I can fill you in a little bit on how things have advanced. I'm not going to do a lot up here unless there's questions or things that people are asking that there's stuff I can show you about, but the teams within the school. So you've got your principals leading their own schools. We've got curriculum coordinators that are talking with their curriculum teams and whatnot. And so all these groups are actually having similar conversations about homework policy, what's good, what's bad, what should be changed. What are things that are there that people should be aware of that we might not have thought of yet? And so all those parts and pieces have been rolling in over the last couple of days. And then we're going to sit down with the cabinet and start to consolidate all the ideas that have come up. We started a conversation here the last time that we were together, which I can't believe it was over a month ago. But if I remember going back and checking my notes, we had talked about a number of things. And the last piece that we were kind of on and kind of discussing at the time was kind of impact on sports and after school extracurriculars and things like that. And so I'm happy to kind of pick up again. It's an odd protocol. My job is just to kind of listen, take notes, ask clarifying questions. If you have something that you want me to respond to, just tell me to. But the reason for me not responding to a lot of it is just because I don't want to mess up your thoughts, and I want to make sure that you get them all out so that we get a chance to hear them if that makes sense. So good. All right, so who's first? Another question. Yeah. With an added homework policy and shifting schedules, will teachers be allowed more time in the day to plan in grade paperwork, or receive greater compensation for the extra work they would be putting in? Homework, typically, especially the way that we're looking at is a normally expected duty. So I would say probably not. In terms of planning time, there is a big difference, though, that you're touching on, which is right between elementary school and high school. High school, because they typically teach five out of the seven classes. They have kind of natural planning time that's built in. Some do have duty. Some do not. Elementary school, I worry a little bit more about, because they tend to be with the students more of the day. So they don't get as much planning time. So one of the things that we've been doing to try to bolster that a little bit is we've been increasing the amount of time that the librarians have. They used to only be have librarians one day a week. We've got them up to three, and I'm hoping over the next year or so through the budget process to get them up the full time. And that way, the students are working on digital literacy with the librarians, or the teachers who do their planning to help out a little bit. So good question. Other thoughts and parts and pieces? Speaking of the elementary schools, so do you have an idea of in comparing S-back scores between Brookfield, Braintree, and Randolph? How does that, are they pretty evenly aligned, or is one school way above another, or how does that? It's changed. I might even be able to throw the data up for you, but let's see if I can describe it a little bit. And again, things got really weird during COVID because the data wasn't, it was indicative, but it wasn't giving you real information that you could latch onto. Typically, prior to COVID, the three schools, they were fairly close. There was a little bit of separation to them. Historically, Brookfield was always kind of the highest performer on Braintree is and has been for quite a while. Brookfield is second, but it's been improving. Randolph was third, but it's, it had this really weird year in COVID that we can't explain where all three schools, their scores were growing were improving. But Randolph had a year, I think it was two years ago, that their score dropped like 30 to 50 points in one year, and then they recovered the year afterwards, and so it didn't make any sense. And so I did talk with Erika, who was the principal there at one time, to kind of try to do a little bit of research on what happened. Typically, when you see something like that, it's one of two things, and it does happen, used to happen on MCAS in Massachusetts as there's error in the test correcting that happens, or the students just weren't taking it seriously for whatever reason. And we did go in and look, and when you have a test that's supposed to go an hour and a half, and the students are spending 15 minutes or less on it, that's pretty indicative. But then the follow-up question is okay, did they spend 15 minutes on it because they just weren't taking it seriously, didn't feel it was a big deal, especially with COVID and everything else that was going on, or were they not engaging in it as fully as they could because they were anxious, they were nervous, or they just didn't know.  Most of them, prior to COVID, the elementary's were at or close to 70% hitting proficiency, state averages tend to be around 50%, give or take a couple of points, so they were doing really well. Above average of the state average. So the reason I bring that up is so Brookfield hasn't had, with the idea of like mandating homework in the elementary schools, Brookfield hasn't had homework in the school since for six years, so it doesn't seem to align with the argument that if they have more homework then they're gonna perform better and be better acquainted with the material and make better connections. So let's fill in the blanks again, and again, I'm not gonna say there's a causal relationship, right? There's correlation and there's cause. Correlation means it looks like one might be impacting the other, but you're not sure a causal means you're sure it's causing it. The change that happened, so Brookfield's scores had fallen kind of early on. They've been improving lately probably due to a lot of the work that the two curriculum directors are doing. Braintree was not ahead of Brookfield until probably the last five years or so, two or three years before COVID, and the one difference that Braintree has that Brookfield does not as they do 20 minutes of homework a night. So were the Brookfield scores higher? Like, do we have data that shows that seven years ago, and seven to 12 years ago Brookfield scores were higher? Yeah, Brookfield, if you go back way back when I started, Brookfield scores were always the highest. And then probably over the course of time, and again, I'm, let's see what I can find here if I've got the complete, I may have to do some searching over the last five years over the data is, but they had fallen behind Braintree kind of took over, but one of the big differences, because they do try to keep a quality between the elementary schools, one of the big differences is that they, they do have a homework, homework plan. All right, performance data. Let's see if we got the longitudinal statistics. And as a fact, they haven't even given us last year's data yet. And of course, the secretary of education is leaving and I wonder if the two are related. Let's see when the last we had data. So Braintree, last year, I'm trying to remember when the last year before COVID was, I think COVID is 2020, right? Yes. So 2019, if you're gonna give me a minute to orient myself. All right. So what you see happening, so this is 2019. So this is the percentage of students in each grade that hit the proficiency threshold. So they had been doing work for a couple of years there. So it kind of makes a little bit of sense, right? Third grade, 47% were hitting the proficiency level, fourth grade, 57%, fifth grade, 80%, sixth grade, 73%. What school is this? So this is Braintree down here at this point in time. And so that was 2019. And even just looking at this, right? You see kind of the change over time. Let's go back to 2015, right? They were between 22, they had one really high year in there, one really stellar class. But typically they were in anywhere between the 20 and 40% range. And so they've made some pretty dramatic improvements. So let's go to Brookfield. Actually, hold on, let's go back. And that was for ELA. Let's take a look at, this is ELA data up here. This is math data here. And math data is gonna be a little bit more impacted because of the COVID years when we get to the COVID years because typically it's foundational. It builds on itself. But let me reorient. All right, so 53, 29. So the math is between 30 and 29 and 60. And kind of when they started, they had a 56 in there, but they were anywhere from 16% here in the 20s to 16%. Yeah. In terms of overall, you can kind of see the change over time. So if you look at the average percentage of students that are hitting proficiency each year, so in Braintree, right in 2017, it was 60.8%, 2018, it was 76%, 2019, it was 66. And this even includes, and they came back really strong after COVID. And excuse me, that's ELA. And then the math, you can kind of see the changes. They've even come back completely above where they were prior to COVID, which is unheard of in the state based upon the last round of data that we actually had for them. So let's take a look at Brookfield. This was probably the easier number to take a look at. So if you take a look at Brookfield, right, 2017, so like I said, four or five years ago, right, they were lagging behind a little bit. And if you take a look back to 2015, they were actually higher in terms of where their scores were. And so that's the ELA, and this is the math. RES, let's see if we can find the weird year. A little bit closer to Brookfield, in some cases exceeds Brookfield, in some cases it's below. But they had a really bad year in 2021, right? So in terms of ELA, more than half of the kids were hitting the proficiency or higher for some reason in 2021, you see this huge drop, right? You know, there's a 20 point drop there. And then they kind of recovered. In math, the drop was huge. I mean, when they went from 52% one year to 17, and then the next year they jumped back up. And so that's why I'm saying I don't think it was a knowledge thing. I think it was either the kids weren't taking this seriously or they misgraded the tests. So what score were you saying that they haven't had homework for? In Brookfield, they haven't had homework and it doesn't seem like their test scores are further behind then, drastically farther behind than Randolph or Braintree. Oh, I remember, so 2021, these they've been improving. So they're hitting 70% in ELA. Let's take a look at where Brookfield is. They're 40 to mid 50s. Can you look at Randolph? Yeah, you wanna look at the elementary school, right? Yeah. So Randolph, right, kind of the same thing, right? Where the other one was hitting 70s.  Right, depending upon what you look at. And again, that one year I don't, because it's not explainable in the recovery afterwards, I think it's just bad, bad data. And I probably should even eliminate it from the list. But again, the big difference, and I think they're, it sounded like, and so to put things in a time perspective, what I discovered, because, you know, Richard up at Brookfield had brought up, well, you know, we looked at some research and the research said the homework doesn't matter. So I went and I talked with Melinda in a little bit with Kara, because they were looking at that research, I think my first year here, which was around 2017. And so that's when Brookfield decided that they weren't gonna do homework. Braintree continued with it. And again, you see that that's when the scores are different.  