we have a lot of information to cover this evening and i'd like to thank everyone for coming let's get the pledge of allegiance  schedule and then we're going to wrap up with an overview of some of our stem in i'll talk a little bit about our thinking behind curriculum revisions and what we're looking at in critical of it revisions is not so much change for change's sake but try to engage ourselves in a reflective process of improvement and asking ourselves is this the best we can do for our children and we have teachers i want to knowledge of teachers here in the audience who are content experts and our thought partners in this work and i'm going to turn it over to i turning it over sikorski to talk about some of the changes in the middle school good evening everyone i want to announce too that one of our teachers becca ritter is in attendance and she'll be able to speak specifically to the critical analysis of text course that i'm going to speak to here in just a second so thank you mr ritter for joining us tonight so you see on the slide there were critical analysis of text that is a proposed course new course for our seventh grade student and you'll see that it replaces a goal seven course so through a parent and staff feedback committee ins and steering committee we kind of looked at the goal seven course and decided that a lot of the content that was built within that course could be absorbed if we had a better transition process between mcmurry in the middle school so we're looking to eliminate that course and be able to pick up a lot of that content in other areas with with that proposal we're looking at a course again title critical analysis of texts and the reason why this course is we see a need for this courses in this new digital age we see that our students or exposed to a lot of different forms of tax through technology whether it be  social media commenting whether it be postings whether it be tweets you know i know that a lot has changed since we were in middle school but this is what our kids are being exposed to and receive a real need for our kids to be exposed to a lot more text we want to make sure that our kids are actually reading that's really important to us we want our students to be able to read with a critical lens look at text from a critical lens and interpret our world with that lens and analyze what is being offered in that text and be able to share that analysis with others so through this course of critical analysis of texel be exposed to a variety of different forms of text with the hopes of understanding and interpret in their world and making their own assumptions and reactions to those taxa mr henning is going to lead us through a little bit more of the details of this course so we are looking at it as a unit approach you know thirty day course and you have five units throughout first of all and you'll see how they all kind of build on each other in a very conscious decision to make them sequential in that way so starting out first unit looking at a variety of tax assets speeches articles narratives poems to examine the distinctions between the structure of different types of documents moving from there the stilling significant information from the text so summariz paraphrasing what is essential and relevant you have all these details or the important details to be able to identify next moving on to perspective point of view and bias you know every author is a human being with biases perspectives experiences that color what they write and as readers we need to know how to interpret that and how to acknowledge that also who is their audience people write for a reason so what are they trying to accomplish for their audience comparing and contrasting paired texts and it's fascinating to see how you can develop a similar strategy all k through twelve i know that my  daughter i you know went home was looking at some work that she was doing and she was doing a comparison contrast in second grade of benjamin bunny and peter rabbit and looking at that comparing that i thought was fastening to see  true tax dependent analysis and really looking at that but it is fascinating you look at that scale k through twelve it's based upon the complexity of what you ask them to do the vocabulary with which you've equipped them and that they have acquired and  know all of those things but the skill is still the same so that's one things q ok twelve we want to work towards is having those embedded in the curriculum and then finally drawing conclusions and making authentic and ready to read that is data driven inferences coming through out this also be a vocabulary strand going throughout the words we valuable in high school and college study as well as the p a eligible content words for l a and some of the ones i polled that are relevant for this particular study connotation counterclaim hyperbole nuance ones that really work with getting into the subtleties of being able to analyze text so the ultimate goals of the course will be looking for  first of all we do believe that this will help our k twelve efforts in increasing us eighty scores and it is a k twelve efforts on a high so high schools on the island by themselves we're all working towards this and working to put our kids in a position to be successful and to be ready at the college level but we're working to increase rich functional vocabulary so functional vocabulary is not i study these words i memorized them for the test it is i learn these words i see them in reading and i use them in writing and in speaking whenever i'm making my argument so that's the emphasis we want to look at you know the s a t section is actually called i didn't realize until fairly recently critical reading that's actually the name of the sax not just reading and i think that the skills that students reading text in order to understand the on the text to global truths and new ideas and the difference here is whenever you're working with text the way that we are in this course and as a as a district somebody can come to you with a conclusion top down be it a teacher or a parent someone on t v but what we want students to do is be able to build conclusions bottom up so use what you're reading to be able to work towards developing a conclusion on challenging text rich vocabulary you know you have and she has a right to work through those types of things and not to give up i know you know if you've taken the else out of the g r e they make those passages deliberately challenging they want you to have  have a question with respect to who who what kind of teacher would teach this class is it an english teacher is it because it seems to me like it is you know e over the last couple months in terms of looking at what is provided in that course some of the things for example or organisational skills so in terms of you know how how to organize a minder for success at the middle school and through academics well if there was or if that's something that we can push down you know at a sixth grade level in preparation in the spring of here's here are examples of you know organizational tools and and  opportunities that students are using it at the middle school and expose that earlier so that they're ready to hit the ground running within within or within our school you know it makes sense to for that to be absorbed at a younger group at an earlier age and then looking at some of the things where we can still provide that within our school but outside of a core setting so for example study habits and study skills as part of that goal seven course well that's something that we can embed through our counselors through some of the opportunities that we