##VIDEO ID:Mm13UZA4Wbg## good afternoon everyone welcome to the uh December 10th 2024 culum subcommittee meeting uh we'll start off with approval of minutes from November 25th sub committee meeting I'll move that do I have a second thank you very much Jesse Jesse how do you vote Yes and Helen how do you vote Yes Stephen yes I vote Yes as well thank you uh we are excited I excited to have Emily back here for our presentation on middle school science so Emily I think I'm just GNA turn it over to you awesome should I unmute here no no everyone can hear me I should have announced your sound goes right through here there microphones at top of the thank you all right so I'm going to share my screen all right and I'm going to go into slideshow mode so it's easier to read um so thank you all for taking some time in your busy agenda to have me here today I am super excited to meet with you and tell you about the work we're doing um I love talking about science and um the work that our teaches are doing and that our students are doing around science um luckily I'm sitting because I told Jody today that I was running a stream table program ATR and I had my black pants on and I covered in sand I'm like trying to like get it all off before before coming to presenting with you guys but um doing science is what I'm passionate about so um I came to curriculum subcommittee several years ago and presented but it's been a while so some of these slides are a repeat just because I know we've had some new people come onto the committee and I wanted to have sort of uh a baseline that was familiar to everybody before we go specifically into kind of the focus work we've been doing with middle school over the last couple of years um so um we have a department mission that is about having our students prepared to be scientifically literate Global Citizens and to give them that Foundation that they would need if they want to go on to higher education or careers in any of the stem Fields uh so science is important for everybody because everyone will be citizens making choices with scientific information um and we also want to make sure every student has a full spectrum of options available to them as they go forward um so we want students to have a deep enduring understanding of how to think and work like scientists it's really important that we're doing science not just um knowing facts about science and we want them to make real world connections to the things that they're experiencing in their lives that are about science and we want them to be lifelong Learners stewards of the environment and responsible Global Citizens so those are some things that we are hoping to achieve with the work that we do in the science department um what we teach comes from kind of a set of different documents so back in 2012 there was a document called a framework for k to2 Science Education that was uh published and that really was a culmination of several decades of research into what are the major Concepts in science um how do we learn them at different developmental points in time and what do we need students to know at each of those developmental points so that they're prepared for the next one it's an amazing document if you're a science Nerd Like Me um and what it did was kind of give this whole overview of Science and then there was a collaboration of 2 26 states that took this information and turned it into a set of performance standards called the Next Generation science standards and you'll see that abbreviation NG GSS um at other places in the um in the presentation and what that is is a um a collaborative set of standards that were built to try and get all of those things that the framework said research tells us about what's what people need to know about science how they learn science um Massachusetts was in that 26 State collaboration they helped write ngss um and then after ngss was written some states adopted it full outright and some states took uh took those standards and modified them in Massachusetts we made um some modifications from that so we the standards that we are responsible for here in Massachusetts are the mass stte standards the science Technology and Engineering standards they have about an 85 90% overlap with ngss but there are certain places in which they are different so there's curriculum out there that is being written and aligned to ngss uh and we can often use that but it does take some modification because the set of Standards we are responsible for in Massachusetts are very similar but not exactly the same so you're saying njs I'm Jesse by the way njs as like a subset of it then or so child of it it's different at different places so in some places like there's a second grade standard in mgss that's specifically about plants and pollinators and how they interact Massachusetts didn't adopt that standard so we have a different standard in second grade that's a little more General about how plants and animals interact in systems so there's things like that and then there's some places where they kept the same standard but like added a word or change so if you're like a scier you really dig deep into it I can tell you all of the details of that but for the general sense is that they're mostly the same but we do have to modify things that are aligned to ngss to specifically get at M standards just quickly interject that's generally true for any sort ofal standard the national social studies standards aren't quite Massachusetts the naal language standards aren't quite the mass so we're talking about sort of like subjects then differences are subjects like when you talk plant pollinators it's like a subject area yeah so when they did the frame workk they really kind of thought about these domains of Science Life Science physical science earth science and then they broke those domains further down into like um big subcategories when we look at the endast data I can kind of show you those and then from their specific standards that are specific developmental levels um so this was a change from the math standards that we had had for decades before that um and so in the previous standards and in the mcast kind of before 2017 our standards really were focusing on content and most of us grew up in an era when we did science classes that were very content heavy you need to know these facts you need to know these laws you need to know these theories the new standards actually equally prioritize three different things science practices the doing of science the disciplinary core ideas that's the contents that was there before um and what they call crosscutting Concepts these are Big Ideas that um tie together fields of science ideas like systems systems are a u an organizing principle that you can use in physical science or biological science or earth science so the new standards are much more what we call three-dimensional and that's something that you'll hear a lot if you hear people talking about science standards um the previous scientific method and again this is probably the way most of us learned it in U Middle School or high school was a straight line you ask a question you make a hypothesis you set up a procedure and we no longer Envision science sence is happening in a linear process it's not something that you start in one place and you go forward and it has an end point but rather that science in engineering is an iterative process where you start at some point you learn some things you come back you ask new questions um so we're really trying to um move to this idea of thinking about there's eight scientific and Engineering PR practices and they happen um iteratively and you are using at different points in time to achieve different things when you have a question or a problem and the old standards were kind of like oh this idea seems like it'll be fun for first graders or this idea seems it like it'll be fun for eighth graders um and just kind of put Concepts in where we thought they might be right whereas the new progression uses that framework what we know from research is developmentally appropriate at what points in time do students develop the abstract skills to to learn about a level of um of scale or um distance that is outside of the frame of reference that they are familiar with like all of those things were considered when deciding where standards were went so they were very they're very purposeful the other thing that's really important in the new uh way that we're teaching science is that um instead of science being focused around a series of topics that you learn in the order that teacher thinks is the right order we actually use something called an anchoring phenomena so we have something about the world we're trying to explain with the science that we are doing so students will um be introduced to a problem or question or something um what we used to call a discrepant event something that's not happening like what they expect it to and the purpose of that is to start having students generate questions and models about what they think are happening so they'll see this discrepant event they'll see this phenomena they'll have a discussion about it they'll try and make they'll think about like what might be happening here and they'll create an initial model and those initial models are really a great way for us as Educators to see what's going on in the students heads what like where they are developmentally what ideas are they pulling in then we use that model to generate questions about okay we think we understand this but we still don't understand that what do we need to learn to fully explain this and those um those questions then drive our instruction so we're really um it's a way of Shifting students centered from just like the hand on that was early inquiry Science Education to really being about like scientists notice things in the world and then they try to explain them and then they investigate to learn more and as they learn more they refine their understanding of things it's something that's happened um with all sorts of science Concepts throughout the history of human