And it was a first year teacher there. That was his first year. So there's a little bit of. Could be. So can I say definitively that the difference between the two is that? No. But I have a feeling that it had to have some impact. And even John Hattie's work, which is the work that they were looking at in terms of the research saying that, yeah, because of this, we don't believe in, believe that homework's impactful. But John Hattie said actually a couple of things. The first one, which was really important was that his correlations actually showed that there was improvement at the elementary level as well as the high school level with homework, just that the improvement at the elementary level didn't tend to be as great. And then he went on to be very specific about it. And his concern was, and I probably have to quote if you want me to look for it, was that he did what was called a meta-study. So he didn't do any of his own research. He looked at, you know, hundreds of other people's research to see what patterns emerge from it. Yeah. You said that, so Brookfield didn't have homework, right? Braintree has 20 minutes of homework a night. That's kind of their standard right now. Okay, and is that for each class that gives 20 minutes of homework every night? Yeah. Now, would I say that they're all 100% consistent about that? No, but it is the norm. So you know, most days you could expect that. Is that for all grades? Yeah, okay. Yeah, matter of fact, then I reviewed it too because I was looking at the notes that they sent over as a part of it. Go ahead. Question. In regards to upper level high school education, I know many students who do not spend their, have idle time in much of their time out of school. Instead, they are forced to work for a variety of reasons. I myself work a job. And an increased homework load or increased stress from this policy would likely result in them prioritizing their work over their school as they would be forced to do. And in this prioritization, this forced prioritization would not further benefit their education if you look at it from that perspective because of the relatively high poverty rates in our localized area. I agree with the fact that it has had a marketable impact on grades in more wealthy areas, such as I think most I've read were in a few specific examples of Massachusetts, but yet in lower income schools, an increased homework load just forced an issue there and then when wealth inevitably wins, people just pull away from school more altogether, according to some of the studies I've read. Yeah, I know a lot of people in the junior grade who are kind of like overwhelmed by, or somewhat overwhelmed by the work that they have and they prefer to work so they work and they don't do their homework. And I think that issue would get, would be exacerbated, or could be considered, could be exacerbated by this. No, I think that I think they're good points. I wanna add, like there's also in lower income areas where kids have to take care of their siblings after school and or they have to take care of their parents after school. So, and some of those kids aren't doing their homework in the first place. So they're probably more than likely not gonna do that extra homework because it sets you up to be like, well, I can't hit this expectation. So maybe I shouldn't just hit this at all. Whereas the other kids who are in their classes doing their homework, they're probably gonna have, and I've seen studies on this and we've had to have discussions with this where your mental health is important and you're stressing out about getting this homework done because you do your homework and this added flow that you don't really need.  And to add on to that, adding extra homework kind of assumes that kids have a space at home to do that work uninterrupted and undistracted where it's like not all kids have those undistracted things. Like if we think, I don't want to put this as a classes, this is gonna come off classes. I'm just taking notes just to make sure I'm not people counting. Kids with stable homes, even they don't actually have sometimes places to actually do the work. But kids with stable homes are the ones who are probably doing like the after school sports who are doing these other things and this is gonna impact them that way. But kids, and I think we have a really high free or reduced lunch rate in this. Yep, depends on the town. These three schools, so again, not just some classes, but usually in those situations, those are the kids that have a job, that have to take care of their siblings, that have to take care of their parents.  Like their dinner is maybe on the room or on the floor because those are real situations that we have. And one more thing, if you have a child that has an IEP that needs accommodations and they may or may not have support from their parents on those accommodations, how does that work? Because if you have a kid that has difficulty reading or writing and they usually have a scribe or a speech to text, how does that work with their 20 minutes where one kid can read one paragraph for 20 minutes and not get anywhere, where another kid could probably zoom through a book in 20 minutes. So how does that get timed and how does that get worked out? I know my child's graduating, but we had those accommodations too. And I would just worry about the, I don't know if I wanna call it the economy of scale to it where if teachers have to give up this 20 minutes, even if their class doesn't need it, but they have to give out these 20 minutes every day, where do they get that individualized control to be like, well, my classroom is ahead and I have a whole five or six stress buckets right now. And they can't handle this right now, they have other things to do. I just hope that the teachers have, they don't lose their autonomy and their control over. Now I'm just, I've read that you're supposed to, it's supposed to be high foundation and high quality, but I work for the government too. I get statutes from the state telling me this has to be this and that, but then when you actually have to fulfill it, it's not what the statute says on paper. And I don't know what the means and metrics are for the teachers to do that. And especially if they have IEP or 504 plans, like I just don't wanna see that little control. So are there questions in there? Because there's a lot of pieces that you asked a lot of them, so it's start, start. The question is the, any quality, maybe, to kids who have access to stable homes or calm homes versus kids who don't, I guess is the first question. So the goal, overall goal, and then there are some structures that we have planned for next year to try to accommodate for that. And they may not be the best, and if not we learn and we adjust. But in terms of for the older students, the work should be at a level that they can do. So that's the first piece, without assistance from parents at home. That is not how this matters, well, personally. So hold on here, please let me speak. And I will agree with you, they may not be working that way now, but that just means that the other piece of this is we have to have clear expectations for the teachers in terms of how things are delivered. There are a couple of really important points that she brought up. And again, my answer may not be satisfying, but I'll give you the thought process that went there. So that's the first piece. At the lower grade levels, it gets a little bit more difficult, right? Especially at the lower elementary grades, where the interactions with the parents are gonna be key. And it's a good thing if those interactions happen because a lot of the work that those students are doing or developing socialization, the best way to do that is in the family unit, if at all possible. So at the lower level, we do and expand upon kind of what we've been doing now, which is the parent nights, to have the parents come in, we serve them dinner, we'll talk a little bit about how to interact with the students in ways that will be helpful, that will support the homework, and the homework is different there, and the homework may not be the best word. Like you said, it might be, okay, here's a math board game that we will supply to you. Can you take this home and spend 10 minutes on a plane with those sorts of expectations, and then we spend the night kind of going through and playing the game that night so that the parents are comfortable with it, and we can talk about what it is that the students are learning by doing this. At the high school level, we built in, and this was to support some of the other concerns that came up, we built in the after-school busing to help, so that students that needed to stay after for a couple, half hour or whatever it is to get some help and get caught up, they have the ability to do that, but also the other concern that we had was that we wanna get more of the students involved in extracurricular activities, whether it's sports or whether it's the drama program or the various other programs that we have here, and a lot of them haven't been able to do that because they don't have that ride, and so that's the other purpose behind that, so trying to be able to meet those pieces with providing what's basically a $70,000 cost for the year, which is cheap compared to the budget to kind of fill in those spaces. In terms of, and this comes back to the idea of the extra, homework, the goal isn't to say, you know, everybody's got 30 minutes of homework tonight or an hour of homework tonight, and it's not to provide extra. The goal is for the teachers to identify with the new testing systems that we have, folks have been through Star 360, some folks have probably had tracked my progress testing. It identifies where the weak skills are in terms of the students. Some of those skills are weak because we need to improve the activities that we're using to teach our kids. You know, the activities, they're doing activities with the kids, but they may not be as effective as they need to be, so some of those changes can happen. But those testing modules are important because when we pick the specific pieces of homework that we feel are the most important because they really get the kids to learn the foundational standards that they need, not everything has to be learned really well. You have to be familiar with a lot of stuff. Some stuff you just need to have down pat. We can actually use the testing results to tell us if that homework was effective at promoting what it was we wanted to accomplish. And if it doesn't, we go and we change it until we find the right mix of pieces. To go back to a part of that perspective that wasn't fully addressed, my personal experience with the school has not been the standard one. I am considered to be a twice exceptional student who struggles with dyslexia. And in those struggles, I have consistently found that I've taken classes of all levels. I've been in APs and I've been in lower level courses. And in my experience, the teachers who attempt to have steady consistent homework have had the least time or been willing to do the least in order to make accommodations or look into this work. And oftentimes when I struggled most in classes because my dyslexia was in the standardized regular formatted work. Because in those cases, the teachers give out so much of it that they can't look at it from an individual basis or case to case basis. Additionally, some of the classes, some of the more highest performing classes, like higher level classes, such as AP classes which are striving the whole year to meet a set goal. So just AP physics or AP lit, the two I am in currently, provides less homework. And even AP physics, which is widely considered one of the highest level, high school courses. If you look at the AP test, like testing results and scores, does not provide standard homework because the teacher knows who has been like pushing us quickly the whole year to the extent that we've all been there for most of it, hasn't been giving regular homework. In AP lit, there hasn't been regular homework because oftentimes that is not what's necessary for learning and it would just cause further stress and duress in some of the already challenging courses. Additionally, the lack of support that one can see at home if they struggle with a learning disability is a vastly different environment than what they can do at school. With, if they don't have, say, parents helping them with reading or navigating a complicated source or site, your productivity goes down by a massive factor. It becomes almost impossible to do in an hour what you could do in 10 minutes at school, at times. So you had a lot of parts and pieces in there. The very beginning one, which I agree with you wholeheartedly on, is it's not about adding extra. It's