14 | ACTON-BOXBOROUGH REGIONAL SCHOOL DISTRICT
Teaching and Learning This school year continued to require our leaders and our educators to embrace a mindset of flexibility, agility, and student-centered solutions. Educators, curriculum coordinators and coaches, department and school leaders continued to prioritize key grade- level content, concepts, and skills as well as provide prerequisite learning so that students could access critical standards.
UNDERSTANDING RACE— NEW SOCIAL STUDIES COURSE AT ABRHS The Social Studies Department has been working over the past year to develop the course Understanding Race . It is a semester course open to all sophomores, juniors, and seniors and the department is excited to have two full classes for their pilot year, 2022–2023. The goal of the course is to provide students with the tools and information to be able to talk about race and understand the importance of race in our community, the country, and the world. EARLY LITERACY TEACHING AND LEARNING AND DYSLEXIA REGULATIONS In accordance with the 2020 MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Dyslexia Guidelines, the District has, since 2019, made some shifts in the teaching and learning of reading. To begin this work, District literacy coordinators partnered with researchers, Drs. Joanna Christodoulou, John Gabrieli, and Tiffany Hogan and attended numerous symposia and seminars. ABRSD educators continue to expand their expertise through professional learning related to bridging cognitive neuroscience and effective literacy practices, literacy pedagogy, reading engagement/
motivation, and inclusive children’s literature. Special educators continue to attend Wilson workshops and Dr. Melissa Orkin has conducted several professional dyslexia workshops for all elementary staff. Next year, she will work with grades K-3 at each elementary school to further advance educator practice and the use of data. Other shifts include the development of Family Literacy Guides (posted on the Elementary Family Resources site). Continued work includes: • The formation of a reading Task Force • Partnering with Hill for Literacy to aid in the review of literacy programs • Continued professional learning opportunities for all staff • Determining classroom-based measures to use alongside universal screening tools and educator observations/notes.
ILLUSTRATIVE MATHEMATICS K-6 IMPLEMENTATION
During the 2021–2022 school year, we began year one of a district-wide implementation of Illustrative Mathematics (IM) in all Kindergarten to Grade 6 class- rooms. Illustrative Mathematics is a problem-based cur- riculum that fosters the development of mathematics learning communities in classrooms, gives students access to the mathematics through a coherent progression, and provides educators the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of mathematics, student thinking, and their own teaching practice. For some classrooms, this was year four of implementa- tion, and for others, this was year one. Our Elementary STEAM coaches were able to provide job-embedded professional learning for teachers by focusing most of their coaching cycles this year on IM implementation.
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