Oct. 5th Professional Development Day

We are always thankful and excited to get the chance to gather as a faculty for a professional development day. I was excited to lead the second segment of the morning's work (the first was spent working on curriculum mapping), which focused on improving our progress reports. This summer I had a series of meetings with Kathy (our Early Childhood Division Head), Gretchen (our Middle School Division Head), and Jeanne (our database manager) to discuss this topic. We generated the following problem statement to drive our work: How can we make our progress reports more effectively and efficiently communicate students growth for both faculty and families?



We decided that to best capitalize on the precious time the entire faculty body had together, we would focus the discussion on one essential component of the reports: the terms we use to describe the stage of developmental mastery a student has reached for each criteria. To do this, we drew on the thinking routines of Project Zero to create an activity that helped faculty make their thinking visible to each other, and to foster a conversation grounded in shared experience and understanding.


Hung up around the room were several pieces of chart paper: one had our current K-8 terms (emerging, developing, comptent, effective, mastering), another had our current ECC terms (not yet observed, in progress, consistently, area of strength) and nine others contained alternative sets of terms we had gathered from various other public and private schools. Some examples of these other sets include novice, apprentice, practitioner, expert; below expectations, developing, at expectations, above expectations; needs support, inconsistently, usually, consistently; and below, approaching, proficient, advanced. Teachers put sticky notes with their thoughts, responses and questions to each set of terms on the appropriate piece of chart paper (or wrote them directly on the sheets).


Faculty were also asked to respond to two other questions. First, were there other sets of terms that they wished to suggest? Second, what did they think about having different sets of terms for different divisions (Early Childhood, Elementary, Middle School)? After about thirty minutes spent posting their ideas and reading the comments of their colleagues, we held a spirited discussion about what terms (and associated definitions) would help us improve the effective and efficient communication about student growth.


After lunch, the faculty worked in divisions. At the K-5 level, we spent most of the time continuing our (re)training on the DRA2 reading assessment that we implement. While this is our third year using the DRA2, we believe it's important to regularly retrain all faculty in how to use the tool to ensure that the assessment data is reliable and valid (and, we have new faculty this year who have not used the DRA2 before!). This was the second half of our training (at Wednesday's division meeting, we reviewed all of the materials and procedures): we watched video of an assessment given last week, and each faculty member scored the oral reading fluency of the student reader, after which we compared and discussed our results in pairs and as a whole group.

The goal of this activity is to both give faculty practice taking oral reading records (which use specific notation to indicate miscues, omissions, repetitions, etc), and to develop inter-rater reliability (thereby improving our reliable and valid use of the assessment). Faculty then looked through the folders of their current students to review assessments from prior years, and, combined with their understanding of the students in the last month, determine the level of text on which to assess each student during the upcoming assessment window.