Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, Oct. 30, 2006

October 30, 2006 at 2:40 pm | In Minutes |

Summary:

Next meeting: Wednesday, November 1, (during staff development), location TBA.

Literacy:

We need to define it, starting with the standards. We need to decide what are baseline skills and what are skills specific to our content areas.

Visioning and Timeline:

We need to go through the list from the Visioning Night, streamline it, add our ideas about the “curriculum menu” exercise and student visions of space (arts wing), and decide on relative importance and timing of items.

We need to talk more about a concrete project around “school” that could be presented at PATHSfest, coming (we hope) out of the "curriculum menu" exercise.

Present:

• Phil Divinsky
• Jane Krasnow
• Valerie Green
• Jill Irving
• Dave Nichols
• Kelly Noble
• Diane Manzi
• Tom Lafavore

Full Notes (paraphrased):

Hello to Kelly Noble! Kelly is Diane’s student teacher.

We did a short recap for Phil about what’s been going on for the past 2 meetings, since he has been at PETs.

Tom: we need a baseline for kids’ literacy skills before we do any exercises with them around literacy.

How do we gather data on literacy?

We need to make sure that we don’t use journaling as an assessment tool, but it’s definitely useful for the creative process and/or for developing vocabulary in the content area.

Diane: I’m not trained to do literacy with assessment. How do we assess students’ literacy skills?

Val: we need a list of the skills our students need. What does it mean to be literate? Something that we can look at, go down the list, and check off "yes, student uses punctuation correctly, or uses correct punctuation 50% of the time…"

Later we picked this up again: specifically, what does literacy mean? We need to define it, before someone defines it for us. Start with the Standards. General literacy is different than literacy in a specific content area, so we need to figure out what the baseline skills are for all areas, and then what the skills are for a specific content area. The hardest part is the assessment piece. We don’t have the tools or the access to student info (such as NWEA or MEA scores from sending schools). Once we have the data, what do we do with it?

We don’t have a school literacy specialist yet. It’s possible that we could access a literacy specialist from somewhere else in the district, before getting our students together to do something like a group creative writing assignment.

We talked a bit about the group "curriculum selection" exercise we discussed during the last meeting. We need to bring students together as a "group within a group" and explain to them what we’re thinking and what we’re trying to do with the arts academy–a lot of kids just want to go to their class and that’s it. Maybe students could rotate through each class to hear about the curriculum (possibly from other students who are in the class), and then get together for a group exercise to choose curriculum and create a "dream experience" at PATHS. It would be nice if students could be the spokespeople for each program. We also need to make sure that those students could get together and talk about curricula with the other spokespeople, so that they don’t miss out on the information about other courses.

Once the curriculum exercise is over, some students may be interested in doing some visioning around space and a new arts wing.

Phil: nice flow between creating a curriculum "menu" for kids and then moving into a theme around "school" for a presentation at PATHSFest. Would this be a good thing to do second semester? Get together after Xmas and schedule the visioning, explain the goal of presenting at PATHSFest?

Elizabeth: this kind of concrete project, involving students, could go out as part of a letter to our growing contact list.

Jane was wondering where we were in terms of our large-scale visioning versus what actions we’re taking now, and urged us to make a timeline. We should start with the bulleted list from the Visioning Night and add our ideas for curriculum visioning and fundraising to it, and figure out when we will do what, the relative importance of items, etc.

We’ll meet on Wednesday. Tom will see whether he can book the Central Office conference room for us, to give us a change of scene.