scientific Endeavor um and we don't recreate all of that that scientific Endeavor in the classroom but we recreate that experience for students of getting a phenomena trying to understand it trying to figure out what they need to know next and then using that to build their understanding and so for those of us who learn science differently this is one of those shifts both for families and parents um the way in which their child is doing science they look really different or sound really different than the way they learned it themselves in school and for some of our teachers it's also really different from what they've done for a really long time and so we are kind of focusing on how do we help teachers and families um understand the the purpose a function of phenomena so you're saying that maybe even the whole swath of teachers who teach science with this curriculum need PD or yeah redirection or alignment to sort of think in this way so they project that same thought towards the kids we did start um we started with that even before we did the scope and sequence work that I'll talk about today we did um in my second year here we worked at Museum of Science and did some PD just on like how do you what is an anchoring phenomena how do you teach with it but of course continue to get new teachers so so there's contined need to um support new people who may be coming from a place where they didn't get that background right I guess I bring yeah yeah I bring up from time to time like teachers that are coming out of um B of Science Education degrees from colleges a learning this little bit on the does it carry over into math as well this kind of concept of anchor so I think that um in math there's a there's a real similarity in the way math talks kind of approach an open-ended problem and really help kids think about like what are their strategies for finding an answer and this work so it's not exactly the same process but the critical thinking skills and the ways in which kids are interacting with something and kind of really first making their own thinking visible and then from what they understand and know about something building the a deeper and more accurate understanding I think that process is very simpar any other questions I'm missing any questions from the zoom hi um this is Stephen over here U Emily I'm just um I'm just wondering does this sounds a little bit like design thinking in that um students are asked to uh respond to a challenge with their own solution and then they revise and refine but but what's missing is that it's that there's nothing uh supporting their their thought in the first place is there um is there any introduction what was that tell me more about what you what you're okay so so um what I'm more accustomed to is a design thinking process whereby students are exposed to uh some scientific learning say a lesson about um air foils or something like that where or a specific lesson in and a concept in physics and then there asked to respond to uh a challenge and then from there they develop their hypothesis and they iterate on their solution so that sounds to me like a traditional kind of design thinking that that for me anchoring phenomena e Echoes that that's the concept pedagogically that I'm very familiar with so that's my only that's my only reference point so that it's just I'm so I'm responding from a position of some ignorance I'm just comparing to what I what I know um so I'm I I'm listening and wondering at what point in this pedagogical process are they introduced to uh scientific facts or what is known scientifically is it after they begin modeling or is it before do they have a starting point when when in this learning are they introduced to scientific ideas that is an awesome question and a really big part of the art of doing this well is um is making those calls um which is why having some resources that we'll talk about later on can be very helpful in doing that so in the beginning those initial models are not about making an accurate model it's about getting student thinking visible so we can understand where students are coming from and we can build on that rather than what we think students might be knowing or understanding about a topic so in those beginning models it's really about making student thinking visible not about demonstrating scientific knowledge as they start to learn more we are expecting that their models become more accurate because they are getting information through the different practices it may be that they are provided with some data that they analyze and they talk about and then they make claims from that data that help them make a scientifically accurate understanding um one of the science practices is um using uh readings and other media to learn about science so there are points in time we're like okay we've we've done some investigations and we've looked at some data from this other um place um but we still we need to know a little bit more about what's underlying mechanisms and that's when you might bring in um a reading so an example of that in the eth grade physics unit is that they um they're trying to figure out um why sometimes cell phones break when they fall and sometimes they don't and in early in the unit they spend some time trying to think about what happens when two things come into contact and do they um change shape and do they always change shape and when do they change shape in a way that they that they don't return they when when do they break um and so they learn a little bit about deoration they do a lab in which they measure formation of different materials and then they read about like how do engineers U understand elastic limit what is elastic limit how is that related to what's happening when things um apply right so they start off from a like hey we've got this question and we're starting to figure it out they spend some time making models where they're just thinking about like what do I know about the world in my experience and then slowly they do a combination of Investigations and readings that get them to a scientific understanding so car has a question that was a great answer wait can I just a quick followup I would love to know um just nerly like any of the um the education theorists that that um from which this model is taken so I just for my own benefit this is not a I could give you the names off the top of my head where they would be is in the Frameworks and so I can go back to the framework Works um and find some of the people who worked on that and some of the references they used there okay again I'm not asking out of any skepticism this is just for my own career I understand um yes and okay all comes back to the Frameworks that's that's where if you ever really bored and you want to read the Frameworks then it'll actually if you're a science n may be really exciting what's your question how can I help you thanks hi this is Carolyn th um I'm a school committee member um so Stephen's question was when are students introduced to scientific ideas and then you I think just said sort of the students get to understanding I'm trying to understand well a few things one is sort of like how new is this approach and is all of this um you're talking about the Frameworks and then I think that our curriculum is through openi Ed so I'd be interested in sort of the connection between what you're presenting and and that um cul because I will talk a lot about that when we get to the Middle School part so I might see if I answer your question with that and then if not I can come back to it so I guess I'm just what I'm hearing a lot of this sort of like students explore and teach themselves or figure it out so how much is kind of imparting of facts which I think is what Stephen said too or scientific ideas with a teacher teaching so um so I'm GNA try and explain again because I was clearly not as um communicating exactly what I meant to say since what you heard is different from what I meant to say so in that process that I was just descri desing for eth grade right they there are certain things they are figuring out themselves they are figuring out and getting um data and evidence that things change shape and deform when they come in contact and they're doing that um through a series of Hands-On labs and activities and collecting data they get to a point where they figure that piece out but they need the next level of knowledge the what is this called This is a itic limit how do scientists Define it and that's at the point where they would get a reading from an expert that takes them to the next level and kind of ties it all together and provides them um what we call the stamp on that concept right so there is many things that they are figuring out with kind of supported guidance and um and kind of thoughtful progression that's been field tested in a lot of different places and then there are also times when they're using the scientific skill of um reading and comprehending to get the next level of knowledge things that we can't necessarily test for or experiment for things that took decades and decades and or hundreds of years for scientists come up with we do not have our sixth graders figure out that atoms are atoms right that took many decades but they get to a certain point where they realize they need the concept of Adam to explain what they're trying to explain and then we give them some background reading about how early um chemists and Alchemists figured out what atoms were we we do some of the work that those scientists do we didn't do all of it um and then we use that information to say okay so the thing that you're trying to explain in this model that is atoms and these atoms can form other structures called molecules and when a chemical reaction happens what's happening with those atoms and molecules based on the evidence we've seen throughout the unit we know that the same amount of matter is there at the end as there was at the beginning so how can we explain that with this idea of ads so I'm gonna yeah well no probably not good effort um I mean it's not clear I I actually get