Urban Montessori Charter School
Minutes
Academic Oversight Committee Regular Meeting
Date and Time
Thursday June 15, 2023 at 4:00 PM
Location
4551 Steele Street, Oakland, CA 94619. Signage on campus will direct you to the correct room, generally the Sun Room.
The public may comment and participate via Zoom if they prefer. The public may also email comments to karaf@urbanmontessori.org to be shared during the meeting. Please make that intention clear in your email.
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Meeting ID: 825 9285 5160; Passcode 510 842 1181
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Meeting ID: 825 9285 5160
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Additional teleconference location: 494 Juana Ave San Leandro, CA 94577; 2927 75th Avenue Oakland, CA 94605
Committee Members Present
D. Williams, K. Fortuna
Committee Members Absent
None
Guests Present
D. Bissonnette
I. Opening Items
A.
Call the Meeting to Order
B.
Record Attendance
C.
Review of Action/Discussion Items
D.
Presentations from the Floor
E.
Vote on Minutes from Prior Meeting
II. Academic Oversight
A.
Instructional Updates
B.
Board retreat follow up - Role of Academic Oversight Committee
We need to follow up.
C.
LCAP and Policy Review
Kara and Donald will review listed policies to determine which policies or which portions of them are relevant to Academic.
We will also review calendar proposals for committee calendar.
III. Closing Items
A.
Topics for next meeting
Policy review.
Possibly state test results.
Retreat follow up
In the midst of summer 2 of training cohort - a lot of fun. Quickly diving into work, aiming for 18 lessons a day. Exciting for UE to see how it all comes together. Next week the cohort is going to Chicago for Montessori for Social Justice conference.
NWEA Data - Reflections. Elizabeth SLade created a Spring Focus to steer what teachers should focus on for end of the year, by level. Teachers found helpful and we should start the school year with these in place. We are looking at our cirrciculum map, which aligns Montessori lessons with common core. Looking at ways we can bridge tangible to abstract to support testing. Making time during August PD for teachers to take NWEA tests to understand context the students are presented with. Looking at year of lesson study focused on math.
Questions: apart from NWEA tests, is there internal way to track progress? If so, how do those numbers differ from NWEA results? Lessons are tracked in Transparent Classroom and Transition checklists. We don't have a good aggregate for the school. Checklist is paperbased; not sure about tools in transparent classroom.
Is NWEA ABAR aligned? No, no tests are. Its a very narrow measure of skills. Not a good test for equity. But, one of the main way our school is evaluated.
SBAC will look similar, based on individual results. SBAC was given 4 months before the end of the school year.
Do we want to continue to do it the way we did this year? Lot of testing.
5th and 6th graders should be moving closer to abstract thinking so their results should be stronger in math - looking at focus on intervention at those levels in extended care.