have to study or for through our study lab courses so we can design and specifically target students who are in need of study skill preparation we have a homeroom period where we can do some of that skill building a study lab theory where we can do that skill building for our tents of students if we need to formulate specific groups we can do that within the school day as well so those are two quick examples of what i was what i was speaking in reference to and then some of those so some of the more media your such is career explorations some of we can and we can pick up in the newly  revised course which mr hannigan will talk about here in just a second so it will be a combination of what can we what can what can be absorbed and what can we do on our own through our structure that we currently have in place ok and i will note that i've been in  many meetings you know p t a meetings while my kids were in middle school and since then where a lot of parents fret because if the idea for goal seven is to have your child be organized for middle school level work and they don't have that rotation in till the very end of the year everybody gets bent out of shape because you know my son or daughter needs it is the beginning even more reason why we wanted to replace that course w something more meaningful but oss so figure out a way where we can expose every student to what parents fell and what students felt was really important out of that course and have everybody like i said like i mentioned be exposed to standards for failing consumer science is a wonderful opportunity for us because they might not be exactly what you would have thought if you wouldn't write have read them and a couple of the ones that we are looking at are financial and resource management that's family consumer science standard financial literacy so one thing that we've done in the past is we've partnered with junior achievement as part of this course and this is an opportunity to even further develop that partnership because they have a lot of rich resources in terms of those standards as well in looking at one of the areas that we really needed to pick up it was such a natural fit with goal eight so when you combine the financial literacy piece with the stud skills there's still part of the goal curriculum and pick up bolster that a little bit more with goal seven you know not existing next year but bolster the study skills out aspects for the students and then the career exploration piece is probably the biggest part of that goal a course in that part would remain so we're looking at financial literacy some study skills the balance of family work and community and career exploration and blending all of that together into really a powerful class that we're really excited about because there's a lot of focus behind it you know financially and careers have to go hand in hand as we all know so when you see that really you know preparing the students moving forward to the high school and beyond you know the study skills and they have an eighth grade now so we can start speaking context a little bit more about high school and college you know the career readiness you know what do you do once you have a career what choices are you going to make those types of things and then balancing with you know family work and community you know what's your role in the community so there's a lot of people sequence to this course as well and we're really excited to get a chance to right this course a thirty day course and i think that  computer seven course being being added to right now our students in seven and greater taking essential to the same course and so next year our seventh graders have already taken that course and so we're in a position to do to develop a brand new computer applications course for eighth grade so this course is really going to take what students have learned at mcmurray and in seventh grade around keyboarding in processing skills in addition to a lot of the work they've done in terms of gaining proficiency with microsoft office products and putting that into application and what i say by that is we're going to have a real world experience in capstone projects for our students so the course will be designed  with students working as a as a digital cold as a digital or premise so the first thing first thing that students are going to are going to be exposed to is centered around digital citizenship and we're going to have an opportunity to be  hopefully the second school in the state that's going to be a digitally certified school so that's our goal we want to become a digitally certified school and make that attraction for our school building from there students are going to be working in a partnership with california university where students are going to be over the course of the three of these thirty days they're going to assume the role and they're going to view themselves as entrepreneurs and additionally they're going to be entrepreneurs graphic designers and marketing executives and what i mean by that is they're going to have an opportunity to create and experience the phenomenon of going through a start up business and they're going to have to use their computer application knowledge and backgrounds to do this so they're going to develop they're going to develop a business and a logo to go along with the business which is which is graphic design from there they're going to have to put together a business plan and solution and they're going to be working with local business owners who are going to be we're giving them and providing them feedback on their plans so to be real world application of  partnerships that will have they're going to have to have to utilize scratch software which is coding software if you're not familiar to kind of design some of the things that they want to produce whether it be a website for their business or some of the other marketing marketing avenues that that they want to pursue and it's going to be all in collaboration with california the university of pennsylvania will have members from their university providing  guess mentor ships for our students within this course i might have a question what does it mean to hide digitally certified means that students have gone through a training program where it teaches students the responsible and respectful behavior of technology so they're learning what the appropriate uses of technology are for and it's a pretty it's a really good course talking about the dangers of technology and how to avoid the pitfalls of of landing yourself in about some of that has already started this year and we'll talk about that as we go on to talk more about some of the work around stem for this year there's always the potential for us to go to their campus they've made that very known to us and they they would welcome that but the the majority of it will be happening at our school and they'll be sending representatives to us not just representatives from the university but some of the local businesses in partnership said that they have will be coming to our school to be able to talk to the students and work within our small groups it's called the program is called the believe the boss program so the students are their bosses of their this new initiative and project within th will move on to the high school now and i want to thank mr miss reglan for coming tonight who assist with the presentation what we want to think around when we're talking through the high school schedule is starting to give students more options at this point in this presentation will talk about  new classes or eight revised classes so there's a total of eight new options in a sense of