it because I educated but I'm G to try and move you along okay because we got a lot to go through you have about 20 more minutes unfortunately in terms of just not so I'm thinking if we can hold our questions a little bit uh so we know how much time we have at the end and if we can move it along because we have we do have this yes and so I'll I'll finish going through I'm going to talk a little bit more about Open sad later and so um hopefully that'll also answer some questions you might have so uh the other thing that I wanted to touch on today before dig into the middle school work is that science doesn't stand by itself science intersects uh with a lot of other areas and there's two other areas that I want to highlight today so um science intercepts very strongly with all other curricular areas both kind of like what we think of as the core academics but also all of the um Associated Arts there are ways in which the skills that happen in all of the classrooms and all of the um other times of the day that support strong science thinking so it's really important that strong science thinking is built in the context of all areas of the curriculum because to be a good scientist you need to be able to read you need to be able to write you need to analyze data and know math you need to be able to make clear diagrams and technical drawings you need to be able to um experience the world and notice difference between different sound patterns and uh all of those things help us to be good strong scientists so we intersect with all areas of the curriculum and it's really important that we have a very balanced program so that we can have strong science thinkers um when we work on topics in science when we work on this developing deep conceptual models um we are also setting students up to have stronger reading comprehension when they get to reading about those topics right so if we have spent the time to make sure that our kids have a fully developmental model about a concept when we give them a reading about that concept they're going to understand it better and they're going to be able to hold on to that information long um so for my my continual cry and plea um all of the time is that we work as a district we work together as coordinators to build purposeful and strategic interdisciplinary connections because the more we build that the stronger our students critical thinking skills would be so that's one area of intersection um and uh although we are not working specifically on new science at the K 5 level all of the work that happens at the K 5 level in ela and social studies will have impact on science and we want to make sure that we are strategically making those impacts positive um the other thing thing that I know you guys recently heard from the sustainability task force and of course sustainability and science walk hand in hand so as you saw in our vision we are part of our vision of our work is to um create the next generation of environmental students that's something that is core to what we try and do with our science curriculum um both the nextg science standards that we talked about and the math um Science and Technology and Engineering standards have standards at every grade level K to8 that have some connection to environmentalism sustainability um so those are also part of our mandate from the state in terms of what we are teaching to our students and learning about these things learning about the environment learning about sustainability climate science impacts mitigation what we can do highly engage students the things that students want to know about they're things that students are um excited to learn and make a difference around so it also is really important to us for engagement so I just wanted to make sure that we understand that science is um super fun and exciting and important to me and I love it but science also is part of a bigger picture and a bigger in our district so I'm going to move right now from kind of this General background about science into our middle Middle School scope and sequence work so we started the Middle School scope and sequence work by um setting some criteria for what we wanted the final product to look like so before we started doing any of that um we had some conversations in the team and then I kind of synthesized them and came to this agreement that these were the things that we would be looking for in our scope and sequence we wanted it to be aligned to the MTH standards and we are required to have it aligned the math standards um we wanted something that was consistent so that students that went to any of the KDA schools in Brookline would have not the same experience but an experience that was consistent and familiar to other students in other KD schools around the district we needed some flexibility because teaching is as much an art as it is a science and so we want to have something that allows for consistency and also allows for the the flexib ability that's needed in a classroom we wanted room in the curriculum to be creative we wanted students and teachers to feel like they were creative and able to uh bring themselves into the classroom we wanted it to be inclusive and Equitable we wanted it to prepare students for future both going into the high school and careers beyond that and we wanted something that support teachers doing their work so that was what we were trying to design for when we worked on the scopen sequence we did um kind of the first round of work in the school year the 2223 school year um and that was kind of thinking about what goes where and we did an iterative process in grade level teams we used a truning protocol to look at different options for Scopes and sequences and then people would provide feedback and then I would use that feedback to make some adjustments just like science is an iterative process this was an iterative process um during the process some things that we heard from teachers over and over again was that we wanted a clear storyline connection within a year we wanted things to make sense as you went through sixth grade from the beginning of the year to the end of the year and we wanted there to be a connection between one year and the next year and we wanted to think about like what base knowledge people need at one point to get to the next we also had teachers who' been teaching here for a really long time had a set of topics that they were comfortable with that they had lot of resources for so we wanted to as much as possible reduce movement of big topics um but we did need to do some movement because one of the things we had diagnosed was that there used to be the sixth grade used to be more in the elementary grade um and then when we moved it to Middle School it still had retained a lot of Elementary standards so our sixth graders were not doing Middle School level standards we had to make some shifts to move some things into sixth grade that were middle school appropriate and move the things that were Elementary back into Elementary so we had some shifts that needed to be made but we tried to reduce those so at the end of that school year we came up with this working scope and sequence and it's really a very draft working draft because as we are doing it we are learning things the timing on this is still the most um the thing that most needs to be ironed out but what we did is we put the standard so these numbers and letters here just represent different scientific standards so we put the standards into groups we um and we organized them into big units from sixth grade to eth grade now we are in our second year of an implmentation process we uh we opted for a three-year implementation and the reason we did that is because we're actually following a group of students so the group of students that were sixth graders last year are going to get the new scope and sequence their whole time through so the students before that are getting whatever was there at that school beforehand and then this sixth grade group is um moving up so last year sixth graders that was our Focus grade so that grade um kind of got the most PD and attention and they followed the new scope and sequence and they worked collaboratively to use two of those opened units that uh Caroline mentioned to try and meet the first two units of the scope and sequence and then we did kind of a mix of things for our third unit that we're going to refine again this year seventh grade was following the new scope and sequence they had very little change actually in their um in what they taught and when they taught it um but they weren't using any new curriculum materials except by choice so some teachers were trying out some units and and trying to get um a sense of them and they really worked on breaking down the standards um so ubd is a acronym for understanding by Design and it's just a way of taking the standards and breaking them down and thinking about if what do they mean what are the things you need to know in order to achieve those standards what do you need to understand at a big level so seventh grade kind of looked at their units and said started kind of parsing that out um and eighth grade did the same thing we did have last year in eth grade several new teachers um and a long-term sub who needed to um have some resources in front of them and those teachers um did use open Sayed because we don't have other curriculum materials to provide outside of open sad um and we had an eighth grade teacher who was new three years ago who has been using open sad since he started so um that was something we had some of the new teachers do because that was the curriculum resource we had available for them we're in year two right now this year seventh grade is our Focus so this year seventh graders again are that group of students that are moving up through that um and so this year they are working on how do we how do we use open sayet um as a curriculum tool and then the what we're working on now in addition to that is common assessments what are some common ways we can assess to get to that consistent part how we make sure that as we