ILD Meeting Summary Sept 17, 2013 3:00 PM In Attendance: Edmund Szutu, Michelle Davis, Heather Hart, Brent

Schieve, Dan Olsen, Sheryl Hatton, June James, Tammie Stocklie, Michael Dumochelle, Andrew Holland, Stefan Stipp 1. Trip to San Diego - It's all set. We're just waiting to see what happens with CUPE job action. 2. How can we best support Integrated Studies? Find time for Sheryl and Tammie to meet with other members of their subject areas at the Grade 8 level to create inquiry questions. We plan to connect with teachers that might be interested and use DH days to make this happen in Ps 1 and 2. Get a document camera for IS Waiting on application to Janis. If that doesnt work out, Brent will show Sheryl how to make a cheap one($100) work in her room. Money for field trips Sheryl Tammie and June will apply for funds from Janis and PAC. Once we know more about how much ILD has left, well consider using some funds for this purpose too. Getting Moodle onto a local server Sheryl will investigate how we can make this happen. 3. How will we know if Integrated Studies is working? We agreed that its not helpful to try to make comparissons to other SESM classes but rather to find ways to assess IS on its own merits. We also agreed that given the various innovations being tried, that we need to be wary of the implementation dip, a phenomenon documented by Canadian researcher Michael Fullan. He posits that when new practices are implemented, student performance is likely to dip in the short term because both the teachers and students are not skilled or comfortable with this different way of doing things. In the long run performance should improve past the baseline level if the innovation is one supported by research and increasingly well implement. For IS this means that although we should gather data throughout, we should not make any evaluative judgments until at least this cohort is in the second half of grade 9. Heres a draft list of ways we plan to collect data: Assess students success according to the IRP using performance indicators (rubrics) for various core competencies (reading, writing, critical thinking, self-regulation, numeracy). These are still a work in progress and Stefan will work with the IS team to move them forward. Teacher perceptions Student perceptions We will create a student survey to assess their engagement, feelings of connectedness, perceived value of inquiry and the work in the program and more ASAP and will use it once is completed and throughout the program. RAD - pre and post Diffusion of innovation Were not sure how to measure this but one way to know inquiry is working is if other teachers are using it in their classrooms. Failure rates at the end of grade 9 and grade 10

 English crossgrade results at the end of grade 9 We agreed to revisit this list at our next meeting. 3.5 Who will step in and teach the SESM blocks vacated by Sheryl and Tammie next year? Will they be IS block? How will we make sure that IS doesnt negatively impact class sizes and compositions in other grade 9 classes given that repeaters cant really go into IS and its smaller than most grade 9 classes? We only had time to raise these issues and there was consensus that they are important and must be addressed at a future meeting. 4. What other initiatives (if any) do we wish to undertake? Food? PLC's? something else? Deferred to our next meeting. Meeting adjourned at 4:04 Next meeting on Monday October 7th