providing more flexibility to the students schedule when it comes to thinking through some new electives the first change you've heard a lot about it's the final change in the new the realignment of the social studies curriculum this is american government which will be the eleventh grade course it hasn't been offered for a few years but this is the the final course to be to be realigned when we change from global studies to american history and then finishing out with the american government so this is just to remind the board this is work that's been going on for several years so when we come to me looking at new textbooks and writing this curriculum that will happen this summer for the art department we have misty giovanni here from the high school there are two new courses being offered in the art department ceramics hand building and ceramics wheel throwing focusing on specific skills within that department for students that have a true passion for wanting to work there in art specifically in ceramics and these are both semester courses which allow flexibility for a child schedule when they're trying to fit everything in that they have to take along with what they really truly want to take and the passion for that if i may in addition to that the ceramics three offers a next level course so what we've been dealing with has our teachers do such a fantastic job that kids love taking ceramics and register like crazy in those those courses fill up and oftentimes students top out and so they've already had ceramics want to ceramics to you know like i want more i want to take my stuff to the next level i want to work on level projects and so these courses will give the students a place to go to push it to the next level and so each of the each of the classes is focused on one of the two areas that they focus on in the in the ceramics labs  the hand building in the will throwing so kids can take both kids in day one kids can take the other but it does give them a continuation in that program and if you have specific questions about the courses we can always the teachers are available as well what we're doing with the biology lab is in exploration and i know it's been talked about this biology lab is a would be a one day a week lab period where students would work in on hands experimental labs it wouldn't be an additional period of just doing more with biology curriculum at this point the teachers have cleared out thirty eight labs where kids would dig in and get their hands dirty and learn more about the depth of science it's just an exploration at this point we did use it as a scheduling model to see how it would fit but we want to see if it fits with our current staffing situation and the current schedule to ensure that it wouldn't put too many restrictions on a child's schedule the word exploring meaning that you're proposing this only if it works with the current scheme the high school yes i want one of the things that has come up in discussions at the high school when it was brought up for p t a meetings was the fact that it's one day a week and i know that's a big change for us but that it is sensually takes an entire year of an elective from a student because there's no there are no classes that can be currently at the high school that can be scheduled opposite a lab a few years ago they used to do it with physical education so that you can have physical education opposite a lab and then that was no longer available so i know the discussion that i had with their high school parents is  that you know it's been told to us that you know a lot of other schools most schools who have biology have a lab but that taking an entire year of an elective out when the only thing opposite you can have is study hall is is a big cost and that if you were going to do that because i do see the benefit of the biology lab is there any way in the future that we can either start being able to incorporate jam opposite the labs because most kids who are taking biology are either freshman or sophomore and that's what usually when they take their gym or developing some other courses that would be ripe for going opposite a biology lab i don't know whether it would be a more about biology type of subject or something because that's the biggest concern i've seen is with that taking away that elective because there are many kids that don't even want to take a study hall at all they really want to fill up those courses so i mean can you tell me like that one of the things they need that are a great idea yeah that is one of the things we're exploring what it could but up against in my experience it has been a physical education class of thinking through how that would work in mary well in the schedule that's it has to work in the confines of what we do now so that's why it's still exploration it's a part potential proposal because the teachers do really want it biology is the only science right now that doesn't have a lab attached so you're right it is a tenth grade class predominantly most tenth graders or in biology the honors kids typically take it as a ninth grader so thinking through a way that it doesn't impact a child schedule and handcuff them to have to wait another year per perhaps there are some things we could do around what are the requirements in one third grade how do things work in thinking through that holistically than just how we get this to fit so that it fits with the study hall right could potentially work with if is ed we have to see once we see all the course requests which were just finished last week what can we do with staffing to make this work for kids and for teacher we really want to make the bio lab work and so there are a couple kinks in order to try to get it to work and one is making it fit for the majority of our students make it fair for all of our students and so most of our ninth and tenth graders have study halls so for most of the students it would be situations where it would take one day of their study hall away not non elective so they would leave them with four study halls instead of five which most parents would be happy about the elective situation that is something like dr murphy said we are exploring but that is for a smaller group of students that that that would even be the case so we are looking at things like whether or not electives can match and fit in that times time slot but again that might be an individual decision for an individual child which which is fine because what we're anticipating is that for the vast majority it will be during the study hall time and when you say most of the ninth and tenth graders take study hall is that like sixty percent like a like a majority vast majority are our ninth graders most of them have study halls written into the schedules and we do that out of a transitionary type of we do that to specifically for the transition from middle school high school we'd like to schedule in the ninth grade study hall so that's a conversation we have with with our rising ninth grade parents moving on to the media department they've been actively working at thinking through ways to reach more students in mississippi here as the facilitator for the department and one of the things they saw over the last few years is having a yearlong media one class kids it was challenging for students to be able to fit in their schedule and be able to take advantage of some of the great things going on in the media department so the two things they proposed is changing media one from a semester or year long to a semester course again providing more flexibility first children and then creating the basic visual editing and design course also a year long two a