make the modifications that are needed um in each School we're still staying consistent um and then eighth graders um because we've had some turnover in our eighth grade team we actually have many teachers who are following the new scope and sequence this year because we decided it didn't make sense for a new teacher to learn a one scope and sequence for one year and a different one for the next year um so next year all the eighth grade students um will be all that Focus cohort will go up to eighth grade um and all the eighth grade teachers veterans and new will be teaching the new scope and sequence that team will have some people on it who've been using open sad because they're new and some people who are veteran who haven't used it and will work together about how do we use that tool and we'll continue to refine our common assessments common assessments take a while to make we're not going to get all of them made this year so we'll um probably take another year on that sixth grade will um really be working they have done an amazing job their common assessment for their chemistry unit they rewrote it it's amazing um so they were just talking about that in the meeting before this and um they're going to be able to start looking at student work together and start um actually like norming um how do we use those assessments and what do they tell us about students knowledge next year um and seventh grade will be in a similar vote with their assessments they all generated internally so there is um yes the the final common assessment for each one will be generated internally some of them are going to be based on like some of them are based on open sad assessments that are being refined some of them are completely separate from opened um it really goes back to our standards in the ubd so the process of understanding by Design so when the team takes the standards and they break them down we want our assessments to line to that um so it's not what comes from the curriculum it's what meets the needs of the standards that that determines what we use for common assessment and how does that match the like State assessments I don't know so M I'm mcass is changing and fit through eight I don't know how much people know about that in science um I'm I'm try and keep that super brief but they are moving from the mcast that you've known for years which is multiple choice and some constructed responses to what they're calling simulation based testing so they're going to this year be field testing across the state every student who takes science mcast will get a field test of a simulation based question and simulation based questions um require students to collect data within the test format using a simulation um and use that data to answer questions computer yeah computer and we have um access to some resources that are embedded into our um our Middle School curriculum where students are using simulations like that fairly frequently I don't think it'll be a big lift for Middle School I think we are going to want to think a little bit about um how do we build those opportunities in for our kids in three to five for that fifth grade Outcast all right yeah I I agree you know just like maybe like parents for example as you said earlier never ever be trained in any of this because they're older just you know things have changed are going to look at results and then they don't understand perhaps without all this introduction how it all supposed to fit together and so unless they're really tightly coupled the students performance could reflect negatively on all the good work even though we know we're setting them in the right direction because they can't handle the way it's tested for yeah and that that is one thing um so I'm going to go a little bit into the like the culum tool piece um but I will say this is one conversation that I'm having with people at the state level and one thing that we are monitoring really closely in the state is monitoring closely which is um does open sad uh perform as well or better than previously on data collection things like the Suzanne do we have something scheduled for K through five now that we're getting like upgrade it to know what 6 R is doing like for like our focus is on literacy this year through we do that a different time correct okay so Emily yeah um we have principles who are coming okay so so this is what I might suggest is do your curriculum tools okay and then just and then pause and we'll have you come back oh okay we'll hold on to our slides okay yeah that be okay that's perfectly okay I this is what happens we it's so interested could done the whole that's the problem yeah that's the problem with and science is joining usan we're interested too so I I think I'll the next two slides and then we're gonna have you come back all right sounds great all right so curriculum tools so I'm gonna talk faster than is appropriate because I just want to make sure we're using time so in our past practice everything has been individually created by teachers which um is a a ton of work for teachers especially new teachers and creates a lot of inconsistency and variability in uh in the level of which it's meeting these goals of uh of the new standards it is um but the other side of that is there is also a lot of really creative exciting experiences and projects that teachers are passionate about and have built in to their work and we don't want to lose that right that is good stuff all of this these pictures here are really amazing projects that the students have done underwater Rovers that have been built indoor gardens that have been built fieldwork where people are collecting authentic data so we are again have that criteria of both a consistent and a and a creative and flexible curriculum so we have both the units and then if you look um if you you look at that working scope and sequence documents you'll see Flex time we' buil-in time for teachers to have explicit time to do these projects as they are connected to their uh their curriculum and as we move forward we are using select opened units um as the recommended curriculum again this gives them the base so open Sayad is built around these anchoring phenomenas it gives them the tools to do that well with the resources and kind of the sequence of like students building knowledge students building knowledge here we Anchor It Here's the the the reading of the resource we help to Anchor It students building knowledge students building knowledge here's the resource we Ed to Anchor it so um building that from scratch we do have a couple internal units that teachers um before open side came out um built after we did the training on anchoring phenomena they're amazing they took tons and tons of work and doing that at scale is just not something we have the money or the time or the resources to do so open gives us a tool it's a tool that meets de um the Department of Education des's definition of high quality instructional materials districts really are um required is not is a little strong of a word but districts are very strongly encouraged to adopt high quality instructional materials um and so this is one that allows us to do that um again it gives something for new teachers they don't have to create from scratch um and then we balanced here we're going to use this tool with we want to maintain flexibility and creativity so we had that Flex TI and then in some cases uh we're finding that open sighted doesn't fully meet the needs of our students or of our scope and sequence and in those cases we have additional resources that we pull in uh to make the program well round it be everybody's need so good job all right I finished do we want to do can I ask a quick question uh so you can have we have three minutes of questions Stephen okay I'll be really fast first I just want to say I really appreciated this um this presentation and I'm really excited about this new curriculum I I am in my regular life I direct a uh engineering education program and it just squares with a lot of the trends I'm seeing in the field and I'm just excited that we're doing it here in Brookline too um my question is just really small and logistical do we have a required uh time on learning for this new science curriculum at any of the levels so um we are still in the process of completing the Middle School review and um so I would say at the middle school level we have um some inconsistency between schools but we're working really hard to that to be more consistent okay thanks I just want to say again I'm really excited about this thank you so um you know if there are questions and there may well be I mean especially if you're really into it like Emily is you might want to do the really check out the working scope and sequence with all the framework standards and so you'll really get a sense of what's being taught when um and uh I would suggest to either uh jot down your questions and bring them back when Emily comes back and or maybe you could even yeah send them off to you right well you're always welcome to email me I'm happy to talk to anybody who will listen to me about Science Education and that is true that that I couldest that she loves to talk about it and she loves to have people who are enthused as well yeah so I'm I'm happy to um answer questions over email set up a zoom with anyone who wants to understand more who wants to like look at like what are those open sided resources how do they actually work in a classroom um are we sure kids are getting what they're supposed to get and I will say if we don't see it in open Sayad then that's when we pull in additional resources but we make sure that kids are getting what they're supposed to get that's that's our job and we take it seriously and we want kids to have an awesome Science Education thank you thank you so much really appreciate it and we'll hold on to this and we'll have okay we are going to move do we are our Yep they're just walking down the Halloween at here yes yeah okay literally walking okay I didn't know were everybody maybe we should do just introductions um so we can start I