Parents were invited to meet Task Forces: Social/Emotional & Assessment on April 24th & May 8th.
John began by outlining the objectives for the meeting. The coordinators of the two Task Forces described the work they have done to date and faculty fielded questions as parents shared them.
Frann Ravid and Stephanie Dwyer, leaders of S/E Task Force, described their work. They’ve set out to answer four questions about the learning that our children experience in the social and emotional arenas:
- What is our intention for social/emotional learning? (In a perfect year, what practices and content does our social/emotional curriculum include?)
- What is our actual practice? (In a typical year, what are our practices and content?)
- What are our core values? (What do we want to teach children about their behavior and choices in the social/emotional arena? What do we believe about best practices for teaching these skills?)
- How do we align our intentions, our practice and our core values? (What are our next steps?)
During the course of the year, teachers on the task force have undertaken a number of projects.
Survey of teaching practices:
The faculty and staff were surveyed to report on our own practice. Questions were both detailed and open-ended; questions asked about frequency of social/emotional work with children (daily, weekly, 2x a year… etc.) A group is working to collect and analyze this data.
Review our Materials:
A group has been tasked to take a close look at “what we say about ourselves” – from the school song to our website, to admission material – How do we talk about our core values? Another group of teachers is examining what other comparable schools’ practices around social/emotional curricular. Are the learning objectives explicitly taught or embedded in the school culture? Do they surface in daily practice and/or co-curricular and hidden curricular spaces in other schools?
Survey of Parents:
The Task Force designed and distributed a short survey for parents that left plenty of space for open-ended responses.
By end of school year, the S/E Task Force will report to the Head of School and suggest incremental steps for improvement. This is a one-year Task Force, so implementation of recommendations will begin in the upcoming 2012-2013 year.
One parent described the April 10 program on bullying. Parents K-8 were well represented. 28 parents attended. “There were some tense moments, and the speaker offered some good advice to parents.” Empowering our children to stand up for themselves and for one another was an important point. A stronger S/E curriculum to help children be more self-aware and change their behavior when they need to will support that goal.
John spoke about the importance of all members of the community (students, parents and teachers) agreeing on standards for individual behavior, being willing to hold one another accountable to shared standards.
Maureen Dorsey and Martha Effgen lead the Assessment Task Force. This Task Force has worked to answer an essential question: Do our assessments communicate clearly – to students and parents – the core values of learning at IDS?
Teachers in the EC and LS have been working to articulate clearly and simply the essential criteria on which students are evaluated and to examine how those are communicated to parents. What does learning look like? How do we know it when we see it?
The Task force borrowed from assessment work the Middle School has been doing during the past three years and studied its usefulness in the K-5 world. Teachers looked at four categories:
- student behaviors
- cognitive work
- social emotional skills
- attitudes toward learning
Teachers considered each of the four in their own grade level and discovered that three of the four categories are consistent over time even though cognitive work shifts over time. Student behaviors and readiness to learn looks surprising alike in 1stand 5th grades. That seems like good news…
…so – similar language, across the learning community will, hopefully, leverage learning.
The work thus far has made us all aware of all methods of assessment. We offer students feedback all the time, face-to-face, in comments on their written work, at the close of class or an activity – how do we do it, how do we want to do it better?
This is a two-year Task Force. John shared his hopes that what teachers are learning about the principles of strong assessment practices will be available for future work in the assessment of administrators and teachers: What does it look like when my teaching or my work as an administrator is at its best? How will I measure it? Assessment practices need continual review and tweaking. Developing a language of learning school-wide will help us to continually grow.