semester course they could choose to take them back to back and then it would be a year long but it just allows the opportunity with media one being a prerequisite for most of the courses in that class to be able to get kids in and not have to wait until it fits into their schedule when they have everything else on their plate there are two course name changes one is the advanced multimedia which would be a project based in house mentorship we have a state of the art facility with our meat media department at the high school so there's no net no need necessarily to send our students somewhere else to get mentored when we have high quality equipment and very talented teachers and people from the township working at the school the time so this is a course that was offered in the past but hasn't typically been able to work so they wanted to bring it back in house and do mentoring on our campus with what we have going on to at the high school at this time if i can add can i add to that so the the thing that we're known for is the quality of our educational program in our core classes when people think of peter central high school i mean i get i get calls i got two calls today from schools around the state that that said what are you guys doing up there we want to know how you're managing your science curriculum we want to know how your your  literature keystone scores are so high i mean we're known for our core classes but one of the jewels that some of you are very familiar with because i see you in the t v studios all the time is the quality of our elective course areas and that's something that is is not as known and doesn't get as much on or but still offers a very vibrant and diverse curriculum to our students and in the media around we have and another area that a ton of kids absolutely thriv florida in and getting the kids into the media realm in the past had been a challenge because the media one course was a year long class and so kids are looking for exposure in one thousand tenth grade so they're looking for semester classes so they can try those things so we cut the media one class into pieces so that they can take more it's more accessible to more kids schedules so for those that have been into our t v studio this is now a class that provides a gateway to this program and then also adds the top end of the classes so they can finish in that program and so we're really excited our media staff is really excited to to be able to offer mentorship almost in house in turn ship level experience in the media broadcasting realm so something to look forward to and you get to see the product of these kids projects you'll get to see them on channel seven and things like that so look forward to great things that come from th in the second course name changes the media web page development and design and this is coming from into media having a focus around what we can do a little bit differently in this course will be talking a little bit later around our whole seven to twelve when it comes to some of our electives and this is one of the ways where we feel we could definitely do more for our kids and then the new course option which is very exciting is media on air talent this was an area where we felt we could definitely do more with the kids around actually being on the in the studio in front of the camera instead of behind the camera so teaching them the communication skills necessary to work potentially as a broadcaster or in front of the camera and so just in the production moving on to a couple other courses that the high school the adapted physical education course is a new course at the high school that's for students that have physical act adaptations that may preclude them from be able to participate fully  would be a new course for students that need those adaptations and there's also a potential where students could have students without the physical adaptation need could apply to be a member in this class as well as if is a credit perhaps a student interested in education or physical therapy and be able to take gym alongside the students that need the adaptations so this is really a new exciting course here at the high school dr murphy what happens now if a child doesn't have those adaptations do they what do they do they they still have but this offers a smaller setting situation where they could they still take physics at in the the regular group but this would be an opportunity for a smaller setting and the other course we're looking at considering is the theater exhibit in design course that would be offered in the second semester of a school year focusing on again again it's demolition in engineering of what it takes to build of a stage  takes to create a an exhibit or a design for production so this is something that would be new top by mr and so he couldn't be with us tonight but we're hoping to partner with cow you and they would bring professors on board to help us ensure that we have a quality curriculum aligned to the needs of what engineering or set design would provide the predominance of of what the course we based on is on this your engineering project design models so students creating from start to finish from a design using as a colonnade ing experience in the engineering stamp program using the skills that they've they've gotten from their other engineering classes that they've had so this is we're talking about a capstone course this is kids that have been through the tech add and stem and engineering classes employing all those skills from start to finish of projects so that is what most of their assessment will be based on as is their designs their creativity and their employment of those engineering skills actually building it because then you would need saas and all that kind of thing or how they're building it they're building it yeah this is this is taking from idea to reality so for example if let's say that our fall play happens to be a certain play that needs palm trees that one of the projects that the kids will be asked to to build is almost like a like a contest a contest of design of who can who can build collaboratively the best palm tree that supports a certain amount of coconuts that that looks the most realistic and actually whenever possible partnering with our theater programs that we're very proud of as well that have the directors and a look at the kids designs and decide which ones should be incorporated into the productions so it could be a real nice tie together between engineering and our actual stage productions the big thing in this realm is getting courses that actually come back and serve in the house and they actually are a community benefit to the school so it would be a great thing for the kids use your skills to benefit and be part of those productions yet there are a lot of really great opportunities on the  ory so and then the final thing we started to do is look at course duplication what are we offering that students could potentially take at the c t c and we found that our family consumer science standalone courses are courses that students inal part of this part of the presentation we're looking at revision for our courses become is around our world language department and mr wilkinson is here as the facilitator k twelve this process started many years ago couple years ago going through the cycle of what happens when a curriculum is revised and the first face started when the teacher started visiting area school districts i know they went up are saying claire they went to taylor all today's high school in pittsburgh public schools and they started to look at study at what other districts do when it comes to world language education