about finding out the key pieces that are really important and making sure that there's homework that's tied to that. So you might actually, in a lot of your classes, might find a reduction if they do this process the way that it is supposed to go. AP is a different animal. I do know that, especially with the AP physics, I know the students do come in and put an extra time above and beyond because she makes herself available for that work. And so that's kind of taking the place of what would normally be homework. She's there and she's available. She's in AP physics and that work isn't usually treated in that way at all. Where you're from. By how, it isn't usually, you're given the work you would be given as homework in class. So the entire class time is usually spent on understanding the concepts more than blank work, which is why it's necessary. But that's my main point. My main point is, whether it is intended to be in addition to or in replacement of other work, if someone struggles with a learning difference, or if they struggle with a home system, what would be a small amount of work that they could bring out in five minutes at school could take hours at home and cause huge problems. So with a student who's on an IEP, typically what happens in those cases is the team gets together and they either modify or they accommodate for that extra work. Which works in class, that doesn't happen with work. Let me finish and then I'm happy to connect so that, because otherwise I get lost in the. Yes. So typically what would happen if the burden is something that a student couldn't do, then the IEP would be changed to accommodate for that or to modify the curriculum so that it is something that they could do. With the after school component as well, as students would be able to have access to those specialized support services to be able to get that help at that time. In reality, what happens at four years of experience in this system is in those situations, the student doesn't get extra help or assistance in this class, they're sent to a lower level class that's usually below their ability. You could be fully capable, but that isn't what happens. And that is not the route that I have ever seen taken either with myself or with any other student I know with similar struggles. What you're saying would be ideal, but I had never taken place to my knowledge. We haven't tried to implement this yet. No, but I'm taking, there are a few classes that use a similar system of standardized homework, such as Ms. Drowns, AGS3 or a few others I've taken earlier. Where teachers have standardized and set, this class will have this much homework at night. And that's always the classes with these issues of lives. So you're saying that when we put this new policy in place, it's if a student has an IEP or like a learning difference that sits on apart from other students, work will be done so that they will get support at home more than is now to help them doing this. At home, after school, and or like I said, a modification. So there's accommodations and modifications. Accommodation is probably the best way to explain it is this is how we're gonna help develop strategies so that the students can help themselves.  If there's additional homework or there's additional work that the student is able to do, but because they might process a little bit differently, might take them longer to do than those assignments would be modified or eliminated if they're not felt that they're completely needed. But again, that gets us back to the idea of quality. If they're not completely needed and they shouldn't be a homework assignment anyway. And they'll be training for the parents, you said. Because that has a time limit. And the teachers, because it's gonna be potentially a new role for them as well. Yeah, because unprepared parents, even almost unprepared parents when dealing with a learning difference that they don't understand or agree with or know, and that can cause a lot of frustration, yelling. You know, like, it can be bad for the child to experience unprepared parents with their learning differences. Yeah. Yeah. No, 100% agreed. But the training for the parents is important. What I found, and it's not true in all cases, you know, we shoot to try to help as many folks as we can, is that we have a lot of parents at the elementary level that really do mean well for their students, but they just don't know how to do it. Yeah. And that's why that training piece is very, very key. Well, I think that that is parenting. Yeah. Like.  Some parents don't have that, and they really don't know. And so the being able to sit down and have those conversations and have those little trainings with them can make a lot of difference. So it's a good question. Other thoughts that folks have? I mean, so you said, Brentry for just about all grades has had like 20 minutes of homework. Is that like a night or a week? That's typically Brent's nightly. Nightly? 20 minutes per class. I have a little brother. He's been going to Brentry for three years. And for reading class, he has 20 minutes of optional reading homework. It's not required. I think sometimes he has math homework, but I think most of the time he's asked for it from the teacher. Other than that, I haven't heard of any homework he's ever had.  Per night, yeah, across all classes. Thank you. Yeah, no, again. And again, I'm not a proponent of 20 minutes every night. I'm a proponent of, these are the 15 standards of the 400 that you've got to learn in the class that are critical that you need to understand both to build on in future classes, but to really understand the paradigm behind which the class is taught under. And so those are the ones that you would support with the extra work to make sure that the students have those things down path. And it's one of the things that I've noticed over the time here is that the students actually learn really well in the classroom. But what seems to happen is they forget it pretty quickly. And so when you see a pattern of that, so in terms of, right, they'll learn it, they'll do well on the project, they'll do well on the work in the class for this week. But when they have to go back and do that same performance, when they get on an S back, here are your high school scores in math. It's not there. And it's not that they didn't learn it at the time. That I am sure of, I've seen some very high quality teaching. But when you don't have that rehearsal to have to go back and kind of rethink through the key concepts, that retention gets lost. And then it becomes very hard to pull up the information you need when you need it. I might be misunderstanding or misinterpreting you, but I think that this suggests that the problem is something other than lack of homework because in math, math classes for, I think we can agree on that. You're gonna make a really good point if you follow it all the way through to the end. So continue saying what you're saying. Yeah, what I was saying was we can all agree that math classes are probably assigning us the most consistent nightly homework. Okay, so we are getting homework regularly from math classes. And I think we can see here that the students are not retaining what they're being taught in class. So to go back to the original discussion with John Hattie when he did his research, his homework for the sake of homework is pointless. Quality homework that's tied in producing results, which we can, you know, we get the assignments, we can see how the students did and decide if it actually had the impact that it was supposed to in terms of student learning, that makes a difference. So one of the arguments that you could make here is yeah, they're giving you lots of homework, but obviously it's not having the desired impact, is it? So again, that's, you're on a really good, a really good thought path there. But quality homework and that's the theme that runs through this idea is what's key. Randolph, as it appears to be, seems to be a challenging teaching environment as based on the high turnover rate of staff recently. And relatively. No, I can talk about it, because I can tell you exactly what our turnover rate is and it is not high compared to what's been going on around the state. Because it has seemed in these last few years, a lot more faculty from all perspective in high school have seemed to need, but my wider point, I believe still stands, that you're asking for the homework to be higher quality and the work to be higher quality, but mandating a set amount when I don't believe we'll increase the individual quality of the homework, especially with all already trained teachers with a lot of new teachers and a lot of the more senior teachers I know and have spoken to teaching many, many classes. So the, again, we're not advocating a standard amount every night. We're advocating that where it's appropriate, which is typically foundational standards and what we call targeted standards. That's where the homework would come in. In terms of turnover rates, prior to COVID, our turnover rate was about 12%. The state average is between 14 and 18, and I'll go to what happened during COVID as well. During COVID, the state average was anywhere, depending upon the region that you were in, between 20 and 50%, especially the last year that COVID was in place. Ours never got above about 18. Between the last school year and this school year, was the turnover rate between staff? The last one, I have not, but it's less than it was during COVID. It's probably back down to around the north. RTCC, the tech center's had a very high turnover rate, but in terms of the general district. I was referring less to total turnover rate, but I know a lot of senior teachers between last year and this year, and I know many more who are leaving after this, several more who are leaving after this year, the teachers who had experience and who had been more senior in the community are the ones who have been leaving. I was more referring over the last two years in particular. Yeah, again, I'm a data person, so I'll have to disagree a little bit. I also know who has put in to leave for the coming year so far. There may be others that have not stated what they're doing, but they're not too many right now. Okay, so just to clarify, so you're saying it's not a set amount of homework every night for our class, it's to improve the quality of, because I feel like there's a lot of confusion in that it seemed like at previous meetings, it was kind of, or maybe, I haven't read through this whole thing, but the theory that... There's a couple of big asterisks in there. That were like... Okay, so there's gonna be a certain amount of homework in every core class every night, and I think that's the, I think most people are not opposed to homework, and most people are probably not opposed to improving the homework so that it's of quality and it's meaningful to the students. It was the idea of a mandatory amount per night in every core class that seemed like it was not gonna... No, what I had done, and I tried it, and maybe I didn't state it very well, I did put a couple of asterisks, so I put the little grid in there of what the highest performing schools in the country are doing. They have policies where there is a specific amount that they expect, which I do not agree with. But one of the reasons that I put that in there was to provide a talking point, and that's this, is that one of the primary things that this sort of work does, it extends time on learning. And so if you look at one of those high performing schools, assuming that what they are requiring is high quality homework, those students are actually experiencing probably two to three times as much time on learning because of that than students say here at RUHS. How does RHS compare to that school in other respects? How did the students' home environment and ability to focus on learning outside of school compared to those schools? Bella High School, we had a high poverty rate there as well. We had the similar here. There wasn't much of a middle class. You had the group that was extremely wealthy, and then we were right next to Cambridge and had a lot of students that were coming in from Cambridge that