Mather Parent council Meeting Minutes 3/16/2017

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?