Math+Department

DEPARTMENT MEETINGS ESSENTIAL DISCUSSION/QUESTIONS There are 5 essential supports for reform to organize and improve schools, leadership, parent communities, professional capacity; student centered learning climate, and instructional climate. As a department team begin to discuss and list your ideas and strategies to improve in these areas and to strengthen our instructional core (culture, structure, systems, resources, stakeholders) LEADERSHIP: (i.e. vision, distributive leadership) PARENT COMMUNITIES: (i.e. family engagement/supports learning) PROFESSIONAL CAPACITY: (i.e. right people on the right bus/skills in the right seat) STUDENT CENTER ACTIVITIES:(i.e. give and take in the classroom, relationships) INSTRUCTIONAL CLIMATE: (i.e. teacher support, mentors, PD, active demand teaching/culture of accountability, relationships)
 * Leadership amongst staff can be improved through collaborative discussion in departmental meetings, e-mail, wikispaces. Modeling for students to reflect leadership qualities.
 * Leadership amongst students can be improved through cooperative activities, assignments, and projects.
 * Open up lines of communication with parents through phone calls, emails and open houses that display students’ projects.
 * Keep parents informed of their students’ progress, including improvements and issues, to establish a relationship between the teacher, parents and the students.
 * Create a survey and distribute it to the staff in order to find out their strengths. Using the results, committees can be formed based on individual traits or skills (i.e. data driven committee formations).
 * Provide students opportunities to contribute their input on aspects of the class, including the rules, curriculum, and differentiated assignments.
 * Base more class work on small group or pair share.
 * Allow students to discover concepts and build definitions on their own through investigation.


 * Professional development where departments can prepare talks on how to create cross-curricular activities or lessons.
 * Teacher-to-teacher observations and feedback can be used to strengthen instruction.
 * Prepare off-site instruction through educational field trips to help develop student-teacher relationships.