were from families that were food insecure. These are high performing schools. Highest performing in the nation, yeah. And so the goal isn't to make us the highest performing school in the nation, but the goal is to take a couple of the pieces that might be beneficial and see if it can help because this, and again, this is not a criticism of the faculty and staff because they've actually slowly been kind of improving stuff a little bit here. They're back up, they went through COVID, they're back up to above where they were before COVID, so they've been learning and growing in terms of their connections with the staff, but this isn't acceptable in terms of where they are. They should, at a minimum, they should be somewhere, 48 to 53%, that's about where the state is, so that's where they should be at. Prior to 2017, if you go back and you take a look at the percentages that were meet in proficiency, you know, 18%, 11%, they were historically only 11% of the students out of the high school were hit in proficiency in mathematics, so even though these scores are still low, they've improved quite a bit, they've almost tripled. You know, there's other ways to look at it too, but no, that needs to be much better than it is. And you guys may have other ideas too than homework that might help us. What besides homework are we also doing to improve these scores? Because homework might not be your only piece. No, so a part of it as well is that a couple of cabinet meetings, because the piece is all tied together, is okay, you know, are the teachers, what are they doing with the work that they're receiving from the students? Are they grading it? And when they grade it, are they using it to provide meaningful feedback to the students so that they can grow? If the students are deficient on something that's really, really important for them to learn, are they required to redo that work to make sure that it's up to par and up to standard so that we're not sending an unintended message that this work isn't important? It was different. I'm sorry, like what on top of like, where are the other metrics besides homework to improve these scores? So the first piece is just what we're talking about is making sure that the teachers are providing feedback. They're actually collecting a tremendous amount of data, but when we took a look at what they were doing with it, a lot of it was being used to inform their own instruction in general. They were not providing a lot of feedback to the students and using it to kind of revamp, oh, you know what, you did really, really poorly on this piece and this is really critical, so let's have you come in and let's have you sit down and make sure that you really understand this concept. And so that's a part of the expectation piece that would go along with this is okay, there are some ways that we can interact with the students that we should be interacting with the students that can help. There should also be a regular assessment cycle because it plays into the idea of what they call distributed practice. So it's kind of like learning a sport, right?  They improve over time for a couple of reasons.  That's the rehearsal piece I'm talking about when we talk about what students are learning. If they only hit it once and maybe do a little project on it, they're gonna have a fair understanding of the concept but it might not be retained and more importantly, they'll have difficulty pulling it back into their mind when they need to use it. So the purpose of a regular sort of assessment cycle and assessments don't have to be tests or quizzes is to do what they call distributed practice. You learn it here. Tonight you do a little bit more of it. You go away from it for a week or two. That concept comes back up again and in the old days it was in your chapter test at the end of the week or every two weeks. It comes up again in your midterm and it comes up again in your final and it was doing that because it was increasing the time over which the students were encountering your information again and again because that's what the research shows makes the changes in the brain that causes the retention so that the information is there. You can draw it up when you need it and you can draw it up in multiple environments when you need it. So without that rehearsal, that's a piece that's missing and I think that's a big component of what's happening here. Yeah, go ahead. So quality homework here is described, since you know this seems to be pretty much the main focus of this new system is gonna be quality homework, I mean there's relevance and there's quality and quality says it requires students to practice a skill or knowledge that they have just learned in order to increase fluency and attention, if that makes sense, requires students to engage in thought or practice skills at a level to the edge of their current ability which also makes sense. So if like we have a math class and we learn how to factor binomials in that math class and then we are assigned homework on it, how the homework would look this year is you have to do those problems. You have to factor binomials, you're doing the thing that you learned in class. So with this system in place, how would that look different? So, and again, not necessarily here but how it would look different in some of the schools I've been in. Why would a teacher assign you 50 problems to do tonight for homework when three or four could have gotten the point across if they were carefully selected? When I did, went through my math program, I could tell, I'd have four or five problems a night. Each one I could tell as I did the problems was carefully selected to illustrate a concept or to make sure that I didn't miss something important. They weren't chosen at random. There was a purpose behind the choices and the choosing to kind of reinforce those skills. And so that's the key piece. If you're getting homework every night and you've got to do your 20 problems every night, that's probably not the best way to do it. If you're getting two or three carefully selected problems that require you to think through the things that we covered in class today as the reinforcement, right? Stress the neurons in the class. You had some consolidation time for the neurons to kind of rearrange themselves a little bit and you stress them again with the homework.  If that makes sense. The other piece I think that's important in there that's a little bit further on is the idea of like we were talking about the foundational and the targeted. So foundational standards are, math is a key example.  And everything that I learned in algebra one, you know, it's nice to be familiar with a lot of it, but there are probably only six or seven scenarios in everything that you learn that is critical that if you don't have them under your belt you're not gonna be successful in your next math class in life. So foundational standards is an area that we would target for this rehearsal process. Targeted standards, don't lose your thought if you got one. Targeted standards are a little bit different. Targeted standards are the teachers have gone through the assessment data for the year and they realize that there are three or four areas where despite best efforts the students really aren't learning at the level we need or we want them to. And so we would target those as well where the teachers at the beginning of the year would identify what those targeted standards are. They would sit down and create new learning activities right then and there is their teacher group on those professional development days so that they're ready to deliver those activities when those concepts come up during the year and those would have homework tied to them as well because we wanna raise students' knowledge on those targeted standards. So go ahead, sound like you had a thought. I have a question on the same point where in my experience in the school which has not been the standard one I often would go straight from the lowest level in the subject to the highest but when old metrics have been covered they've been covered from a fresh perspective and like you basically redone the work. I've come into almost all of my highest level classes without having taken any other class in the subject. I'm in the epilogue without having taken an English class. I skipped until age three in math not from like jumping ahead but from just never having the opportunity to take the lower level options until I was at the grade level to take just three and then going from that to physics and there has not once been a time when a concept was introduced and not taught in class in that perspective. Even when it really hasn't been necessary that students all seem to understand the concept the teachers here and they don't know exactly what was covered by the previous teacher. So therefore every thing like every quality has had to be recovered anyway. So I think I'm understanding a little bit so I apologize and you can steer me right. Typically with the AP classes with a few exceptions it is best to have the standard class first and then take the AP. And that's right from the AP and right from the AP research with the exception of a few courses biology. AP biology is one that students can take the first time around some of the social studies and some of the history AP courses they can as well but like the AP physics especially if you're taking calculus based AP physics the expectation is that you've taken the standard high school physics course before you've done it because it introduces those concepts that you then rehearse and build upon when you get to the AP class. And our scores because we don't do that our AP scores are probably one of the reasons that they're so well. That was not my point. Okay sorry about that. I just use the APs as an example of it being true at a higher level but my wider point and without that background I haven't felt like I've missed anything in those APs even when compared to the background that students have but my wider point was I went from no proper math class to like AGS3 basically for example or ended the same in several other subjects because I came to school in ninth grade as a homeschooler and only then part time but personally I've never once run into a subject in which prior knowledge from a previous class would have been necessary if you they will they reteach everything every year anyway and the few times I've seen you teach yeah with our exception in my experience in this high school even in the more successful classes. So that way here you're saying is that they reteach it prior to having the knowledge. They don't have to bring in information that you learned in a previous class that you took that whatever their expectation is for you in that class they're gonna teach you in that class what should have happened earlier. But do we see a problem with that? No but the source of it is a lack of internal communication it appears to be. I agree. More than a lack of the knowledge being taught and maybe that should be a focus more on coordinating between teachers rather than enforcing those discussions and meetings between the teacher who taught the previous grade and then the class that they're picking up instead of an increased emphasis on policing of the work they're sent home with the students. So some of the structural work that was done this year that made its way up to the high school was that the teachers were heavily engaged in creating their curriculums. So the curriculum is all the concepts and skills and standards that they'll be teaching to the students in their courses. And one of the reasons that they do that is so that they can provide the proper tiering as students move from grade to grade so that they're getting the proper foundation in grade seven so that it doesn't have to be retaught in grade or taught in grade eight before you can move on to the grade eight curriculum. So that work has happened over the course of this year behind the scenes. In ELA, in math, social studies is working on it. They're a little bit farther behind because they're starting to scratch a little bit more. And especially in terms of the assessment side of things but fine arts is working on it and science is working on it. And so that is gonna address that piece that you're talking about which is really important. Because yeah, they just think we don't know what was taught in the previous.  