guess we'll do the table and then um Dr Gill two places okay got eyes da why don't we just go around and then sure we'll just point out the other school committe memb online so gab cormi senior director of D Jamie Pierce principal vaness Val lawren principal Jesse Hef school committee Michelle Herman senior director for teaching and learning Jody funa Deputy superintendent for teaching and learning lus Giller is superintendent Suzanne fville school committee Emily spe K science curriculum coordinator Brian viio principal of L Betsy Betsy Fitz assistant to the school committee okay folks onine Helen Helen charlupski school committee okay Carolyn Carolyn th school committee and Stephen stepen arberg school committee okay thank you very much um you want to kick this off love to this so one of the celebrations that we have in the district this year is that we've had three of our middle school programs named the top middle school programs in the state um and three of our middle school programs made it into the top 10 of that list Pierce was number one Lawrence was number five and Lincoln was number 10 on that list one of the reasons that I like this particular designation is it didn't rely solely on FL mcast scores it looked at mcast scores in relation to a student's relative socioeconomic level which is something that we do when we disaggregate our data and we noticed that socioeconomic level is an indicator of student performance and what these three schools have done is they've helped narrow that gap between students that may have a lower lower socioeconomic profile and um students that are wealthy um wealthier and they did it in a district that is already high achieving with um students that perform well um and so it's really a very exciting um honor to have had this um bestowed upon us and we've invited the three principes here to just have a kind of a round table discussion a Q&A about what's working well at the middle school um why are we seeing this so I want to thank the three of you for coming tonight thank you for giving up your time for sure and you know as a school committee we want to kind of know uh you know what's working and if you did something different or maybe not uh but so that we know ways that we need to support either budget or personnel which is part our you know just what is it that that seems to be working well then that we should be le so are we do we just open it up yeah let's open it up so um you need more more focus on maybe each one could just spend a moment saying you know what what lessons you kind of learned and how you think you might have gotten there and um what's working for you well I'm obviously the newest principal so um I think Brian and Jamie have more years but what I will speak to that I think is really important is how hard our Educators work I think um this is really a testament to not only our Educators but also our family supports and the relationships the connections I do think that um you know I came to Brooklyn partially because of the K8 model I shared that when I came on board and I do think that there is something special in terms of our school communities um building and nurturing learners all the way through and so when we were talking even prior to this came coming out when I was sharing with my whole staff um the celebrations of mcast because we saw really significant I think um our math and Ela at Lawrence um were were first in terms of overall proficiency meeting or exceeding the standards and so what I was talking about with my whole staff is it really is a celebration k through eight like we only get there at seventh and eth grade and sixth seventh eth grade um on building on the the find Foundation that's happened earlier so even though we're talking specifically about middle schools I think the combination of having a K8 model um which allows Learners to grow develop in a school with a community that's supporting them as a learner is really important to focus on um and then the other thing and I know we're in a very difficult budget cycle but I would say the class sizes having been a special educator and a middle school educator prior to becoming an admin Ator working in different districts um the class sizes that my teachers in the Middle School are working with we are blessed with very small class sizes and when you're talking about differentiating meeting the needs of all students in a heterogeneous grouping when you have 20 or 22 or even 23 students having taught in classrooms with 30 in other districts that is vastly different and it allows you to do things even if you're just thinking about conferencing um so if you're an English teacher or a social studies teacher meeting with students about their writing or in a math classroom if I go into Mr dy's math classroom in eth grade how many points of contact he can have with each child in that room and we know that teacher conferencing with students giving them feedback regularly is critical that is a huge indicator of overall learning outcomes and you can do that better with lower class sizes and we are blessed with that right now um for sure so I I would speak to a couple of those things I think we really have to celebrate the K and what that does for the children um we are blessed with lower class sizes that allow us to differentiate um while holding to the heterogeneous groupings that have been um a really important part of the philosophy of roin so I'd start that yeah I you know I do want to Echo uh Vanessa's points about it being kind of accumulative Journey that we go on with kids um and I think in particular right the idea of how we deploy intervention and support uh into our earlier grades so that we are you know having students who are able to uh better access curriculum materials when they hit FAL school I think that's important I think to uh I would with the class SI question you know I think like uh the class SI point I think like that opportunity for individual attention for multiple touch points but you know uh in checkins with uh teachers across a period is really important um I too would come from experiences where I had uh as a classroom teacher 25 26 27 students in a classroom and it's uh it's an enormous differen maker to have class sizes that are in that realm of 17 18 uh or in some cases lower um you know I think also and I don't want like I in thinking about how this came to be for Lincoln 2 I think we have over the last few years in Middle School really been looking at our grading practices and thinking about a shift to a standards based grading process um and I think what that allowed for is more regular and frequent formative feedback for students and we're shifting their focus from away from like kind of like you know digestion and compliance into more about understanding like what skills and standards are you mastering and getting more regular and routine feedback about how that's happening and what that fostered I think was a couple of things right I think for students um it was about like what content am I mastering and on what timeline am I doing it and then I think it also pushed a lot more collaboration among the team where they're talking about um you know I think uh Emily you talked about the kind of like coherence between something with skills and standards in science and the way that that touches the ability to like write and make an effective argument in literacy or in social studies or in particular eighth grade science when we're talking about working with and representing data um I think the collaboration between our 8th grade math teacher and eth grade science teacher really uh was beneficial in both contents last year in terms of not only student experience but also born out in their performance I agree 100% I would totally Echo the grading practice is I mean I walked into Lawrence has been using grading for equity and um that really is coming out of a standards-based approach and I will say that our middle schoolers really are able to talk about what is proficiency and talking about what would be beyond the standards and so that conversation is happening regularly with children so they understand the expectations in a way that um in districts where I think you're more focused on just like a percentage versus what is is expected of me on this assessment has been a big part of the shift in our students understanding what's expected so I Echo that part in terms of like standards based Vanessa why don't you say a little bit too about sort of your data mining pie that you y and we've definitely been looking a lot more at data in general um the assessment practices have been growing over time I know Jamie also spends a lot of time with her teachers looking at at data um and looking at student work so this year for example we didn't have um examples from desie in terms of our student work samples for ELA but last year we did and we did sit down as Middle School teachers looking at our student writing we did that with our elementary school students too but really looking at how did they perform last year where were they struggling again that's looking at what the state is expecting in terms of a writer at fourth grade versus seventh grade versus 8th grade and really targeting our practices around the data that we're collecting um because we do have a lot of assessment information on students and so actually using that in terms of not just here's the data but then instructionally what decisions do we have to make to support children and having those regular conversations about who's struggling um and where do we have you know maybe not a watch list but how do we accelerate learning for certain students that's been regular conversation that's happening um certainly in C ulum planning team meetings across grade levels but the other Advantage we have in middle school is we have two cpts a week or curriculum planning time so when you're talking about what happens in Middle School versus Elementary School our Middle School teachers um you know I'm meeting with them just today you know we had 45 minutes with all of them together and we can