we invited the american council on teaching foreign languages in dr adair who'd act from the university of pittsburgh came and worked with our teachers for an entire day in the fall against studying best practices for foreign language education and that from there they started to look at new textbooks so that was all during phase one of research is where we are now this friday we start to move into phase two of curriculum which is the writing and they'll start mapping out thinking through what a child needs to make it through to level four of a language down to the skills that they could do as a first grader in spanish so that they're not constantly learning the days of the week over and over and over and over again but thinking through what do we want kids to be able to do by a level four and what they start to study in first grade if they stay with spanish or when they choose a language in seventh grade whether they choose to go on to french or german so that work we're starting actually this week this friday and continuing into april with the teachers writing courses from grade one up to the level four we won't be touching any of the a p courses because those are dictated to us through the college board but thinking through each language for french spanish and german new courses in new curriculum for each of those so that's because we're language i was up for a new writing adoption and this is where we are at this point for world language during their research they found that mount lebanon after sinclair was offering a course called global outlooks that allowed students to truly study language at the cultural level and understand where language came from and theories around language it's a little different than global studies because global studies looks at the historical side of culture this starts to look at it through language so this was a course that when it came on the table i thought let's try it and see if kids want it and more than seventy students signed up to take it next school year which i was really excited about as a former french teacher so they're they're excited about this and having a potential to again new choices new options for kids to be able to do some things differently if there's any questions about that he's here to be able to answer  concept me do you want to speak more than just that one language with the idea that in the future they could be interacting with anyone from around the world please introduce yourselves i'm sorry wilkinson i'm one of the facilitators for world language at the high school  having been on the social studies committee years ago it's nice to see that in fact the structure is changed as it did on that group to to build on what you learned before not to  reintroduce the same information i mean the biggest question back there was who won the civil war and for teachers we're teaching the civil war i mean we all came up with the same answers and it was sort of interesting but redundant but it's nice to see that they've changed and are looking to build upon what they've done in the past so that doesn't bore the kids too slow or it's not well thank you so we're talking about schedules and time and teachers are two most valuable assets and the key to a good schedule is finding a way to maximize instructional time and teacher talent i wan and thank mr store for come this evening to help answer any questions we may have as we go through this so we're going to we're going to take a little ride on the education committee time machine and last year at this time we had a similar a similar discussion about updates to mcmurray elementary schedule and some of the main things that we were looking to achieve were increasing instructional time for koreans of english language arts and math and then we also wanted to try to eliminate students from being pulled from those subjects because we didn't want their gaps to increase with any schedule change there are sometimes those unintended consequences of the of the schedule and the one the one undesirable factor that was taken the music and chorus and the samples out of the school day so those are some things that we had on the table last year at this time so we're getting our time machine to move forward to today and so we've had a good amount of time we've had six months to really have discussions about what's working with the schedule what are some things that we could change and what are some adjustments that we can make and we want to first solicit feedback from our teachers they are the ones in the classrooms they are the ones delivering the instruction and store and i we work together and we put together survey and we said let's let's take a look and say look at the schedule we currently run and what are the good things about it what are some of the things that we want to change so of that scale of that list we compiled about thirty three things that we could look at implementing continuing or some things the change as we went through that schedule we i told the teachers as a joke that you know if we were going to implement all that would rotation so we can't do both so then we also want to take a look at a way that we can provide a hybrid between elementary schedules so the kids can have an easy transition from the k three buildings but then also when they move to the seven eight building they can also have a transition with some similarities in the schedule so we tried to do that by building in a block similar to what runs at the middle school at the end of the day with a study lab and then we also try to and opportunity our community member who is expert in music and he had the opportunity present about some of the detriments of the music program by some of these changes and little do you know when he volunteered last year we're going to take  weapons offer but we actually consulted with him as we went through this process to get his feedback on the impacts of the music program so where all of that information all the information we gathered  developed a draft schedule and it took took a while it took two or three months of really hard work and collaboration but what we did just probably the last two weeks is we want to all the elementary buildings and we've met with staff members  facilitators and presented some of those changes and we wanted to get their feedback so as as we went through the presentations we solicited some of the feedback and we're continually making revisions so our goal and our next steps is to continue to meet with the staff members to continue to build schedules with students and included in the schedule to make sure it's going to work and to have a final product by june and that's that's the goal so that we are going into the summer we're going to start the year off strong next year so that some of the conversations that took place is scheduling is like a rubik's cube you know you make one change and it impacts several other things so we try to prevent that from happening and so we wanted to put in those non negotiable so we wanted to have good core instructional time we wanted to bring some music back into the day and so we went through a lot of process and so the big takeaways which is what is the impact on kids and so the impact on kids is we're still going to have we're going to have uninterrupted instructional time for core the core subjects their math language arts their socializing their science  we also have the opportunity we're going to build the ensembles back into the day as i mentioned that they do at the middle school their study lab they have that last period where they have music being pulled up but they also have the opportunity to run interventions and give