October and November have been a busy month for instruction and learning!
As a staff we have taken a deeper dive into our MCAS data, which has enabled us to target instruction, intensives, and intervention based on student need. We were also able to spend time with Genevieve Diaz y Rodriguez, who facilitated a staff meeting on supporting and empowering Queer and Trans Youth. Genevieve Diaz y Rodriguez is a community/cultural organizer and educator that has been engaged in this work for 17 years. She has experience organizing in a variety of ways and approaches which include labor, anti-violence work, domestic violence advocacy, LGBQT+ liberation, environmental and racial justice. Her approaches are based in Kimberley Crenshaw’s work of intersectionality, - “we are whole people and have many different intersecting identities and experiences that make us who were are—we can not and should not be made to separate ourselves.”
At each grade level and on the Specialist teams we have been spending time examining student work and looking at videos of teaching in order to improve our practice and dig into our work around formative assessment. Teachers have presented dilemmas and we have worked as a team, using a protocol, to note what we observe, ask questions, consider dilemmas and best practices, and to connect to our own practice. In addition, as we have begun to focus on formative assessment, teachers have spent time researching, building a school-wide resource, and presenting what they have learned in their teams.