Monthly MPC Meetings 2016-2017

MPC Meeting April - Summer Camps

5/19/2017

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Information on the Summer camps that participated in last month fair at the Mather is available to download.

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MPC Meeting minutes 3/16/2017

3/23/2017

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5:30 meeting begins

Speakers: Rochelle Nwosu, Jana Sunkle, Barbara Owens, Katie Lyons, and Karyn Stranberg

Topic: Vision for the Mather School

Instructional focus at the Mather: Teachers will facilitate student academic discourse to develop students’ skills in using evidence to support their arguments in discussion and in writing.

Vision of the Mather

Move towards becoming a level 1 school through:
- Shared leadership school with instructional coaches to help leverage the work
- Learning lab where all are learners including adults (learning walks where teachers visit each other classrooms to learn from one another, observations, retreats)
- Maintain diverse specialities and experiences; we have many excellent special classes here
- Support 75 minutes plus common planning times; times where teachers come together to plan their work once per week
- Strategically align partners with school goals; we have many partnerships here and we want to align them with the school so they help us advance our status
K-6 or K0-5 expansion: we will work to figure this out together; at some point it will come up through the district

Instructional Structures at the Mather

Development of instructional leadership team
- Every grade level representative has facilitated ILT with support of Teachers21 consultant; we think of the ILT as the instructional “bus driver” it moves us forward
- Every grade level has an ILT member who facilitates the common planning time; it’s going really well this year; team meets twice a month for 90 minutes; planned out all year’s professional development together
Math Instructional Coach: added this year
Restructuring of Literacy Collaborative Coaches for school year 17-18
- Grades k-2: literacy coach support with LC model, coaching, and professional development as well as common planning times; Ms. Owens will move out of the classroom next year to be a full time literacy coach
- Grades 3-5: literacy coach support with LC model; coaching, and professional development as well as district wide curriculum; katie will move out of the classroom next year to coach full time
- Having strong coaching is important as a strategy for improvement because the work with coaches is not an evaluation the way it can be when the administration observes teachers
Math Coaching at the Mather - Jana speaking
- Having coaches at the school is lucky; most Boston schools do not
- Work happens in three levels: whole school, grade level, and one-on-one
- Whole school: instructional leadership team, whole school end of unit assessment system, learning from student work; support technology in the classroom (next gen assessments will be all computer based); math interactive data wall (bulletin board by the main office); MATHer Buzz (form of communication with teachers); Problem of the Month; grade 5 math team (first math team at the school for kids; meet at lunch and solve problems together)
- Grade level: common planning time facilitate adult learning and unpack standards, read research and think about incorporating it, ANET assessments; Full Day Retreats to focus on unpacking study units, reflect on lessons, think of next steps
- One-on-One: meet weekly or biweekly with four teachers to plan lessons and make plans; Boston Teacher Residency Learning Site Visits where teachers from outside visited three Mather classrooms to observe lessons and reflect on what they saw
Literacy Coaching at the Mather - Ms. Owens and Ms. Lyons
- Mather is a Literacy Collaborative School - there are 12 in BPS district
- We started with K-2 and now are adding grades 3-5
- Wanted to do literacy collaborative to build culture at the school and created a vision for literacy learning with focus on listening, reading, speaking, and writing; we focused on creating a coherent approach that would be accessible to the school community
- We wanted to develop teachers’ capacity through coaching and learning the LC model
- Teachers elected to give additional hours of professional development (more than is required) to this model
- Literacy coaching follows the same approach with three focuses: whole school, grade level, and one-on-one
- All teachers at the Mather attend the training in LC model
- Focus on teaching kids to read like writers and write like readers
Role of MPC
- Continue to support Mather teachers
- Advocate for our budget to reflect our school needs (when appropriate)
- Continue to recruit diverse families to join our school community and MPC
- Engage and participate in site council
- Support instructional needs and focus of school
- Continue to fundraise for school needs
- Increase parent school climate survey participation to 30% (April 15th to June 28th); we would really like to achieve this so that our information from parents will appear on the Mather page in the BPS website and helps people learn about our school; ideas are to set up laptop stations, have paper copies available, use EdConnect to advertise

Question: will we get another gym teacher? A: no, but we are getting a dance teacher next year
Question: will we ever get AWC at the Mather? A: no, because the district is moving towards Excellence for All to replace AWC. There are many considerations about AWC that we can talk more about at another meeting, if MPC wants.

Preparing for Ms. Nwosu’s leave of absence
- Starts on April 13
- Ms. Stranberg will be the school leader; there will be no additional supports because Ms. S didn’t want to bring in someone from the outside because we have such strong coaching staff here; she feels very comfortable with the staff
- MCAS testing will take place during the leave and the planning for it is already complete
- We will remain focused on instructional quality during the leave
- Big ticket items:
  - Hiring for open positions; want to fill as many as possible - K2, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, dance, art, technology, community field coordinator
  - Homework; will discuss homework at those and creating a more unified vision for homework at the Mather - won’t get resolved this year but will start the conversation to establish a homework policy for the school
- Do not expect any big changes to happen during the leave of absence

Parent Discussion: Survey rate focus

If 180 families completed the survey, we should advocate to get the results so we can see the results
The new vietnamese parent group could be a big help with getting survey results up (Duyen will email her group to encourage participation)
Booth at spring fling - make it a volunteer role (Abbie W. happy to volunteer)
How do we get paper copies here in all the languages needed? Call Family Engagement Office (Liz Angel will follow up)
Send flyers home in the backpacks to explain (rebecca to draft)
Create a “take the survey” banner at the entrance to the school (Lynn will ask Ms. Thames about putting up signs with the flyer)
Message the reason why to take the survey so parents know that it helps our school - the survey helps us get funding for the school

Future meeting ideas: Mather becoming a K-6 school in the future - can MPC have any impact on the plan for this change?

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MPC Meeting April - Summer Camps

MPC Meeting minutes 3/16/2017

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