I really need you to make sure the kids have those down top before they come to me in sixth grade. It's not obvious what you expect to know when you're in a class because even without previous knowledge, everything is still pulled just to fresh. Yeah, that's a good kind of, yeah, yeah. You talked about like a parent session to help the parents. And I think if we implement a homework policy, I feel like there needs to be something for executive function or study skills for the students because I feel like I have a senior who's done AP classes. I feel like when you hit the AP level there was a lot of homework which he didn't have much. Or he would do homework at school. He very rarely brought homework. My kindergartener was doing homework in my ninth grader. That piece was missing. AP kind of hit him like, oh wow, this is like, I'm not prepared for this level of studying. And I now have a ninth grader who is kind of feeling that same way. Like I wasn't prepared for this level of homework that I'm seeing now. So I feel like the kids really need some study skills. So the Life Skills program that I sent the email out that we had talked about, that is a major component of it. And it's critical. The Life Skills program will start out in kind of a fledgling format next year. But it will end up being kind of the mandatory course for most students. Do you know what level it's gonna be at? I gotta talk with Deb Larry. She's the original instructor. I do have enough funding to potentially bring on a second instructor which we're trying to figure out. It, students should be touching on it probably at least three of their years at the high school. Because given the different things that the community felt was important for students to learn and know from it, the executive functioning skills, how do I study? How do I prepare? Being one of them. It should be kind of divvied up. There should be one during the transition year when you come over, right? And that's where the study skills piece should happen. There should be one that happens probably in ninth grade and another that happens in eleventh, depending upon which of the skills they like. And so it will be a pretty comprehensive program. It's just gonna take a couple of years to build it up to where it needs to be. So we're gonna implement this earlier. I just feel like that. Maybe it has to be at grade level or even individual class level just to give the kids what does studying look like? Yeah. And it should be happening in the transition year because the expectations on the students, they typically, there's a couple of grades that they typically change considerably. It's typically grade four and grade seven. And so those are critical years to really make sure that the students have those skills that they carry a little. I know my kid knows that once they hit ninth and then when they hit eight, he's in eleventh, those are two really big like, well, this feels different. Well, one of the issues is kind of what we talked about a little bit here with the AP is a lot of those AP courses, they are not, they are college level courses. So the expectation is that you took it in high school before you took it in college. And so when we don't double up that way, we're not serving those kids and they're gonna get knowledge out of the AP course but they're not gonna get as much as they could because they don't have that foundation to build on. They can't make the connections with their internal frameworks and have the pieces put out the way they should. How come there's no middle class? No, is it, is there a reason why there's no like honors? Like you go from regular English to honors English to AP because there's that middle piece. Yeah, it's a good honors math. You know, like you're missing those high level classes that don't necessarily have to be AP to give them the students that same. So, and the students can probably tell how well this worked or in this case didn't work. Small schools, it's hard because you don't have as many sections to be able to dedicate to kind of differentiating those courses that way. So one of the things a couple of years ago when the state required us to move over to graduation proficiencies and standards-based report cards, one of the things that they tried to do and I don't think it was successful so it needs to be revisited is they said, okay, based upon this, you know, if you go into your eighth grade math course, here are the standards that you have to master to be considered passing the course. Here are the standards that you have to master to be considered at the honors level. Here are the standards you have to master to be considered at the honors level. So they made an attempt to try to do that differentiation but within a class with all the students in it. And so you guys can tell me how that worked or if you're even aware that they were doing that. What was this? So this started probably the year before COVID. I mean, I was in eighth grade, like I don't think I was able to even experience this. Did that kill you over into the sortings of the pods during COVID? Because I think that did not go well because- Yeah, no. Yeah, so maybe we don't have enough data yet to tell. But that was the attempt at that time and I'm trying to remember the timelines because it all mashes together now. I think you haven't, right? I think I got blown out of the water a little bit because of the COVID piece, but that was the attempt is okay, you know, these are all the possible standards to pass the class and then be considered to have had the general knowledge of somebody who took algebra two. This is what you need to know. If you're at the honors level, these are the additional standards and if you're at the high honors, and so that was how they were trying to differ. So would there have been like three different math classes at that point this year? One class? Same math class, but if you were on the honors, if you were shooting for honors, you had additional learning that you had to accomplish before the course was over to earn that honors designation. Now I'm not saying it was a good system, I'm saying that's what- So it would appear differently on your transcript even though you were in the same class. So if you and I were in the same class and you did the honors track, it would say that on your transcript. Okay, so if you're in calculus, oh, if you've learned how to integrate, you've passed calculus, but if you learn how to integrate and differentiate, you're an honors student. So a little bit additional learning. This is talking back to your previous study system. I'd like to make one suggestion. Yeah, we got it. I believe it would make more sense rather than having Ms. Larry teach this course because she's already, I could teach general things and I believe I can speak from most students when I say I don't believe she'd be particularly well-qualified for that course based on the classroom experience, as if you guys- Yeah, no, he's right. But rather there is, and especially at support department, a number of people who have direct experience in teaching those same executive functioning skills, both the people who have struggle and learn differently in that way, but also those who learn differently in other ways. And so they know how to teach it both to the general student as well as the person who might be struggling with those skills, as well as being, there being a vast number of the faculty in this area who are all familiar with different grade levels and different grade levels expectations and where people start to fall behind in these subjects. Whereas Ms. Larry has a particularly negative track record in this specific regard, according to my experience and the experience of anyone I've ever talked to has taken one of her classes. And they actually teach different things. I don't know if this is where this should even be brought up. No, but it's something we can talk about gradually if there are concerns, because if there are, we always do an investigation, take a look at this. So yeah. I do have one more thing about the homework policy. I feel like when it says that homework should be graded and returned in the time we're in, I feel like obviously you're not gonna set some specific time, but the experience that my kids have had in high school is that they are not getting their work returned to them. We've brought it up at community meetings many times as far as just for us, for Schoology, got to the point where we've actually kind of given up checking it because we've had experiences where grades from November were still not in in February. So my concern is that kids were not receiving feedback because if they're not receiving feedback, they're not learning whether it's positive or negative or for either way. If you're just doing this, I mean it becomes busy work. So it has improved some since we've really checked and checked and checked and checked in with our kiddos, but I still feel like Schoology is not serving the purpose. It hasn't been Schoology for two years. Right, the new system. The new system, yeah. Changes every year. And I think that's sort of the problem for a while. We were looking at the wrong one because they were both still active, but we got that sorted out. But still having trouble finding up-to-date grades. They all go in like the week before school, but then that doesn't give the kids an opportunity to reflect on what they did for work, what they need to improve or change and where the learning actually happens. So I think for the homework policy as well, like if it's not, if it's gonna be effective and not just be busy working, it needs to be returned. So like it's gonna work for them.  So this is, as building this, it's a system that pieces that have to fit together. So one of them is establishing the policy, taking the concerns and the ideas that came here, melding those into it. The other piece, and again, this is a failure of the district over time, is making the expectations clear with the teachers. What does it mean to provide feedback to students? Because they're doing amazing work, but if we're not providing the expectation and showing them what it looks like, that's on us. And so one of the pieces for the strategic planning session that's coming up this summer, where the admin get together, is a revamp of the faculty and student handbook so that those expectations are in there. And then that's what we talk with the faculty about when they first get back to school to really kinda push that. The school of GPs, they're gonna be nixing it. It was, it did not do what it was promised to do. But that's okay, they learned something. But what was interesting about the discussion is that when we went and we were taking a look at the teacher's grade books, you know, we were trying to see, are they giving feedback to the students or what are they doing with the data? Because they're collecting a lot. Most of them were just handwriting it into either their own little paper grade books or they were putting it in Excel spreadsheet. And then they would transfer it over when they had time into school in G. And so then it's like, okay, so why, that seems really inefficient to me. So if that's the case, then maybe we need a better product. And that's two different things, you know. Parents like to be able to see how their children are doing.  