kids what they need in the areas of reading and math and then we also wanted to give the teachers comic playing time because it's integral for teachers have time to plan together to collaborate to plan good instructional activities for kids and then we also wanted to build in some increased time for the related arts and we had actually success for those those items that we had mentioned so that's our big takeaways with with our schedule proposal for memor questions i have just i guess it's sort of like a comment going back on that time machine because you were still principal ad p b i believe and when this june two thousand and fifteen when the final idea or  you know when you have a presentation to be made one of the issues that people complained about with the music ensembles is that nobody was ever told or that so how are you planning on getting parents feedback or notifying parents so that you can get that type of feedback from our hope is that once we get a firmer structure the structure is there we just need to get continue to solicits more feedback but our hope is to set up one of the upcoming p t a meetings that macmurray that we would present the changes we're on to the last part of our presentation around our stem innovation initiatives and this started when mr sikorski came on board and we started to evaluate what we do k twelve with stem again thinking through what kids do all the way up to twelfth grade and this we're in the middle of this at this point but we have some really exciting things to talk about what we've been doing is really focusing on the fact that stem isn't done in isolation it's not just done in science and it's not just done in math so we started to focus just difficulty on our electives in business finance technology and media thinking through what kids could do again as seniors and ensuring they're not doing the same microsoft word thing over and over and over again and how can we ensure that we have potentially capstone courses where students are hitting what we want them to do by the end for this part of the presentation wolf we thought through important things we want to do train our teachers and ensure that they have all the skill sets they need to be able to do this work evaluate our current curriculum and activities that our students participate in and then start to think through our key partnerships we can have with our stakeholders and mr sikorski and i are going to kind of tag team this section the first section is round professional development in training and you'll notice we'll talk a lot about cal you center for innovation because we're working very closely with them out of south point and then there are even more partnerships potentially that could come out of south point just by working with them and people are hearing we're working with them so now other universities and local groups want to get involved and we'll talk about that we attended just a couple weeks ago at the carnegie stem excellence pathway partnership where carnegie science center cow you in the eye you won with teachers from the middle school as well as mr fisher and myself to start to really evaluate what we're doing and how we can continue to get better that was one of the smaller professional development we've attended but we've also had cow you come on site or we've gone to south point in mississippi or can talked to the work we've been doing with cow you the first step that they did is start to look at what is our vision for stem education in peters township and the teachers and the two gentlemen from the center for innovation dr whitehead who's the provost top through what are some things we could do now and what the teachers wanted to do is start to focus on scope and sequence so that's the biggest thing to come out of our collaborative at this point and we'll be starting that this friday with those teachers as well  just to add on there with the center for innovation i think it's really clear that technology is really shaping our world i mean technology centers are world right now and we want to make sure that our students and staff members are on the cutting edge of those new developments and that's you know what we're really aiming to shoot for through this new partnership with the center for innovation we want students to be exposed to different and new things and we want students to be creative in their thinking hence the center for innovation so it's been a great partnership between a school and a university but further great partnership between resources so resources at the university level and resources within the community that we're able to provide for our students a few of those experiences have already occurred that all speak to really quickly there it says the p t s three d printing and coding mrs gregg asked earlier if you know we would be going there the coming to us what we actually had representatives already come to our school and work with our students around the emerging technology of three d printing and so exposed to three d printing and what you can do with a three d printer and some of the computer applications that it takes to to manipulate a three d printer in addition to that they came and worked with our students on coding and you know you may say well why coding and i always think back to you know steve jobs said every spurs in this country should learn how to code because it makes you think and that's ultimately what we want our students to gain from this process we want our students at the middle school to be analytic thinkers to be a problem solvers and coding is a perfect blend of science and mathematics it's a perfect merge of both of those two content areas so we were fortunate enough to bring both of those we've also been pulling mr sweyn chalk into this discussion to ensure that not only is the curriculum where we needed to be but do we have the technology to sport it so that's an important thing that we have going on with him the next part around course alignment and activities as i stated earlier this friday the cow you for it cal you professors are coming back to start to work with us to think through do we need all the skill sets that we want our students to be able to meet and we felt that bringing them in as experts not only as college professors but what kids need beyond college to be able to be successful in these positions they are the ones that are on the ground at that level both in college and beyond so they it's great to bring them in and be able to partner around this work around what our curriculum and courses could look like mr sikorski already talked to you about the computer applications class and be the boss program this is something that mrs van balan has been working closely with chris at the center for innovation to be able to think through again thinking if students get through this course they could have an actual work product in the end not just learning how to to format something in microsoft word or not just learning how to do a power point but thinking through real life problems on creating  situations when it comes to this course and i just add to that really quickly our ultimate goal i mean this would be absolutely phenomenal that we get to this point but if we had local businesses actually come to us to our school and to our students and say we have this  issue and i maybe issue isn't the correct term but we have this opportunity that where we need to really have a think tank or problem solver on can your students come up with something that's going to support us that would be that's the ultimate goal is for our students administration and everything for creating these partnerships because i've felt for