differentiate so we can have grade level specific where we're talking about an individual student whether they're in social studies or science this kid is really struggling this week what's going on the counselors sitting in having those conversations but then we also have crossgrade so Emily might be coming to meet with all of our teachers who are teaching science in the Middle School on a CPT and we have two of those a week where they all have that common planning time that is highly unusual and it's a wonderful way for us to hit the different needs in middle school which we do not have in elementary schools in that same way no that was great you've said so much and I would Echo everything I don't think there's a point that I would disagree with anything that either um Brian or Vanessa said I guess I would add um you know to the K8 piece you know our K5 teachers are generalists and they are preparing and teaching a lot in a district that has a hard time like really marrying a curriculum like we dat a lot of them um and that's a lot of work to learn a new curriculum and so when we get to sixth grade at least at those of us who have large enough schools where we can do this um our teachers are really specialists in one content area that they are experts and that makes a huge huge difference and in the case of of Pierce right now um our Middle School teachers are specialists in one content at one grade level and that also makes a huge difference so our sixth graders have an El Ela teacher that has studied the entire history of their mcast course by the time she receives them the second they're out and also knows all of the mcast scored of all the kids before and has already thought about what adjustments she's making in sixth grade career so using this year as an example she looked at all of her data and realized that poetry was an area that sixth graders did not score as well as she would have hoped to see and so she's embedding these micro poetry units in these places where she's got a day or two here or there to build the skills that she knows they're going to need and what's great about that is you know poetry isn't really heavy in the standards in sixth grade but it's coming right they're going to see it again in seventh grade and then again in eighth grade and so in many ways that's a much better practice for her than building a whole big poetry unit that that derails part of her year she's she's fitting it in where it works and it works really authentically in those spaces um she would not be as able to do that if she were planning for sixth and seventh grade ELA or for sixth and eighth gradea or for ELA and social studies so I know as we're talking about the budget these these numbers are going to come up again and again but I think if you want to see high performance from students they need to have Specialists for teachers and I think that needs to start in sixth grade and if you look at our Mass data at Pierce over time and follow students over time you will see that their growth is very predictable as they move through the years their scores are going up up up up up and it is again because as they move up teachers are specializing more and more um so this year I'm excited one of our teacher teams is piloting in fifth grade a social study science s so one of the teachers teaches science for both sections and the other teacher teaches social studies for both sections that's something that actually we had years ago and when we went up to a five section grade the schedule couldn't accommodate it we were able to bring it back this year with a whole new team of Educators and those kids are going to have a deeper richer experience because those teachers have more time to plan prepare materials trial and error experiment so that's really powerful um and then for us yeah go ahead interject one thing just because I don't think everyone who's maybe newer to the school committee knows that you taught Middle School in Brooklyn did and you have done specialist you've done both discipl so you experienced both of those in our actual conf yeah when I started at Pierce we were a three-section school and I was hired to teach seventh grade US history so that will tell you how long ago was that was when we had our two-year survey course so I did seventh grade US History um seventh grade ELA and special education so those were my three classes and then as our numbers changed and we moved to four sections and then five sections I would teach aomination of whatever the history of the day was the dating of the curriculum um Ela and health and so I moved through all of those and I was absolutely a better prepared educator on the years where I taught more of something right that last class that had me I had it down by then um and that's part of why I believe in a rotational schedule as a sort of core thing because you don't ever want to be the class that always gets the first go at it that's really OD um thank you for adding that um the other thing I think that's important that speaks to Jody's comment about our students with low socioeconomic um status is that we did a deep dive of our mcast data so two years ago because that's what generated this particular outcome um and of the 19 students who scored not meeting on map Anda 18 of them or income now they also all fit into some other subg group so they were also all considered high needs um and we provided really targeted thoughtful not terribly hard to execute because we didn't have a lot of resources focus and um conversation about those students with their entire teaching team and in many ways I think one of the gifts of Brooklyn and its small class sizes and its K to K to8 model is that we're not talking about a lot of kids across would have been fourth through e8th grade so we're talking about a handful of kids at each grade level and teachers were really able to give that kid a lot of thought and even if that thought didn't translate into a ton of action steps having that child always in the front of your brain changes outcomes like we know that when you are constantly watching a student thinking about them paying attention to where they're confused able to swoop in right away because you see it oh this is this kid's losing the thread and get them right back on track you're going to get better outcomes and I think that's a large part of what we saw um and then transparently I think you know I feel very privileged to lead a school where teachers have very high expectations of students sometimes that's annoying for them for their parents and for me but they have very high standards for their students they push their kids past the the low bar that whatever the curriculum sets is setting they demand discourse they demand critical thinking they demand writing and rewriting and rewriting again and rewriting again and these children you may as well pluck their fingernails out that's how tortured they feel but that's how we learn right we learn by making mistakes and going at it again and making mistakes and going it again and when you have par committed teachers who believe that children can reach that bar and are willing to pull whatever they need together to make that work then you get better outcomes and so I think for us it's it's the perfect St pece this year in in the best possible way perfect Happ Sam talk a little bit then about how that translated into sort of the um the after school support as well as sort of your reset academies yeah yeah so we um we worked really really hard to match students with whatever supports we could find given the budget and the staff so transparently I had more money to spend on homework club last year than I could find to staff it it just doesn't pay as much for after school work as other after school work that teachers can do and so if the pay for after school work doesn't cost cover the cost of child care for the teacher who's doing the work you're going to have a little mismatch there um but we had some before school targeted math enrichment activities and practice we had during the day we really leveraged our literacy and math Specialists to throw everything we had at kids um and then after school we were able to provide some support um this year I actually took on an intern through the northeastern Public Health major it's not a co-op it's an internship it's different we don't pay anything for it it's free um just cost me time um but I've really trained her up and she's working this year with some of our kids both during school and after school so she's able to spend time in the classroom with students and then after school provide one-on-one in small group support um it really in this sort of environment you know schools are very unpredictable in a lot of ways from year to year you may have the money but not the staff you may have the staff but not the money it's hard but you sort of have to look at the pool of resources and sort of poke around and see what you can pull together and so I think for us it's about flexibility the model we've built this year is in many ways very different than the model we built last year our our morning map has actually expanded which is great the teachers are really excited about that um but then I've had a harder time fending lower grade homework Club staff but better results with upper grade homework club staff so you know we're putting the resources we can find where we can with an eye toward the kids who we know need them most and I think that's the key is you know having enough time enough focused energy and enough data to really know who needs to just be lifted along a little bit more that that little bit extra to help them grow faster than they otherwise would it's it's about not letting kids fall through the and and continuing to look at the data look at the student work ask the questions you know I I'm grateful that like today a teacher reached out and said hey there's a kid on my not meeting list I'm worried what I'm doing isn't working we had a 20 minute Zoom because I'm always in the wrong building at the wrong time so we had a 20- minute Zoom we had three action