It's their education and they should be, you know, getting the feedback themselves. And that was the more important piece to me is if my, you know, my kids were like, oh, I didn't, you know, it's, you know, teachers would come back and say, oh, I should be in Google Classroom and my kids would go through it and be like, I didn't even know you could check for Google Classroom and comments. And I was like, well, that's a major problem. If you don't know, that's where you're supposed to be getting your feedback. Since they're not getting paperback like we did when we were younger that was like, you know, marked up, it needs to be coming back in some form. Well, there's a whole other discussion, you know, as we were talking about the software piece that we've had and actually the students might be able to help is, what is the value of the Chromebooks? On your marker first. First off, I agree with your earlier comments on feedback and such through Schoology. It has not been a sustainable system, but part of that unsustainability is how it's changed every year, both in that system and in the weighted weights are taken. And that consistent change has made it so no, not only the teachers can't settle into it, but the students can't either or parents to really understand what the different things mean or how to put it in. Last year, for example, I know a few teachers who struggled with that system and because of the struggles of trying to learn new systems sorted it out. So we're changing the whole system again, necessarily be wise instead of giving teachers time to adapt. And on a separate point on the Chromebooks is having a computer is incredibly useful. But some of the limitations are overbearing on what the computer can act as somewhat valid but somewhat overbearing. I have been denied access to historical treatises on war. On various wars we're supposed to cover in history because they contain battles in them or in the like. And also these blockers have slowed the computers down to a point where they crash frequently because that's what most of the power is going into. So I think maybe having an option of, I know there's spare computers setting up a limited block of computer labs for students to do work on or limiting the blockers themselves on the computers that students can take around with them might improve the situation lately. If we weren't using Chromebooks since the students don't get books or textbooks or English books, seems like lately, where would that information come? How would that information come? So that was one of the reasons that I think the scores were dropping when I started, when I came in the door, they had been on a long decline. They had made a shift to the Chromebooks. And I wanna talk about this a little bit since I've got three users here of them. And when they switched over to the Chromebooks they just stopped buying textbooks. And one of the things that we've been doing is I was pulling my hair out a little bit on that because Chromebooks, and this is where you guys can argue with me, so I'm gonna make an assertion, doesn't mean I'm right. Chromebooks in computers use what are called browsers. And browsers by their very name tell you what they're designed to do. They are designed to have folks skim for information and skim for answers. There is not typically a lot of really deep reading and deep thought that goes into the process that occurs between a student and a Chromebook in most situations. And so that also impacts retention and that also impacts critical thinking and that also impacts learning. Right, if you're going back to study something. And they're just skimming for, yeah. And so. And like you said, it's that, you were saying earlier about like, I'm just being able to do it, I'm just being able to go from it. I'm just talking about that. Yeah, and so there's that aspect that might be a concern depending upon how the teachers are using. It doesn't have to be that way, but it depends upon whether the plans, but for whatever reason, when they switched to Chromebooks, they just stopped buying textbooks and there was no electronic replacement for them. I get concerned because one of the expectations is that students are able to read technical documents at a high level when they get out of high school. And if you're not required to be reading regularly technical material, like even if it's just a science textbook or a math textbook, then how are you gonna get that scale? It's possible if it's well-developed with the teachers and the Chromebooks, but I'm not sure if it's happening. The main issue with the Chromebooks isn't the fact that there are Chromebooks designed to browse. It's that, like I said, the blockers make them incredibly inconsistent. Teachers have no way of knowing what will be allowed and what won't be. So they can't decide, I think, to post it because often random stuff that shouldn't be blocked will be or stuff that may be just because they catch all focus. In situations where we, to the point where they've had us do work on our phones instead at times because computers are just unreliable. If- Are they not powerful enough? They're not powerful enough because they're being used up in these restrictions, in these limitations that keep you from accessing oftentimes deeper sources that go into greater detail because they might have a keyword in them somewhere. What you're saying is taking up the memory? The blockers are taking up 90% of the computer's memory, which are making them unreliable in addition, and prone to crashes, in addition to random, like, websites that really shouldn't be blocked, or just because of such a general nature of blockers and improvised security makes them almost unusable for research. You could be trying to research a subject for a history class. Nine, like five to nine of the sources you'll be trying to research will be blocked or web pages with no clear reason of why. Or you're trying to find an image or a relevant passage from a book that will probably be blocked. The reason why they can't be, is not just because of that, but also because stuff is blocked and the tech team is incredibly so slow at unblocking things for teachers or even with ticket requests or allowing extensions that might help learning. I have a reader on my computer, but it's Google Read, right? One of the, what's considered to be one of the least capable and effective voice text readers that won't work on most PDFs. I have submitted tech tickets to request more advanced readers. I've had both the computer science teacher and special ed teacher submit tech tickets for better readers, not have ever been answered. It's the over restricting of computers, preventing students from personalizing some of each of the computers by blocking all extensions or all web stores of places to download information, just blocking the entire store that has made the computers so much less effective than theorized. It's been the management in that regard and restrictions placed upon the computers rather than the fact that they are on screen. So the, if the, see if I'm understanding, so if the feeling is that if the blockers were more selective in what they blocked as opposed to broadband blocking, it would improve. It would improve because we cannot access these PDFs of the textbooks in any meaningful way because websites that supply them are often blocked or various apps and information sources are blocked so people have stopped even going to them. How are you gonna, physical textbook? Well, we've been, we have been in ELA in math and in science. We've been really into math. There's a cost associated with it and it's not cheap, but they're good programs that we've been bringing in. But that doesn't mean that the Chromebooks are going away. What I saw, and again, hopefully it has changed. Not in all classrooms, but in a lot, was when I was doing my walk arounds prior to COVID. You go into some classrooms, the teacher would introduce the lesson to the students, spend about five minutes telling them what they were doing and then the kids just worked on the Chromebook period. And so, I don't know if that's still happening as much. I've got my walk, they're actually scheduled for here tomorrow. But that's, I don't know if that's effective. It could be, depending upon how the teacher structures it. But it might not be, yeah. What are you suggesting as opposed to that, like doing work on the paper? No, I mean, there should be, you've got a highly qualified, highly skilled person there that should be able to engage with you and come up with learning activities that are both funny and work with you on those. And there's nothing wrong with using the Chromebooks. You know, when I saw something like that, my first response is I went back and I talked with the tech team and I said, well, Jeepers, did the teachers ever get any kind of training on what good lessons look like if you're gonna use a Chromebook for these things? And I'm like, no, they just bought them and plopped them down and so that's not the teacher's fault, that's ours. Well, I think the Chromebooks are incredibly useful. I mean, they may be limited a little bit, but being able to look at your grades at any point in time or being able to finish work and hand it in without having to be in that class, it's also really helpful. But on the grades, all teachers, I can't say all, but I mean, not every teacher I've ever had hasn't understood, like they can have the grades they're putting in, but they won't understand the final outcome of the grades. And so- Explain that a little more. So, like, you can pull up Schoology or Power School and it will have the indicator and the grade you have for that indicator. And there'll be a bunch of them and all of that. But then when it's turned into, turned onto your report card, which is really the only grading thing I get that I understand, except I don't understand it, actually. They changed it this year, so I don't understand it yet.  And so what you're saying is you're not clear how that translates over from the grading they do on the indicators? Yes, gotcha. And nobody really understands that. But then also, like this year, the way those grades were represented on the report cards were changed. So like, if you were to average them to find your GPA, you have to change it a little bit and it's unclear how to get that. So like, being able to see your grades at any point is helpful, but we can't currently use that. Because it's not understandable. Yeah. So, so... My teachers, I might say, they don't understand it either. It's not just lacking in the students. I've heard teachers complain about and say they don't understand why how the grading system poses and how final grades look. I don't know if anybody does. Do you find any value whatsoever in the indicators? And I don't want just what indicators? So you have your graduation, right? The graduation requirements that your grades are tied to and you also have the standards-based grading. You called them indicators, so I was using the same term, with the standards that are on your report cards that the teachers are telling you you've met them or you haven't met them at this point in time. Is that valuable or not? Like, knowing where I am, like how I'm doing it. So your report card has a list of, you know, you should know how to solve binomial, you should know how to solve... There are not words or names. There are some form of letters and numbers. Oh, so you don't usually read them all, I'll pull them out. Yeah, so it's completely... So is that the new change? Because I haven't seen the new change. The new change is usually if you would have... I haven't seen my son's report card yet. It would have like the name usually abbreviated that is what indicator it is or what section of learning it is and you have that grade. And then usually you just list those. But this year, as I understand it, I could be wrong, is that you have one broader one. And then you have multiple under that one and all of those are averaged into that one. To say how you did on the broader one. Yeah, yeah. And then there's the broader one and all the little ones that are averaging to the broader one. And then to get your GPA, I think you average all the broader ones. So there, and so this, I can talk about a discussion that I had my first year here. Massachusetts tried to do standards based reporting 10 years before Vermont got around to it. Did not work. It worked at the elementary level. I take that back, but it did not work at the middle and the high school level. When I came in, I talked with the administration at this school at the time and said, you know, I read the law, there's a loophole in there. And the loophole goes something like this, is that you have to have graduation proficiencies.  