NESSC School Redesign in Action

This is a closed Group for the League of Innovative Schools' Principals' Professional Learning Group.

Meeting Resources:

• Resource Sharing
• Feedback Form

Smithfield High School’s social studies department has redesigned what our 9–12 curriculum looks like and how it impacts students. For our students, we personalized the delivery of five foundation power standards which are transferable in nature. This has fostered conversations around everything we do. From professional growth to grading to formative and summative assessments to daily instruction, no stone has been left unturned. We have rebuilt our curriculum into a powerful program that has clear, definable, and measurable outcomes for graduating students who are prepared for their next challenges. This session will not only explore how SHS social studies built and refined this system, but how we live in both a proficiency-based and traditional grading world. We will explore how this not only impacted our practices but student learning, feedback, and supports with the hope of helping other academic teams and teachers meet these challenges within their own schools and districts.

Participants will leave with an understanding of the challenges and strategies when transitioning content areas’ traditional curricula into interactive curriculum guides that are standards-based and 21st century skills-focused which produce a graduate with specific and measurable knowledge and skills as well as a practical approach to balancing the reporting out of both standards-based and numerical achievement.

      "A school's master schedule is a pedagogical choice based on its values."
      ~ Chris Lehmann, co-author of Building School 2.0
Blocks, trimesters, flextime, callback, late-start, project weeks... almost all of our schools have different schedules, even if those differences are minor or fluid. In this session, participants will learn about Champlain Valley Union High School's process to assess and alter our daily, weekly, and yearly schedules based on our mission and values in order to make room for interest-based learning intensives and create a better balance between conventional and flexible opportunities in our building. Participants will then use current research and tools such as asset inventories and root cause analyses to create a draft values assessment and schedule matrix to bring back to their schools for the next phase of the conversation.

In this session, participants will learn how two higher ed institutions in Maine are aligning their teacher preparation program design to increasingly align with PK–12 beliefs and best practices of proficiency-based education. Preservice teachers from each institution will share perspectives on how they are preparing for both effective teaching and professional practice. Finally, to capitalize on the collective wisdom of current practitioners, participants will use a protocol to share critical knowledge, dispositions, and resources to assist both current educators and preservice teachers in designing proficiency based learning environments.

Participants will identify knowledge, dispositions, and skills critical to the training and early success of preservice educators in proficiency environments and engage in discourse of how to best recruit and prepare our next generation of educators.

Participants will learn with a veteran principal and Met students about how to create and improve an
internship program in your school or district. The session will focus on systems, structures, and strategies for finding, setting up, and managing internships. Participants will learn strategies for supporting mentors in developing, maximizing, documenting, and assessing high quality learning in internships. Student presenters will share their personal experiences and participants will leave with practical tools to bring back to their communities.

How should states in northern New England approach issues of racial and ethnic equity in their education systems? What does it mean to achieve equity and close gaps in a largely homogenous region? This session will draw on Maine’s experience of developing a big-tent alliance of organizations in the education sector and beyond to address these crucial issues. We’ll share key lessons from the efforts of the New England Alliances for College and Career Readiness more broadly, then explore in depth the Maine alliance’s work to balance its focus on racial and economic equity. Session participants will learn about, analyze and discuss the work of MaineSpark’s Future Success track to empower racially diverse student populations to reach college and career readiness. Educate Maine will then lead participants in a critical conversation about approaching equity in their own classrooms, schools and districts.

Session participants will learn about approaches to discussing and working toward racial and ethnic equity in education systems, reflect on lessons learned from Maine in this area, and leverage their own expertise and experiences to generate new ideas for connecting with and engaging diverse communities in authentic ways.