Maggie shared action steps from weekly Recruitment Update.  JV is new Recruitment coordinator.  Maggie was on the call and took notes.  Now that he is a little more established, we will encourage him to take this on as taking ownership for pushing this group.

Seems like a high-leverage action step that JV identified is to really engage parents - that is what he brought from his previous position.  Maybe we could incentivize parents to bring another parent with an Aurum-aged child to Week Without Walls.  Long term timeline - targeted ad, postcard routes, etc. in the coming months.

Seems like helping JV to prioritize is also a good idea - focusing on strategy, not just what is at the top of the list.  Could JV use an official project plan?  Maybe get closer to that in the spring.

Maggie did research on high-quality interventions:
NCTM provides a qualitative summary of these results, suggesting that math intervention programs adhere to a set of recommendations, including that instruction should:
  Be in a small group of no more than six  
  Address skills that are necessary for the unit at hand   
  Be quite explicit and systematic                                                           
  Require the student to think aloud as she or he solves problems or uses graphic representation to work through problem‐solving options 
  Balance work on basic whole‐number or rational‐number operations (depending on grade level) with strategies for solving problems that are more complex

We are looking at the ELA scores - it seems like a high-leverage strategy would be to take the students who scored a 2 on the writing.  There are 25 students who scored 2's.  We could focus on that.  Or we could have the general English instruction help students to create quality criteria of good writing that is aligned to the scoring rubric of the SBAC.  Teachers could have an engaging, relevant prompts that students respond to (either high interest or connected to daily curriculum).  Students practice writing a response and then scoring themselves and each other on a daily or other frequent schedule so that they are getting lots of reps in for the writing.  This way all students benefit and the hope would be that many students would raise their scores.

Maybe the students in the Nearly Met category for PS&MDA - maybe do some small group intervention to move those 2's to 3's.  You could look at overall 2's and try to move those, or do some sub-category mini-units.  Possibly fold some remediation into whole group lesson planning, but we think some smaller group, targeted experiences would help.

Abby  & Maggie are available to do more intensive or strategic thought partnership as desired.  Some questions we have:

• are you considering using intervention curriculum (from out in the world) or try to build into mainstream instruction?
• how might you fold this into the existing culture of growth mindset, tracking progress, and incentives so that kids receiving remediation feel good about it?
• do you have a staff person who has experience with intervention and RTI methods?  If not, would resources help?

We will communicate David after he has time to review our analysis and suggestions to see what he would like to do next.