If you do the curriculum work that we need to do, you can say things simply like this. This graduation proficiency, this graduation proficiency, and this graduation proficiency, see that we have identified our met if the student has passed Algebra II with a B plus or higher. And so you've got the graduation proficiencies defined.  And so I wonder if it's time to revisit that conversation with people that might be more willing to listen. I don't know, did you guys like the old just ABC or do you get enough? I don't think we've ever had it. I don't think they've ever. You guys may not have done that. No, they've had a different grading system. I mean, like they've had a different grade system. Yeah, this was a state mandate in which they were... The sixth grade probably, seventh? Yeah, the state did what it typically does is it says, this is what we want you to do. We're not gonna give you a model for how to do it. And so that means that all the districts across the state all did something different. And there's none. I feel like it's really tricky. We've had the contact, you know, Kara or somebody to actually... She doesn't know. She doesn't always know, but they have to actually do the grade point average for us. And then when we go back to try to see how it's calculated and then it came back for a while like, oh, it depends on how the teacher, you know, what they interpreted. I feel like it gets really tricky for kids that are going to college and their transcripts are coming out. Well, the reason I'm concerned about it because if it's not providing usable feedback to parents and students, then what's the point? And so that's what I'm trying to assess by grilling you a little bit with the questions is that, you know, if it's not providing usable feedback that can help you understand where you currently stand in the class and how to improve, then it's not a good system. I think it's usable. It's just not like... Not effective at knowing what you have to do in order to get your grade up. Also, there's no indication of... From what I understand, you're in an AP class, you get a certain boost to grade at the end of the whole thing in 100 point system. I believe it is a 10 point boost and there's no representation of that or means of understanding that on a report card or on any grading, we get back either. So we have no idea how we're doing. If we incorporate that addition to our grade, it is not mentioned anywhere and it is not listed anywhere, the extra waiting. So if you had that information and people were trained and you understood it, would it then be a useful system? Yes, I was applying to colleges this year and in looking at my grades compared to other colleges, the college's accepted grades and such, I had no clue what I was at and I just sort of guessed and I think based on getting the higher... And I think I was lucky as it would get into decent schools on the recommendation and essay, mainly, almost entirely, because I honestly don't think the college fully understood what my grades were based on as I got back, but I had no clue where to look to apply through a grade, from a grade standpoint, right?  So there's no way of knowing where we're at even when we ask. And that's not a good thing. I gotta leave in a minute, but so before I go, I think this is going way back to the homework, if that's a rid. I think a problem that I'll run into is I will have an assignment, homework assignment, and I think this problem will still remain if we actually implement this. So if a student has a homework assignment, and basically the issue is, let's say it's a math assignment, I have this problem usually with math and they don't have an understanding of the actual math that's involved and they have to talk to a teacher about it, because a lot of the time when I have this issue, I try to look it up, how the people, the word try to look it up, it doesn't really, I'm not able to ask questions and not able to really get the information I need in the way that I need it. So that doesn't really work. Sometimes it'll be post on something, but that's usually just like the numerical derivations in that I can look at it, but it doesn't mean I really understand it. So if the issue that a student is having is, they go home, they have homework, they don't know how to do it, right? And they have to talk to a teacher about it, but the homework is due, right? Yeah, so the flexibility and the new dates and understanding. Because I think with math assignments, I mean, in Miss Drownley, I'm not really able to do this because we pretty much just do last night's homework, we go over it at the start of class, but in physics, what I'm usually able to do is the first thing I'll get the assignment, I don't fully understand it, but then I'm able to go in, come after school, understand what I have to do, get the assignment in late, and this is with tests too. A lot of the time I take much longer on tests than other students. And I think that's something that we should try to look at like that's something we should do because a lot of the time students, if they don't understand something, they'll give up, and if they do understand it, they won't. So. I second that point, and that is what callback does. It gives you that time with that teacher. Yeah, that's why I like callback in the enforced time, not the voluntary stay late with that teacher to keep, to go back over it. And I think that's why staying after school. So you said we're gonna try to organize thing where there'll be like late buses for students who stay after school to work on stuff for teachers. Okay, that's good. Yeah, no, I try to, it's been beneficial. You know, whenever we start thinking of things, we try to look at the structures that we've got to build the support of before we put it in place. So that was one of the key pieces. Are you stretching? No. Kind of relating back to what Rowan said, is like if you don't understand it, sometimes you just have to keep working and keep working, and that takes longer. So then you do homework for longer. Which is sometimes okay. But like today, including this, I have homework that I need to do right now. But I'm here, and I also taught youth wrestling, and I was actually in a meeting with Heather and some other people for a portrait of graduate. For the PRG, yeah. Good. But if that homework was due the day after it was assigned, or say tomorrow, then I wouldn't be able to do any of those things. And like having less homework or less demanding homework allows you to participate in things that can help the community. Or if it's say you're given it at the beginning of the week, and it's due by the end of the week, you can decide I'm going to teach wrestling on Tuesday and Thursday, and I'm going to do a lot of homework these two nights, and that will leave me more nights. That will leave me the time I need for something that doesn't happen every day of the week. I feel like that's important. Yeah, I think strut should not be a problem. That's a college thing, because they'll give you a C up front. Yeah, and that's what we should be preparing. That's what I was trying to clarify, is that it's not every night, it's better. It's higher quality. Really, the whole homework policy, the way I understood it when I was clarifying that it's not every core subject, every night required, it's really about improving the homework that's going home, whether it's on at the beginning of the week and do it at the end of the week, or do, like, give it on Monday, and then it's due on Thursday or whatever, so there will be a time management piece and people have the flexibility to still work or do extracurriculars. And that supports the idea for parents, students for college, who's typically, what do they call it? It's not an agenda, it's not an itinerary, a syllabus. They give you the syllabus at the beginning of the course, and a lot of times what the instructors will do is all your work for the entire semester is laid out for you when the due dates are, and then you can kind of work through at your own pace. Some students that may not have to have the actual classes with the instructor before they are able to do the work or able to get a little bit ahead and whatnot. So that's not a bad idea. So that's the way it is. Yeah. Can I add that would be helpful is to go with the support and call back an executive functioning piece, just like colleges that have tutors and academic centers, if there would be tutors after school, to help that piece. There's money for that. Because having a different learner at home, to say like, no, this is how you organize, because this is how it works for me, is not how it's gonna work for him, or if there's teachers and students that maybe don't, maybe they're not understanding that teacher very well, if there's a tutor that might, just like the support people you have in class, having that option I think would be that program. Helpful. No, no, really good point. We built in, of course it was with the extra money and we're gonna try to switch it over to regular budget. We built in summer programming for students to help them that wanna get caught up and hopefully what we'll be able to expand it to is once we get students recovered, we might be able to use it to get students ahead. Hey, you come in and you work on this math class during the summer for two and a half or three weeks, that'll get you your honors designation next year, or in some cases where it's always nice that students have the option to take calculus before they graduate, if they want to, don't have to. Sometimes students have to double up, and so what you can do is you can teach one of the math classes during the summer. So that they're- Like summer school. Yeah. Yeah, and executive functioning school tutors. Yeah, and we did the transportation with it last summer and we have money right now. They're doing tutoring after school for students. It's open and available. There is money for transportation for the students that are being tutored because of the way it's tied to the grant, but I don't think people have been asking for it. Not you, the principals haven't come in and say, yeah, no, we need the busing. So I'm assuming that means that the students that are taking advantage of it don't need the transportation piece right now. Yeah, I don't say it's good stuff. There's so many, we kind of, as we kind of close out a little bit now, but the idea I think we may have touched on it in this meeting or it may have been one of the other homework pieces is that there's so many things that we don't do here or hasn't been done here for a long time that most schools do, that are good things to do. And the after school piece and the after school busing and things like that are another piece of that, having textbooks is another piece of that. Haven't done here for a long time. But it's taken a couple of years through the budget process and COVID didn't help to try to stick to those things back. So it's a long process. I'm getting back to where I need to go. Other, anything can be above and beyond homework policy that people have questions or thoughts about, wanna share or ask? Well, what would it look like for seniors if we don't get the voucher and that days are added in the summer? Will we be required to stay after graduation? And if there'd be marks on attendance that might affect our middle-based scholarships, what would that look like for seniors? It's a state law, so I don't have flexibility unless they give us the waiver. So right now, the April days stay, the remainder of the time after the April vacation, if I remember the calendar correctly we tried to set up is it would have to be at the end of the school year. Is graduation set, is the date set yet? Yeah, I talked to them about do we wanna change this and then you get into, it's always tradition that it's on such and such a date in June, but it's possible that we could change those dates. I am hoping that we hear, like I said, I sent out the first day we could apply for the waiver was February 1st. I sent it out that morning at like 6 a.m. The state board was supposed to meet on it. They decided to delegate the authority to the secretary of education, which I don't believe legally they could do. They did it during COVID because the state of emergency was in effect, but when I read the law, it is the state