a long long time that we have wonderful students we have wonderful teachers but sometimes we don't do enough because the amount of education and experience we have within the community and the people around us is something that i don't think we've ever tapped in too hard the very little bit of the potential we've we've garnered and it could be done so much more and this is just a first step which i'm extremely excited about what's interesting is that every time you talk with local businesses and it like this is they are wondering how to get into our buildings every time i speak with them or community members even soccer games or things like that and one of the parents has a business and i like i don't know how i i don't i get in this like just coming in  get out into the businesses so it's it's a good thing to have all those resources here in our community that we can tap into it's neat that we have a tech person mr sweyn chalk that intimately involved in all of this and wants to be involved in the kid station this is new he spent the morning when the teachers did go to kauai you they went to southpoint in january they're coming to us this week he spent the morning with them i could not stay because i was all over the place and he dug in with them and talked through what can we do and from that work came that they wanted to start to look at the scope and sequence in curriculum so he's he's there on the ground with them  so not only were we thinking of curriculum it within the school day but we're starting to look at what kids can do and activities in these are just highlights on what kids can do after the school day and mr sikorski will talk about the ones going on at the middle school and there's one at the high school she was instrumental in being able to provide this and bring this to our school but future cities competition is truly a perfect merge of everything that is stem it's science is technology it's engineering and it's mathematics so students were charged with creating future cities utilizing simulation software so they had to take take problems from an engineering standpoint and solve for the future cities that  were creating and in constructing through this simulation software from there mrs ritter and another teacher brought in real world engineers to come and speak to the students and consult with the students from  software from there take it a step further now they had to build their city once once they had the final developments in planning and we knew that the city was sustainable they had to create a real life scale to scale a city of their city so a model of their city to scale so they had to develop that and then they took that scaled city to a regional competition where they competed against many many different school districts that were involved in the same type of program so i mean it took it really took every phase of stem to be able to provide that for kids and it was really really exciting to see you know we had one team we had ventured we had to choose one team that would represent our school but we had multiple multiple groups of students engaged in the activity who were designing the future city in addition to the future cities competition future pilots league this is this is something that's currently happening at the high school and is going to be occurring at the middle school in april so this is this was designed by a former  air force pilot and so he came up with software that is flight simulation software and so our students are going to be in the students at the high school are but the students are going to be exposed to real life simulation of flying a jet and they are giving given missions that they have to compete and solve and they're going to be again in competition with it's a regional competition with to see who completed the missions to the best of their ability and you get scored on so many different points and rubrics but california university center for innovation here's where their resources come into play they provided all of the technology for us so all of the computers the software applications everything was provided to us at note no cost because this cal you really want to partner with with our schools and provide these opportunities to our kids so it's a real world experience and the winners there's some there's some really neat opportunities potentially for the winners of this of this competition and that's yeah just an awesome awesome experience for our kids at the hour of code ok is the next one on there and the hour of code is actually a global movement some of you may have heard of the hour of code it's gaining a lot of and garnering a lot of attention but it's a global movement it's actually within one hundred eighty different countries worldwide and what it is is it's is it's having students commit to at least a one hour period of time where they're exposed to demystifying aspects of coding because when you say coding you know the i know for myself before i learned more about it it's pretty intimidating of you know only certain people can code and you have to have a knack for coding and you know coding is boring and there are so many misconceptions that are out there that this hour of code again coding teach kids to coding directly teaches kids how to become problem solvers so the hour of code we expose our students in the middle school to one hour of coding so they they had they had the opportunity to experiment with coding and mrs van dellen was was the one who implemented that within our building with our students and it was a major major success so the final part is around expanding our partnerships and most of this mr sikorski will talk about because this is then a lot of the work he's been starting says come on board with us but the first thing and i'm going to talk about this as freely as i can because we're in a grand competition for this now hoping to find out next week if we got it but mrs ragland at the high school we leading this work around our math and science and english teachers in looking at a p classes and ensuring not only are students in a teachers and support for students is a major initiative with this our grant focusing on math science and english so this is a great opportunity that we hope to find out more about next week so i'm talking tongue in cheek because we can't say too much but it's well hopefully next week if where a finalist for this grant and mr sikorski will finish out peters township library so talking about partnerships is one that we were able to create that's right across the street and it's right here in our own local community they purchased finch robots which and they are the first library in the state of pennsylvania that has robots for borrowing purposes  and so that's pretty unique and that's pretty neat as as the peters township library so when we you know we're going to talk about the stem career fair but when we got wind and word that the finch robots were coming to the to the library we certainly  partner as quickly as possible and again you thought that i brought mr ritter here because of the critical analysis of tax course but lo and behold she's involved in some of these other initiatives as well and she was again instrumental in meeting with the representati peter's time ship library with myself and trying to figure out where we can bring this opportunity to our school and the finch robots we were able to bring to our school and it really exposes students to twelve different programming languages so there's a lot that can be done as initial programming responsibilities within within robotics with these robots and we were able to we were able to bring that experience right here