Arts Academy Revitalization Action Team

Arts Academy Meeting Notes, Jan. 29, 2007

January 29, 2007 at 2:40 pm | In Minutes |

Summary:

Next meeting: Thursday, January 25 @ 1:40 in the Music room

Meeting adjourned at 2:40 (30 minutes extra staff dev.)

Elizabeth will work on starting a newsletter.

Work we need to keep doing:

• “elevator speech”
• exit criteria / transcripts - what do they look like?
• curriculum discussion: college-style schedule? How do we decide what a "course" is and how to "major" in an area? How to design majors?

Staff meeting: 30-minute presentation to staff during an upcoming Wednesday, including:

• reason for starting the work
• value of small-school learning (researched/presented by Val)
• inclusivity (model for rest of PATHS)
• HOME project
• MET and BAA visits (PowerPoint presentation by Phil)
• examples of cross-curricular work currently going on

After the presentation, we’ll ask staff to fill out a short survey showing support or not, as well as comments.

Val will keep track of contact hours past 2:10.

Present:

• Phil Divinsky
• Vicky Stubbs
• Elizabeth Watson
• Jane Krasnow
• Valerie Green
• Dave Beane
• Dave Nichols
• Lisa Hicks

Full Notes (paraphrased):

We started with a re-cap of Thursday’s meeting and discussed giving a 30-minute presentation to the staff during an upcoming Wednesday.

Also, could we start a newsletter about A.A.R.A.T. activities that could go out to the staff and a larger community, so that we could start letting people know what we’re doing and get some community buy-in? Elizabeth will work on this. Maybe whe can use John’s template for the Program Developer newsletter. We need to decide who gets the newsletter. Portland Partnership arts grant recipients, others.

We need to continue to work on our "elevator speech", have discussions about what transcripts/diplomas would look like, exit criteria, how students move through curriculum. This came up again at the very end of the meeting, when Val mentioned a conversation she and Lisa had after last Wednesday’s staff development. Specificially: what if we ran our classes more like a college, split up into courses, offered at different times through the semester? Then it would be easier to chunk up our curricula and figure out what a "major" in an area would look like and how we could combine curricula. We need to discuss this more. Val is thinking about how to work it into her course within our current schedule.

Elizabeth will make sure that her A.A.R.A.T. e-mail list includes Tom, Bo, Brian & Dana.

Staff meeting: 30 minute presentation + Q&A time. Vicky will ask the L.I.T. when we could do this. Afterwards, we should ask the three questions + comments.

Presentation:

- why we started this work

- value of small-school learning. Val asked what "small school" buzzword means: just smaller, or does it also assume things like advisory groups, etc. Phil: things that work for small schools. Val will research for the presentation. If it becomes an important part of our presentation, maybe we can get someone from the Gates foundation to come in and talk to staff.

- making sure we stress inclusivity: this isn’t just about us–it could be a model for the rest of the school. We need to keep stressing this vision.

- our HOME project, incorporating literacy. We will try to get L.I.T. money, as well as Staff Development money, to help pay for this. When we have the proposal, Elizabeth will contact Portland Stage about matching funds.

- visits to MET school and BAA. Vicky has photos of MET; John M. has photos of the BAA from last year. Phil will make a PowerPoint presentation.

- examples of how we’re already incorporating cross-curricular work in our classes.

After the presentation, we need to ask specific questions of the staff to get the feedback we want. It will be the end of a long day and people won’t want to answer open-ended questions. We should also send out a follow-up e-mail for those who didn’t get a chance to fill out the survey.

Val will now include the meeting length in the notes, so that we can keep track of extra time spent for contact hours. Generally Monday meetings go until at least 2:30 and Thursdays until at least 2:20, so we will figure an average of 30 minutes a week up until this point, and keep track more completely from now on.

[ Editor Val: I volunteer to keep the spreadsheet ]