board's responsibility. The secretary of education is leaving. We just got the announcement, so I'm sure he's got other things that are on his mind legitimately when he's transitioned. So I did immediately reach out to Heather Boucher who was gonna be the interim secretary. And I give her a lot of credit, but I wrote her and I think she wrote me back within 20 minutes and said, I don't know a lot about it, but I'll figure it out for you. So I'm hopeful that we get a message and I'm hopeful, but we get a decision before April vacation because I really don't want people to have to cover up April vacation if they don't have to. So graduation is not set. The date is set, and I don't think we can move it. So the community does not want it moved. I haven't even heard the date, and I haven't seen it. Do you know who the date is? I think it's the 19th. It's just weird for a senior to graduate, but then have to go to these classes. And what are they doing? They could be working and they could be, you know, there's. Oh, they're completing the classes, but it's, yeah, I'm in agreement with you. The waiver piece is key. And so, and you didn't hear it from me and don't say that I said this, but you know, it might not hurt if a couple of parents, and I know the union was thinking about it too, because it affects the teachers in their planning, of, you know, maybe sending the AOE a couple of nice letters. Nice letters, not angry, but hey, you know, these are all the things that are impacting as we're waiting for this decision. Students could do that too. I think we just, I think we're caught in just unfortunate circumstances because of that transition that's happening. And again, I just, I did send in, she did right back just to make sure it didn't drop off people's radar on the transition. So we can either just keep our fingers crossed, or like I said, maybe people can write a few letters. Nice letters. Any other, on any topic? I appreciate the time. I appreciate the discussion. Thank you for hanging out. How much homework do you got? Just one thing for AP US history. How about you? In this school, it was my AP classes, but I have no, to put it total, I just have work for my college, the online college course. Very good, no, thank you. And we're in what, almost in April, I mean, the next open forum, I think I'm doing them the third Thursdays, typically in the month. That'll be more just kind of broad band, you know, what's on people's minds. To clarify, we have often been assigned homework, but if you're in an AP class, you get a free period in which you can get out most of your homework. If that affects your wider points, not that we haven't been assigned anything at this point of the year. No, that makes sense. Be safe, be safe. Thank you very much.


Hey everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage and in this lesson we're going to answer a student question and it reads, how do we develop our ideas when dealing with an unfamiliar topic during the speaking exam? So this is a very common fear that a lot of students have so we're going to help you with this. So what we're going to do is look at three reasons why you should not worry too much about this. The reason why we're including this one is a lot of people get very stressed about this and that can seep into other parts of your performance and kind of lower your score if you're really really stressed out. So we're going to look at why this is not as big of a worry as you think it is and then two strategies for coping with unfamiliar topics during the speaking test. So first reason why you should not worry too much about this is it is very very unlikely to happen. Where this fear comes from is students go online and they Google IELTS speaking questions and they find fake questions. All right so fake questions are created by people who don't really know what they're doing and if you go and look at real speaking questions, if you go and look at the Cambridge online or look at any of the Cambridge books, the vast majority of questions are on things that you should be familiar with and you should be able to talk about but if you look online and look at fake questions you're going to find lots of questions on crazy topics that you don't know nothing about and if you focus on the worst possible scenario you might fail. What do I mean by that?  So is that likely? Not really. Could it happen? Yeah people get hit by buses but if you spend your whole time worrying about the worst possible thing that could happen then you're not really focusing on improving. You're not really focusing on the things that are going to really help you in the speaking test. The same thing is like if you go on holiday your plane might crash, planes do crash sometimes but it's highly highly highly unlikely to happen to you but that could ruin your holiday because you're so afraid of getting on the plane and then you're so afraid of getting back that you don't really enjoy your holiday. The same thing if you're worried about the worst thing that can possibly happen then you're spending all that time worrying rather than focusing on things that will actually help you improve your score like pronunciation and fluency and grammar and vocabulary. The things that really do matter. So focus and try and be positive that the majority of the questions will be fine. I promise you. Number two the second reason why you shouldn't worry too much about this is you're being judged on your whole performance. You're going to be asked a bunch of questions in part one. You're going to be asked one question in part two and you're going to be asked quite a few questions in part three. The examiner is not giving you a score based on your worst answer. The examiner is giving you a score based on your whole performance your total performance and one poor answer or an answer that you feel uncomfortable giving or you don't know enough about that topic. Don't worry too much about that because everybody has a poor answer. Everybody gets questions that they are not that comfortable with. That's why the examiner bases his or her, bases the score that you get on the whole performance. So if you get one question like that don't worry too much about it. And number three it's not a knowledge test. So a lot of you talk about what if I don't know anything about this topic or that topic. It's not a topic test. It's not a knowledge test. It's not an IQ test. It's a speaking test. Alright what are the examiners thinking about? They're thinking about your grammar. They're thinking about your vocabulary. They're thinking about your pronunciation and they're thinking about your fluency and coherence. Nothing in here, nothing that they're going to give you a score on is related to knowledge or topics or content or anything related to that. And the strategies that I'll give you now allow you, even if you know nothing about that topic, to be fluent and to demonstrate good pronunciation and good grammar and good vocabulary. So you don't need to worry about this as much as you think. So let's now look at the two strategies. There's two possible strategies. Imagine that the examiner asks you a question you know nothing about it or you think you know nothing about it. So one is to be open and honest that you know nothing about it. Some people really like that strategy and others that I work with they like to just make up a story. They and we'll talk about each of these and the strengths and weaknesses of each of these. So a lot of the questions even though they're kind of designed for everybody you might get a question that's just not applicable to you whatsoever. I work with a lot of students from the Middle East and some of the questions just simply do not apply to them. For example, I had one student who I was working with and one of the questions was it was a part two question and it was on tell me about a music concert and she just explained I'm from Saudi Arabia. I've lived in Saudi Arabia my whole life because of my religion. I don't go to music concerts and then she went on to explain what it was about her religion that she couldn't go to music concerts and then she said if I could go to a music concert I would like to go to this one and that one and she spoke for two minutes about the fact that she couldn't go to a music concert because of her cultural background and and her religion. So even though she couldn't technically answer the question and couldn't technically talk about that it was absolutely fine and no examiner if you are open and honest and just tell them full and give them the reason why you know nothing about that then that will be fine remember you're not being judged on one answer you're being judged on the whole thing and it's impossible for you for every question to be like I know nothing about that so just be open and honest about it but there's two ways that you can do that one very effective way and one that's not effective. Some people are open and honest and just say I know nothing about that topic all right that's not so good all right if you just say I don't know or I don't know anything about that topic again you're not really demonstrating any grammar any vocabulary or fluency or pronunciation because you're not giving the examiner enough to go on but if you say I don't know anything about that topic and then elaborate on that in the same way that my student did that when she knew nothing about music concerts and explained why and really developed her answer doing that and that was absolutely fine. Other students are more comfortable just making up a story some people are natural storytellers and some people like doing that they like inventing a story and it's not lying and you know the the high old speaking test is not a lie detector test you're not talking to the police and it's not an honesty test you can make up a story remember what you are doing is you are demonstrating that you can speak English fluency pronunciation grammar and vocabulary whether that's the truth or not it doesn't really matter the examiner is not going to like wait there I'm going to check whether what you said is true or not they don't care however this one making up a story some people are not comfortable with this at all they are just not used to telling a story they're not used to inventing things and they're not comfortable with that other people who I work with are very very comfortable with that in fact even if they do have a real story they actually prefer to make up a novel story a false story so those are the two strategies though those are very easy to use either be open and honest but develop your reasoning and explain why you can't answer that or just make up a story the example I had here was I was working with a Vietnamese student and the question was about a gap year and in Vietnam it's just not very common to go on a gap year the year between ending high school and going to university here in Ireland and the UK it's very very common for people to take a gap year but in Vietnam there was there they're just they don't do it that much some people do but very rare so the Vietnamese student he was a natural storyteller and he just made up a whole story about him going to Europe and traveling and he talked about going to London because he liked Harry Potter and he went to Ireland because he likes the Game of Thrones where it's filmed and all of these things just made it up and was very fluent and demonstrated that he could talk about it and what I would recommend doing is try and find some questions or you could do this with a partner try and find some questions on topics that you're not very comfortable using or not very comfortable talking about try being open and honest and just say I don't know anything about that and developing it or try making up a story and see which one you you feel most comfortable with it's always best to tell the truth just use this as a last resort but as I already mentioned it's for these reasons it's actually very unlikely to happen so don't worry too much about it hey Chris here again hopefully you enjoyed that video if you want more videos here are some for you here on the screen and don't forget to like and subscribe hopefully see you again soon bye bye