to our students and who knew that they were right across the street so it's a pretty pretty amazing resource to lab so just to talk about the innovation lab i mean one of the things that we want to make known to our community and stakeholders is the fact that this lab is family based and family centered and so there are opportunities for family play labs so if you're if you're as a parent you know it's so hard to keep up with technology because it seems like it's changing constantly and that's what's beneficial to have their resource right down the street you can have you as a family can go to a play lab and get to experiment and work with the various different technologies with your kids which  an exciting opportunity for families they have innovator summer camps where you can have you can choose and as a kid and as a family different opportunities that you would want to expose your students to that are stem based in terms of camps  and finally they have a full size competition space for the first tech robotics which i'll talk about here word says hosted the first tech robotics competition so first text stands for first  inspiration and recognition of science and technology as a different types of robotics program where you know we talked about the finch robots in the k'nex in the in some of the lego robots that we currently have within our building but the first the first robotics the difference is you are serving as again in engineering that you are creating the robot you're not given a robot and from there able to write programs and languages you have to build up from the ground up and so we were able to host the first tech robotics competition in the winter right at the middle school and so we had hundreds of teenagers from western pennsylvania ohio west virginia common compete at this first tech robotics competition and that sparked and generate a lot of interest and we partnered that with a stem career fair where we had local  businesses and universities common expose students to fields stem fields and you know i would say our primary goal was was was for exposure like let kids know what fields are out there what exists then that might you know sparked your interest but i think you know a tertiary benefit to that stem career fair was the notion of positioning our students to be closely competitive and i you know i think that the workforce right now is extremely extremely competitive and to provide as many experiences and exposures to students as possible is only go benefit us in the long run and part of that stem career fair you'll see down there we had westinghouse as a representative well we had the senior engineer from westinghouse com and speak to the kids about what does it truly mean to be an engineer and something that i took away and i think a lot of people took away from from his talk was engineering is not just engineering and you know dr murphy alluded to it from the kick off but these fields nowadays you have to be versed in very  in almost every content area and very profession in a lot of content areas as well as as you know not just science technology and mathematics but we they play live in unison and you know from that career for some some some other opportunity or looking at mentor ships and so you know i know westinghouse was extremely pleased with the fact that we're holding robotics competition exposing our students to this and they were and you know i know that they're looking for any future opportunities for us to  be able to partner with them the same with carnegie mellon university or robert morris university in fact i was just on the phone today with current carnegie mellon universities robotics institute and they want to partner with our school for the first ever pittsburgh robotics library and some really interesting things that they pose to us that have partnerships with nasa and google one just just through just through these partnerships have really really expanded the opportunities and potentials out that we can provide for our kids which is super exciting i think that's a great idea please and you probably already have but please consider how that might affect the accelerated master's coming from the middle school if that would preclude them from taking bio when they're still in the younger grade levels and the other thing is i really like what you're saying for all your courses but as far as the goal eight course is there any chance you might be able to come up with a better name than gold i have no idea what gold means when i look at that as a parent and something that might be more descriptive i think would help a lot of  thank you to anyone else that any questions or comments could they just address that because i did i did not remember to bring that up about the accelerated math and i know it was brought up at the p t a meeting and they said that they were working on that that could you go into a little more detail and i'm sorry but i know mr squeers case fuck it i'm sorry but can you go on a little bit more detail about how it will affect those children because we talked about that right away with basically just like you're saying or exploring options will work spurring options well but you know the reality is like what we've been looking at is one of the special  courses being scheduled in the third period and that would depending on how things would play out you know students would miss a part of one of those periods once per week if that was the way that it would play out or you know potentially you know more often depending on when the lab here would be offered so they would it would be a special area it would not be one of the core areas of instruction would it ever it was never here it could never coincide with arrive and those things we have looked into that and some that just it works out logistics but and daycare and it will not be a core area of math science social as language arts and parents would know that in advance so that they could choose and just have them go up for math instead of math and science if that were the case there was no info dr murphy a question for you place we've talked about stem most of the steve a new act and then those come out of steam is the arts anything especially being done about that program with the arts yes well that's one of the reasons we started to look at the new ceramics courses because students do have passion for art music so is it integrated with stem at this point it can be but we're focusing specifically on stem and then broadening out once we get the seven to twelve stem down how can we impact that with steam so it's it's also being called innovation now that's why we put stem slash innovation so i think it depends on what school of thought you speak with dr white had a cow you pushed us to stop calling it stem but to call it innovation because it's bigger than just science all  the little acronyms of what stem means he wanted us to think bigger and broader and how we can really be innovative with what we have our kids doing i think you anybody else have any questions this is just the one thing i do want to really commend and highlight and all of them but mcmurray elementary school that was that was pretty good there's not a time that you spent on that as you know we've had last year was that was one of our main worries and mr fisher and blair mr story thank you i mean that's i'm impressed with that and the time you put into that i mean it it always goes back to that's why i mention all the individuals because it's not one person's not two people it's a whole team of people that really really worked i know how many i personally know how many hours you all spent on that and it's not a coffee