From Grace's Desk
Happy mid October and happy Friday!
Academic Conversations: At Orchard Gardens professional development two weeks ago, the staff read the first chapter in Zweirs Next Steps in Academic Conversations. Zweirs reinforces the notion that students' conversations must be grounded in grappling with content knowledge, vocabulary, and building onto their schema. Discourse must result in a concrete task resulting in writing, drawing, graphs, tables - any representation of knowledge, but especially in writing. Here is an excerpt from the text:
... if tomorrow you ask your students to support ideas with evidence, how many will think, "Doing this will help us build up an important idea," and how many will think, "This is yet another thing we gotta do for school?" We must change the mindset that learning consists of memorizing disconnected piles of information and conversations are great opportunities to practice what I call a building ideas mindset.
Many students and adults think of conversations as free-association time or brainstorm sessions, in which participants either connect randomly to previous ideas or share randomly ("popcorn out") a variety of different ideas. But without doing the work of focusing on and building up an idea, these kinds of talk will not become academic conversations. (p.10)
Equitable Literacy Information: Marguerite Vichiere-Guerre from the Transformation Office shared this resource organizing the many resources from ALI and last Thursday's professional learning day.
NWEA MAP Participation: I am proud that our region beat district MAP participation rates. Bravo to Region 6! Data are in Panorama and available in visual format and longitudinally for students who have been taking it over the last several years. These data can be sorted many ways - by grade, race, EL status, students with disabilities, chronic absenteeism. Jodi is working on creating a region 6 data set for us to review at our next meeting on November 2.
Panorama → MAP data has been synced into Panorama. Here is a resource on How to Monitor MTSS Progress in Panorama. Monitoring MTSS progress means fulfilling BPS policies, measuring the implementation of plans, and ensuring that all students meet their goals.- This new training resource walks through key details.
- Direct any questions to David Fisher, mtssdata@bostonpublicschools.org.
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