to our group was discussed, and we decided to continue as we are and get her input once she sees where we're going with the direction of our professional development plan. I will include a question at the end of these minutes that we hope Sue will address.

After much discussion, our group is determining to move forward with a professional development initiative that will target teacher understanding of data. We hope to move conversations and evaluations of standardized test data from a strictly summative assessment piece that only serves to inform if students, and in turn, a school, meets AYP to a longitudinal exploration of data that allows standardized testing to also become formative to some degree. By allowing teachers to focus on specific longitudinal cohort progress of the class they have in session in a given year, we can allow previous years' data to individualize learning more for all subgroups of students. We talked about the parallel to NWEA's MAP testing in this regard. This assessment provides student data two or three times a year, and it measures growth above all else. What if teachers started out in the fall by looking over the last several years worth of standardized testing data for their students and used that to inform their practice for that specific class?

We believe it is this approach to student data that would move the conversation and the way we educate our students forward in a progressive, positive manner. That is the focus of our plan, and we will also include educating parents as part of this so we can serve to both increase our parent/staff relations and educate parents on what the test data mean for their students.

We also discussed how we can engage this professional development initiative using technology tools available. By setting up an online classroom environment and various other collaborative technology tools, we can focus on accomplishing our goal of moving teachers forward in their understanding and application of student data through means that can be more productive than what is traditionally used. This will also serve to increase teacher understanding and effectiveness of utilizing 21st century tools.

We also discussed the way we should measure the effectiveness of professional development initiatives. Many times the metric is based on how much the teachers learn from the program. We discussed how that might not be the best method of measurement. What if we measured the outcome on student performance instead? Many teachers learn a great deal at conferences, inservices, workshops, etc. But due to a host of reasons, they never let that learning impact their students. For any number of reasons, the learning doesn't get applied to their students' learning.

We all committed to spend some time and either respond to our discussion questions in more detail here on the wiki or in the ELC.

Our question for Sue is this, we are not following a typical path for an "intervention" of student data. We are proceeding as we are on purpose. Will we lose points or will there be any issues with the philosophy we are applying in targeting the way teachers understand and use data in their classroom? We believe a professional development initiative like this would result in improved student learning.

Respectfully Submitted: Ben- This week's reporter

Meeting Recording-Split into two recordings A media type="file" key="Team C-03.25.10A.mov" width="189" height="189" B media type="file" key="Team C-03.25.10B.mov" width="205" height="205" C media type="file" key="Team C-03.25.10C.mov" width="203" height="203"