Supporting Student Success – NH Extended Learning Opportunities

All Site Meeting

February 12, 2009

Location: NH DOE, Walker Building, Room 100

Time: 9:00 – 12:00

In attendance:

ELO Teams:

Manchester Central

Laconia

Franklin

Newfound Regional

Monadnock Regional

Farmington

Raymond

Mascenic

Nute High School, Milton

Oyster River

ELO Partnership:

NH DOE: Paul Leather, Suzanne Birdsall

PlusTime NH: Cythia Billings (facilitator), Melissa Gallagher

QED: Kim Carter, Elizabeth Cardine

CACES: Rob Lukasiak

CSSR: (Center for Secondary School Redesign) Joe DiMartino

Antioch NE: Tom Julius

Main Street Academix: Bill Preble

Special guests:

Student presenters from Laconia High School and MC2.

Announcements

• The Americorps bidders meeting will be held at PlusTime on Feb 25^th and March 3^rd. Both dates offer meeting times of 9 – 11:30 OR 12:30 – 3:00 (flyer distributed).

• The A* VISTA bidders conference meeting will be held at PlusTime on February 17^th and March 11^th. Both dates offer meeting times of 9 – 11:30 OR 12:30 – 3:00 (flyer distributed).

• Antioch University is holding a discussion forum on Alternative Programming for At-Risk Youth on March 13^th from 12 – 4:00 p.m. (flyer distributed). Tom Julius also announced that he will be contacting all schools for input in planning the Teacher to Teacher conference, to be held on May 7^th at Antioch University in Keene.

• Ed Week is hosting an online discussion “Using Assessment to Strengthen Teaching and Learning” on February 12^th from 4 – 5 p.m. (flyer distributed).

• The next all site meeting will be held on Thursday, March 5^th. The snow date is Tuesday, March 10^th. (meeting schedule through June 2009 distributed).

Engaging Student Voice

Bill Preble of Main Street Academix kicked off the meeting talking about the roles that student leaders can play in developing ELOs (handout). Bill is partnering on this initiative to work with schools in tying the ELO initiative into a learning opportunities for students. Bill offered ideas on the types of credit bearing opportunities that could be offered for students who are involving in designing the ELO initiative in their schools. Right now Bill is working to establish which of the pilot schools is interested in pursuing this work and who is ready to role out a model of student involvement. Bill’s email address is: wpreble@msanh.com and he encouraged schools to be in touch.

Learning from Student Work

Kim Carter and Elizabeth Cardine facilitated a two group activity using the ATLAS protocol to observe student work and experiences through Extended Learning Opportunities. Students from Laconia High School and MC2 spoke about their work and learning experiences, and meeting participants had the opportunity to respond and reflect on these presentations. There was also discussion of the development of a moderation process – looking for comparability of assessment across sites.

There was a variety of feedback on the process, with questions about process, awarding of credit and partial credit. Some participants felt that this process would help community partners connect to the concept of competencies. Others suggested that students should be involved in the group assessment of peers, providing for the opportunity for student leadership and connecting to students.

Personalization of Learning

Joe DiMartino of the Center for Secondary School Redesign talked about school structures needing to change for real personalization to take place and how performance assessment supports this. He shared the story of a student who attended the Urban Academy in New York City:

Urban Academy educates some of the city’s poorest and most at risk students (mostly minority). The student shared her experience with Joe on an art criticism project. The first task for this student was to find a piece of art to critique. Part of this search required the student researching the artist, the genre and conducting an interview with an art expert. The next step required the student to submit a proposal in order to get approval for this project. The proposal was presented to a panel of school and community members (Joe remarked that this sounded like a dissertation defense)After approval of this project, the student met with her advisor for 2 one-hour sessions per week. This is an example of a school that is personalizing learning and has high expectations around students driving their own learning process. They are one of a small number of schools that has been granted a waiver by the state to excuse students from having to take the state Regents exams. They have demonstrated that their students are prepared above and beyond most high school graduates.

The structures in place in the school can drive the student experience. Student-led conferences with parent involvement are an example of this. Newfound mentioned that they have been doing this at the elementary school with great success. Joe talked about the idea in NH that time (the Carnegie Unit) doesn’t matter anymore. This concept of unlimited learning is needed in order to improve teacher practice, create performance assessments and increase parent involvement. He pointed to an example of a school based community center – local businesses decided to set up a community center in the school where ELOs could be designed and set up. It was staffed and fit with computers for student use.

• Participant question: How do you get a school board and the world to understand that time doesn’t matter anymore?

  • Joe answered: NH is the first in the country so it requires a major shift in mindset. It is hard to shift to an idea that teachers can actually spend less time teaching and students can actually do better! We recognize that the master agreement is still based on time and that is something that needs to be looked at.

• Participant question: What do we do about transcripts and grading as it relates to this type of assessment? We don’t know how to handle this.

  • CACES is offering workshops on grading in a competency-based environment and everyone is encouraged to attend. The people who have attended have raved about how helpful it has been. Paul added that most everyone has written competencies, is thinking about what it means in terms of assessment and grading but isn’t quite there yet. Marzano has done some work on this and helping with standards based report cards.

• Participant question: Our school is implementing e-portfolios and I’m wondering if the DOE is going to give us guidelines on what is enough in terms of demonstration of competencies? How much mastery does a student need?

  • The NH DOE response is that this is a local decision – the design of competencies, sufficiency and mastery must be determined at the district level (with the exception of the 11^th grade NECAP).

Joe reminded the group that he will be in touch with school leadership to support them in the ELO work.