The GSP Monthly Dispatch – June 2021

Welcome to the archive of The GSP Monthly Dispatch, our monthly roundup of upcoming events as well as fresh and insightful writing from our school coaches. Did you know you can get the Dispatch delivered to your inbox every month for free? All you need to do is sign up.

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June 2021

Welcome to the latest issue of the GSP Monthly Dispatch. This month, we bring you:

  • Four exciting virtual summer institutes for educators (or teams of educators!)
  • Insightful blogs on taking your school’s equity pulse, summative vs. formative assessments, and how schools create a learning culture through grading and reporting
  • Our latest toolkit on grading and reporting for educational equity
  • The next installment of our monthly Data Dialogue
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Visit our event calendar for a full list of upcoming events.

Professional learning groups (PLGs) provide dedicated and supported time to evaluate student work, tune assessments and plans, and engage in constructive dialogue with colleagues. Developing PLGs that nurture a community devoted to continuous improvement and educational equity requires a shared vision, key skills, and thoughtful implementation.

This three-day virtual institute introduces participants to strategies and considerations, provides opportunities for active engagement and practice, and offers a framework for the effective implementation of PLGs in any context. In the true spirit of PLGs, we encourage participants to register as teams with varied roles, including administrators, in order to effectively process and apply the learning to your school community.

Date: July 13-15, 2021
Time: 9:00 AM-1:00 PM ET
Where: Virtual, via Zoom
Cost: $425/person

Register

JUNE 29-30

Designing Instruction to Foster Student Engagement

JULY 20-22

Designing a Better Advisory System: Building Relationships Toward a More Equitable Education System

AUGUST 3-5

Introduction to Creating and Facilitating Professional Learning Groups

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It’s Time to Check Your Equity Pulse

By Christina Horner

“Educational equity should be at the heart of what all schools say and do. If your school is truly committed to educational equity, it will be evident in what you see, hear, and feel in every aspect of school life.”

Grading & Reporting for Educational Equity: How Schools Create a Learning Culture

By Kate Gardoqui

“I’ve seen schools spend tremendous energy making grading changes that don’t seem to make anything work better for students; I’ve also seen schools transform their culture through shifts in how they approach grading.”

Summative vs. Formative: From Binary Choice to Continuum

By Don Weafer

“If there is one thing we should know from our experiments in remote learning, it’s that we don’t need schools to sort kids: their environments do that already.”

Grading & Reporting for Educational Equity: A Toolkit

Grading and reporting systems must, above all, communicate clear information about the skills a student has mastered or the areas where they need more support or practice. When schools use grades to reward or punish students, or to sort students into levels, imbalances in power and privilege will be magnified and the purposes of grading and reporting systems will not be achieved.

This guide is intended to highlight the central practices that schools can use to ensure that their grading and reporting systems help build a nurturing, equitable, creative, and dynamic culture of learning.

Download Tools
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Over the last decade, New England has seen some noteworthy gains in high school and post-secondary outcomes. High school graduation rates, for example, across the region have been continuously trending up, and an increasing number of students have enrolled in college. When we disaggregate the data, however, we see that outcomes vary considerably by race/ethnicity subgroups. These data raise challenging questions about the educational systems and supports that we are creating and providing to students throughout New England, especially students of color.

These data are part of the Common Data Project 2020 Annual Report.

Download Report

Thanks for reading! See you next month.

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