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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2022-12-15-DIAMOND-min Diamond School Council Meeting Minutes RECEIVED December 15, 2022 Members in attendance: Marlon Davis, Ye Tong, Chhandomay Mandal, Joyce Dvorak, Rachel Harrington, Remy Coombs, Christy Prasad (Liz Sharp, non-voting member) ILEI LEXINGTON MIA A. Welcome B. Approval of Minutes November 17, 2022 C. Updates Principal • Standards Based Grading • Communication ■ We know that we need to make the use of SBG more clear and understand the progression between middle school and high school. ■ Students also need better understanding of what SBG represents. • Next Steps ■ The middle school will not be going back to traditional grades. We need to examine how to communicate better and decide if we need an additional score within the progressing category. ■ Equity concerns could be addressed by using a traditional grade as well as the SBG. • Restorative Justice • A district level initiative but the overall planning has been disjointed. A lot of the work has been done at the school level. • Clarke and Diamond Middle School Principals met with Suffolk to make a plan for more training. In the meantime, plans are in place to see how many more staff can be trained for Tier 1. Looking to see if the district PD calendar can be more flexible for future training. • We have around 25 staff currently trained in Tier 1 at Diamond. • Goal is to normalize the use of RJ in classrooms. We have more staff who are trained to be the facilitators for Tier 1 training. • District wide Equity Teams are using circles regularly. Not sure how to spread it to more faculty meetings at this point. • School Council members are invited to RJ training, along with CO staff. Will be helpful to spread the knowledge base out. Will use the hours we have available with Suffolk to offer this training. • Some community confusion on how RJ is the same as the DEI curriculum. • Offering some circles for parents could be a next step so they can have a first hand experience. Perhaps offering this as an evening with our internal facilitators. • DCAP • Strategies that teachers should be using at the class level so that we can provide assistance to students who may have struggles. • We would like to laminate the one page document to hang in classrooms so that all teachers and students will know what is available. • Our goal is to ingrain this in all we do. Parents • Parent observation about registering for parent conferences o The tabs are very confusing. Hopefully the issue has been resolved. • Question about LHS adopting SBG. o There are no plans to adopt SBG at the high school but the leadership team will be discussing the continuum and progression to LHS. o Teachers at LHS may be using standards based grading but the report card still uses traditional grading, particularly because of transcript requirements. o We are looking at how to support the transition from 8th to 9th grade with grading practices, particularly with homework and participation counting in grades. o Middle school leadership team will discuss this topic today. A guiding discussion based on Guskey's "keep the familiar familiar'. For example, why not keep "exceeds" in our scale since we use that on MCAS; traditional grading is familiar, so why not keep something at least that is equivalent to this scale? • The range in "progressing" could be creating a false sense of security. • The communication to parents should have been better and if it were better, we could be in a better place. • Some parents understand the purpose of SBG as an equity concern and holding students accountable without including behaviors in the grade. Communication could have been better. • Encouraging to hear that there will be a plan to ease the transition to LHS. • Report card comments that are more personalized would have been helpful to understand the grades better. It seems like there should be a comment for each subject, at least. Staff • Staff perspective on SBG is the benefit that separates out the behavior and grades on discrete tasks. We use three pieces of data for each standard and give students direct feedback. • Do parents understand the complexities of traditional grades not giving as much information and that SBG do not translate directly to a traditional grade? D. Open Discussion a. Covered above in the SBG discussion. E. Meeting Adjourned: 7:52 AM F. Next Meeting: January 19„ 2023