steps we've reached out to all the people and we're we're going to try it and we're going to see where that leads us by the end of January and I think that building that culture where teachers are not afraid to say ah this kid is struggling in my care matters a lot too I think you know that's hard thing for any professional to say this this is hard I need help um and I think Brook line teachers feel supported by their building leaders and that help too because then they know where they can go with I mean since this is school committee we're talking money I would Echo the homework club like some of these stiens and other things um you know they really do go a long way we also made a shift in our practices prior to my time at Lawrence it had been kind of a free-for-all anybody could come to homework club we did make that shift looking at the data as lus was talking about about the kids we really needed to focus that attention on and made it an invitation only homework club um so that it could be much more targeted I think that's really important the other data we spent a lot of time on last year and then a lot of energy and this is where I really want to give a shout out to our counselors because kids have to feel like they belong and when you look at our our data from pan in terms of social you know where families are um socioeconomically recognizing that some of those students struggle to come to school attendance is a a real concern and so we started having a lot of regular conversations about attendance and what do we do collaboratively as a team and that includes our clinical team our Administration bringing in the families partnering with our families around attendance because there is a direct correlation to students attending school regularly and then being able to um perform and so for those students um where we're looking at socioeconomic status as being a a flag you also often see attendance and so having attendance conversations what are we going to do what kind of plan can we put into place to support a family to get children to school regularly because that is a huge factor in success yeah so I would say that I mean like we saw that in our um desie data that at Lawrence last year we made a lot of Gaines in what the state was setting for us in terms of attendance and I've seen that in Dr Duo's presentation too but that makes a big difference kids have to come to school to learn and I'll add the trusted adult piece I really appreciate that component of our Panorama data and we have we're a step school so we have Steps step all three of us are um and so that's huge because what what we do and I suspect other schools have a similar practice is we look at all the NOS like no I don't have a trusted adult at school and when I say we all I mean like we all the secretaries the building AIDS steps to success Meco guidance counselors administrators like we all sit down and we agree okay who are we going to go be Bes each like everybody get the best and like that's your job you figure out who that kid is and you find the person the nurse like there's always somebody in the school who's like oh that kid doesn't love me oh I can fix that right like and and so having that data and then having the support of steps for us is really helpful a Jew is a great opportunity for after school programming for students um but also having the me Co advisor in the building if I have a kid who's scholing around and not doing the thing that they need to do I can text to Sean and be like hey I need you to go sit and in this class and get this kids back on track and he has a relationship with that student with that student's family and with our staff so he's the bridge that's literally in the building all day or the buildings all day one building Monday Tuesday Wednesday and the other building uh Thursday Friday um and it makes a big difference and it's another person for kids to lean on which I think matters a lot because as Vanessa said if you if you don't feel loved at school you don't come to if you don't come to school you can't it's pretty directly excuse me sorry can I jump in with a quick question it's Carolyn I'm really interested in what you're saying um Can someone tell me what is a step school before we go too far away from it school that has steps to success um as programming I and all the K through eights don't no so steps to success is a partnership between the district the steps of success Inc nonprofit and the brook line Housing Authority yeah only four of our K8 schools have students who live in BHA properties so we only have steps to success at Lincoln Lawrence Ruff and Ridley and Pierce because of where BHA properties are located in the attending area and the high school as well interesting thanks I'm just thinking about all of the um um truly affordable with a capital A housing that's coming um bringing students to the baker school I know that's not BHA but we met with the baker team yeah and carollyn I think um you know I've been talking to Dr Giller about this since coming in there it's such an important link but it doesn't start until third or fourth grade and I I've been showing my data for those children and again the attendance data this you know especially now that we have a lot more reading data from the additional assessments we're giving um if anything that's a great partnership but it starts too late like we're catching kids in third and fourth grade like we really need to be trying to do more for those children preschool kindergarten in first grade to give those families supports um because it is a a population that needs as many wraparound Services we can give y thank you so much did you have something Brian yeah Brian I was gonna ask you to talk about what you did I think with your writing maybe uh and yeah um so for a few years we were there's turn out explain this without going too far down so basically sixth grade students uh in Brook line they don't have they do not have health as a class and they do not have they have World Language three times a week instead of five times a we so relative to their seventh and eighth grade years they have four fewer blocks a week uh we've been through multiple iterations of how best to use that block of time we have with our sixth graders and for a little so for a few years we've done uh a dedicated just because of the way my Staffing was a dedicated like writing class so four days a week our sixth graders would have they would have a writing class in addition to their Ela class and it was taught by the same person who was doing their sixth grade ELA we did that so the kids who are who graduated in eighth grade last year had had that experience the kids who were in seventh grade last year had that experience last year we were had a um sixth block of every academic class in sixth grade uh that became the easiest because no longer had the additional um you know Ela Staffing available because of just kind of the size of the building and the size of my middle school cohort and team so instead we were we had a sixth block of every academic class so nobody was like planning anything new but rather using that as a like Spiral block or catchup block or sometimes like that would be when they would plan like the assessment we did go to that same model last year when I came in as well that sixth block and it's been very helpful for additional time yeah yeah we've also done various iterations of solving that sixth grade scheduling conundrum and interestingly years ago we had that sixth block and it didn't work well for that team but the team has sort of been reborn this stabbing turnover and so at the end of last year they asked to go back to that model and so we're doing it again this year everybody's obsessed and loves it and so it'll be really interesting to see how that data goes but it does speak to the the nature of schools which is that the the personalities do matter right principles about personalities always and the personalities do matter and so if a team isn't giving positive feedback about how something in the schedule is working for me it really matters that I listen to that feedback and I think about where it's coming from and I try to adjust the schedule to meet the needs of the adults while also meeting the needs of the children because it doesn't matter how beautifully I build a schedule for children if the adults aren't on board it's not going to work and so being really responsive to the schedule itself to the Staffing itself to the student needs themselves and then to the teacher needs it's it's a it's a constant juggle so I guess I would say I would caution this broader committee to just be mindful of the fact that the conditions in each of our schools in any given year are different from one another and are different from how they were last year and so sometimes we're making an adjustment as Brian had to do based on things that have nothing to do with the thing that we're adjusting but it has to happen and so just you know trusting that we are all really thoughtful about these decisions and are making the best decision we can with the particular pie we have been served in building the schedule for the next year and knowing that no two pies in a row might be the same that's totally a good point because most districts you don't have middle schools having to change their schedule every single year and that is one of the tasks that all eight of us have to do every single year um because we have shifting number of sections um and so that is highly unusual most middle schools you know you're running eight classrooms at a grade level or something and it's always that many classrooms whereas um you know we shift and so that means we have to look at the FTE that we've been given and create a whole new schedule every single summer and it is a it's a massive challenge um and and that's part of being a k school with less sections so the good comes with some real challenges that evolve every single year that we try to solve in the best way we can with the personal we have and their strengths uh stepen you have a question comment uh