Members also in attendance,not enrolled in Board on Track: Javier Martinez, Steven McLoud, Amy Fitzgerald

The group had productive conversation about the difference between objectives and measures, and the language we should best use to describe each item. Specifically, we discussed ways to better describe and capture student, teacher and community experiences.
 
Javier distilled a very useful guiding question: How can we tell if we are providing an excellent educational experience for our community? With this and other questions in mind, we left the meeting with a clearer revision of our definition and tools of assessment. After the meeting, Keely and Summer met to further distill and clarify. The resulting revision is as follows (post-meeting revisions noted in highlights).

1. Academic Achievement:
   • Standardized test scores: MAP, EOG
   • Student Portfolios
   • Narrative Report of “Habits of Scholarship”
   • Charter audit?
2. Diversity of students and staff: racial, socioeconomic, and geographic
   • Enrollment and Applications (eventually)
3. Community Engagement:
   • Hours engaged in service-based learning
   • Community engagement
   • Narrative summaries of co-teaching experiences
   • Student narratives/Reflections on Exploris experiences
   • Social curricula implemented
   • Parent narratives reflecting on community engagement
4. Educational Practice: designed by Kaizen team (this could be used as self-reflection tool for teachers and/or a means to do annual review of teachers).
   • Professional Development Hours/Events
   • Lesson Plans/Expedition Templates
   •  
   • Examples of student work with feedback
   • Narrative self-assessment
   • Teaching observations
   • Teacher Working Conditions
   • Culturally responsive pedagogy
   • Relationships: student, parent and teacher surveys/narrative
5. Charter audit and renewal process update (Academic, Financial, Operational) Deleted because we THINK that these items are either covered above (#1) or not relevant to this committee’s work.
6. Exploris Experience (surveys and narrative reports) Deleted because we THINK that these experience narratives can be effectively woven into other areas (4, 5, 8).
   • Teacher
   • Student
   • Parent

 
Thus, a clear definition of educational excellence could be simply stated by answering the above question in this way: Exploris ensures it is delivering an excellent educational experience by supporting high academic achievement for its students; a diverse student, faculty and applicant pool; strong community engagement; and sound educational practice.
 
 
While the group admitted that several questions remain (namely the place for the Charter audit information, where exactly the diversity component belongs, and a more comprehensive list of measurement tools), we decided to leave final decisions until next meeting.
 
Further, next meeting, we plan to make better use of our time by using technology to make revisions of these objectives clearer to the whole group.