Thursday, November 20, 2008

Andy and I met this morning to discuss the email to Ms. Druck and plan out some areas where we will be working to meet our goals for this year.

• By January 15, 2009, students should be able to use the Writing Frame appropriately
• A Homework Help Club will be available on Friday mornings on demand or twice monthly
• The Book Clubs will continue through January 16th - girls meet Tuesday mornings & boys meet Wednesday after school
• The Writing Club will begin next week and run through January 16th. I presented this to parents during the Parent Teacher Conferences. I will be embedding test prep into the writing lessons.

November 13, 2008 Meeting

Postponed due to illness.

Informal conversations about possible changes will be taking place between Friday and Monday. A second list of possible students to include in the study with an explanation of our rationale will be prepared and emailed to Ms. Druck next week.

Once we receive an okay from Ms. Druck, we will begin collecting work from each student to be placed in a portfolio. We also need to discuss the instruction regarding writing taking place in each class, next steps for instruction, and a Before School Homework Club.

November 10th Meeting

Faye (ICI) joined 1 member of Team A and 3 members of Team B in the Teacher Center.

Faye showed us part of powerpoint presentation to help us narrow our goals and objectives for our study.

She suggested that Team A may need to look at additional data since our study involves monitoring growth in writing. Since we need to show 1 1/2 years growth for each student involved in the study, we may need to look beyond just the scores from the January 2008 ELA Raw Scores which encompass reading and writing, but also the scores in the test's item analysis as well as on-demand writing tests throughout the year.

November 6th Meeting

During this meeting, Ms. Ingolia, Mr. Chesler, and Mrs. Russell examined student work. We found that although there are students listed in the bottom 1/3 according to the NYS 2008 ELA Exam, there were still students who were equally as needy in regard to improving writing in the middle and top 1/3 of the seventh grade.

Faye will be coming in the next week. We will be bringing up our concerns with her.

INQUIRY FOCUS

Writing Across the Content Areas

Subskill: Organization of Writing

Learning Targets:
1) Structure Appropriate to the Genre
2) Structuring an Effective Paragraph
3) Coherence
4) Use of Transitions

October 30th Meeting

We looked at the bottom 1/3 of our seventh grade in ELA from the results of the January 2008 ELA exam. Ms. Russell discussed the focus and goals of this year's inquiry team. She had developed a preliminary list identifying 15 students within that 1/3 that were having difficulty with organization.

Ms. Ingolia, and Mr. Chesler agreed to bring additional writing samples from the 15 students in order to make a final selection of the study group.