Race 2012-2013 Our Mission to Improve Teaching and Learning!
Since the start of last school year, all of our teachers have been engaged in focused professional development in an effort to prepare for the implementation of the New York State Race To The Top initiatives. Of foremost importance to your child are the Common Core Learning Standards which are set to be in place for the 2012-2013 school year in grades 3-8.
Improving student performance on the new State assessments, as well as providing the best quality instruction in classrooms, is our top objective. We have incorporated several researched-based practices in our effort to gather better academic data on our student population. For the second year we are preparing our students to take the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) assessment. This assessment provides teachers explicit data on students’ reading comprehension levels. This provides our teachers with yet another point of data to examine and consider when designing differentiated lessons and quality reading assignments for every student at every level.
In math, our teachers at all three grade levels have created interim assessments that align with current State standards. We use the data from these assessments to determine which students need additional assistance with the concepts that were taught. These interim assessments are cumulative and spread out throughout the year in order to provide teachers with diagnostic information to better prepare for the New York State Common Core Assessment to be administered in April. Both the SRI data and the Interim Assessment data can be attained from your child’s teachers.
All other subject areas are also responsible for portions of the new Common Core Learning Standards. All Unified Arts teachers are working on developing assessments and instruction that increase students ability to read and write in each content area. Teachers will have this information ready for parent conferences and look forward to answering your questions about these ambitious initiatives.
