Just when I think I can’t be surprised, I’m surprised.
Yesterday I got an e-mail from the Literacy Coach. She wrote that she is planning a meeting to discuss and possibly make revisions to the Rigor portion of the SIP (school improvement plan) and to also further brainstorm ways to enhance the Accelerated and Enriched Instruction program at the school. Would Tuesday work?
I would love for you to participate in this process. I believe you have some important insights worth sharing in a collaborative work session
Other participants will be the AEI/Math Content Specialist, another specialist in the building, and the Professional Development Teacher who leads the coordination of our SIP. (BTW, I now have a copy of the 2008-2009 SIP.)
I e-mailed the PTA president. Did she know about this meeting? She didn’t but was happy to hear about it. Was this meeting at the initiative of the Literacy coach or someone else? Don’t know. After the SIP meeting I had sent the PTA president some information about what another area school was including in its SIP, namely specific writing requirements. She fired it off to the principal (yikes! I was very blunt in my email and frank about what I saw as shortcomings in our school’s plan), so maybe it had the principal’s blessing.
So now I have to come up with some ideas. One is to use MAP-R data. To begin with, they can look at the data of 7th and 8th grade students who scored advanced on the MSA and see if they made a year’s progress on the MAP-R. If not, well then we clearly know there is a problem in serving GT kids at the school. They need to share that MAP-R data. The other issue is the curriculum itself. Supposedly there is a GT curriculum which has “pathways, extensions and scaffolding.” I want to see it. There has to be something between the standard MCPS curriculum…and the humanities magnet curriculum.
More thinking to do over the weekend, but if readers have any brilliant suggestions of how as school can be held accountable for meeting the needs of “highly able learners” in a No Child Left Behind challenged school, please share!
I assume you’ll be mostly looking at the verbal and maybe social studies/history. Good luck finding the GT curriculum.
Have you seen this book? It has examples of actual lesson plans tied to the Texas state curriculum, differentiated for gifted learners.
http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Middle-High-End-Learning-Students/dp/1882664825/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product
“Lessons From the Middle: High-End Learning for Middle School Students”
Thanks Carrie and Kirsten. I had another meeting yesterday that I’ll post on soon. Seems a new middle school curriculum is going to be rolled out next year, so things are in process.
[...] or School Improvement Plan meetings. And because of my rather direct feedback, I was asked to come back for a follow-up meeting on the “rigor” portion of the [...]