NCSD board hears about teacher development day

Two years ago, Newton Community School District leaders decided to switch from using early-dismissal Wednesdays for professional development to using a full student-free day — the fourth Monday of each month, mostly — for such meetings, workshops and training.

NCSD principals reported to the Board of Education on Oct. 24 about professional development activities that had taken place earlier that day, as those relate to district and campus goals. Tom Bartello of Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, Todd Schuster of Woodrow Wilson, Jim Gilbert of Aurora Heights, Jolene Comer of Emerson Hough, Lisa Sharp of Berg Middle School, Mike Moran of WEST Academy and Bill Peters of Newton High School all gave reports.

Gilbert reported, in part, on professional learning communities and aligning content and assessment across the district.

“The instructional teams have been meeting and discussing assessment, and we’ve come a long way in the past two months in aligning content with assessment,” Gilbert said.

One of Aurora Heights’ FAST/Reading Universal Screening Assessment benchmark goals is to increase the Kindergarten Early Reading Composite from 56.6 percent in the fall to 70 percent by the end of the 2016-17 school year.

One of Emerson Hough’s goals in that same Kindergarten Early Reading Composite is to jump from 46 to 70 percent, along with raising fourth-grade reading composite from 64 to 80 percent. Comer talked about the importance about getting the same message out to all teachers about campus goals and the steps needed to reach them.

Sharp said the Berg Middle School goals are related to achievement and involve five developing common beliefs, use common language, determining which standards are the most essential and horizontal and vertical alignment.

Schuster said one advantage of the Teacher Leadership and Compensation Grant system is that with each campus team “unpacking” Iowa Core and other standards slightly differently, it’s helpful to have team leaders who meet with teachers and/or instructional coaches elsewhere in the district to know what’s being discussed across town.

The instructional coach system, for Newton, includes 10 direct instructional leaders, or DILs, three building instructional leaders, or BILs, and 22 mentor teachers. The program allows teachers to share their best practices with each other in new ways, and to use data locally without waiting for it to be sorted out at the state or national level.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com