yeah thank you Suzanne um first uh thank you Suzanne and Jody for docketing this this is a really interesting discussion and totally for this for this subcommittee so just kudos to you guys for having this idea um my question is um I guess I just want to ask for more bragging um I I'm wondering if there's anything that you did to turn anything around like we don't win these placements every year but we did this year so I'm wondering if there's anything in particular that you did as building leaders to make a change or to identify a problem and uh Implement a solution I mean I'm I'm hearing these discussions of what sound like really smart practices um and ingredients of really good schools and it's really thought-provoking and it's really interesting to me but it doesn't answer the question of why we won this year and not last year and not the year before that not the year before that someone if there's anything that you did to make a change that brought the school into into a higher level over the past year well I would say that there's definit I mean you hear this theme of data I mean I know I came in at the same time as Jody and early on saying to to Dr gillery and Dr Fortuna and Michelle um you know it was surprising that there wasn't a lot of conversations about assessment and data but I would say that that is growing much more like we're we're talking more about students and what information we have and problem solving that um and so I mean I heard that same thread from all three of us that we are having more and more of those conversations and I don't think that that was necessarily something that was always done in Brooklyn but I feel like that is something that is Shifting there's a lot more willingness to talk about yeah we need to look at a kid and dissect and we have all sorts of data we've talked about panorama data here we've T we now have star data we have data from our early reading screeners with um with Dibbles and so we have a lot more assessment data to work with and it's taking all of that information and those are conversations that are happening more and more regularly so I I would say the that common planning time which at least I felt coming in was very much planning time like sitting and talking about who's going to do what when is now we're we're making that shift into what would be a true professional learning community and again I feel like at middle school with those two blocks and more regular time built in than our elementary do we do that more so if you're asking about like what is one of those differences that is a real difference it was already in place but we're doing more and more of that that's fascinating you feel like that's already making itself felt as a shift on the ground it's not just a change in practices behind the scenes but it's already affecting like learning outcomes it's already affecting student culture I oh I think so I I think the grading practices we're building like the like Brian was talking about this this focus on really thinking about um students understanding standards what is expected of me what is what does seventh grade writing look like um that that shift had already was starting but then you couple that with now teachers really examining data and saying what do I know about these Learners sitting in front of me and how I take that to help Channel it and again it's all kinds of data it's that social emotional data it's that attendance data it's that data on what their writing scores look like and where they need to go thanks that's fascinating Jamie or Brian do you have something else I that question no I mean I I the change for us did come I think in like the implementation of a standards based approach to grading and I think that it isn't that in and of itself but rather what comes with it right which is the more regular look at formative assessment data and more regular feedback to students about what their mastering have so yeah and foras I would say it really was the turning point for us was the the focused action plans for students like I think about one particular classroom last year in fifth grade that had a a couple of um students who had action plans and you know I say action plan it sounds big and scary but this particular action plan was like so lovely so the teacher noticed in the opening months of school that these two students were very passive in class like we afraid to take a risk we're afraid to raise their hand we're afraid to ask a question or to answer a question and so she built a plan where each time they sort of voluntarily put themselves out there they earned a sticker and at the end of this which they self Monitor and at the end of completing a row of stickers they got like a a fancier sticker so like 10 little stickers equal one big sticker and the the page helds 10 rows so once they got a hundred like points as it were they were able to exchange that for an incentive of their choosing which adorably was spending time with me which would the win for me um but what was super interesting was that even though she was focusing on that for those two students whenever a teacher is focusing on improving a practice it trickles out to everybody else so if you look at the student growth percentiles in her class they're like nothing I've ever seen before like 80 some odd perc of her students had a high SGP in that class like 60 or above it was wild I have not seen it before I did not see it in any other classroom last year but she picked a practice that increased engagement for every single student in her room and so you know I had another teacher um my seventh grade math teacher built these action plans for she had a whole bunch of kids and each action plan was very targeted to a student Behavior so like one student kept signing out well you can't learn math if you're not fitting in math and so she would stand with a stopwatch and be like you have to be faster today than you were yesterday because he was signing out all the time and what do you know when you sign out less you learn more math what a strange idea right and so another student like did didn't see themselves as a math thinker and so every day at the end of class that student had to share with that teacher something they were proud of that they had done that day in math whether it was persisting on a problem or asking a question or speaking up in a group and that student had an sup in the 90s right so you know these are very small practices that make huge differences for kids and what it comes down to is the teachers have to know their students so when I say what did what did we do differently I wouldn't say we did anything differently we did something with a little more Focus than we did in a prior year and for whatever reason that Focus worked really well now I'm a Believer in patterns like once it's a coincidence so I want to see forget the rankings but I want to see the high sgps for these same students replicate this year because new teachers have now received them have the benefit of the information from prior teachers and prior plans and are taking this new unique human who is 180 days of school different than they were last year when the plan was made and building a plan that works for that teacher works for that student and that meets that student where they are and then let's see how far they grow and I think that's the that's the sort of magic of education is that part of why it isn't perfectly replicable and part of why you can't predict why this year and not last year or why this year and not next year is the humans are different every year even the same human is different right if they're not we're doing something wrong they they should be better new and improve each day right um and so you know it's I understand the reason for the question Stephen but I think that what it comes down to is that you know we are a district of Educators that are really caring and committed and helping our Educators not feel burned out helping our Educators feel like they're getting their needs met maybe dating fewer curriculums and marrying some um like really making sure that the the materials they have make sense that they're well trained on them um that's all going to continue to make a positive difference for our students because that that the teacher should be spending time on the kid that that's the place you want them to be fting I think I think what's worth highlighting too is Jimmy the interventions you talk about are incredibly small correct these are not massive life-changing things for the teacher or the student correct and yet the impact is huge even enormously expensive yeah and your your teacher needs to have I mean speaking back to that small class size like those class sizes that the best were the smallest classes right and that's because the teacher was able in a class of 18 to focus really intently on getting to know to and then to building a plan that could be monitored and and checked back in on multiple times I think you you don't you can't do that in a class of 25 or 30 and so to that extent there is a resource it's just what we've already spent right um so it's about that time and I really want to thank you for being here I also want to say that um I know we invited the three of you but all of our programs actually getting quite well so I don't to make people feel like these you're not you're the stars but you're many others it's a whole constellation out a whole conell whole constellation so but do thank you so much I do thank you for giving up your time on late evening some dark um and we just love when we come and visit and we hear some of this so maybe we can do it again the spring I know it's a bit of a burden but I think it really helps us to yeah to make connections and to know what it is you're talking about just little interventions when we come to visit okay so thank you very much our last item here is new bu to suggest we so thank you very much thank you to the team and um everybody have a good evening yeah thank you thank you thank you principal so much that was absolutely fascinating thank you so much thank you