District Prepares for Tri-State Visit

Teachers have produced some promising innovations across all grades in connection with our critical and creative thinking initiative, including the following examples:

• Elementary teachers have visited each others' classrooms, studying the extent to which students and teachers ask high level questions in the classroom. The Board of Education will hear a progress report in January.
• Geometry students are demonstrating flexible thinking by using multiple methods to verify the Pythagorean theorem.
• Students are researching  geological formations and producing models, maps, and descriptions that apply their knowledge to a hypothetical situation.
• Students are creating visual essays that connect the work of Picasso to two works from different time periods and cultures. 
• Students study the cultural phenomenon of violence as entertainment in ancient Rome through the translation of Latin quotations and the study or related articles. 

These and many other student projects are designed to strengthen student's capacity for higher level thinking.  How do we know if we are accomplishing our goal? To help us answer this question we have planned a three-day visit/consultancy from the Tri-State Commission, scheduled for May 1-3, 2013.

In the past, our accreditation visits from the Tri-State Consortium have focused on a single K-12 discipline - mathematics in 2005 and science in 2009.  This year we are taking a different approach: we are asking the visiting team of educators to assess our critical and creative thinking initiative. Rather than gathering artifacts related to a single subject, we will be assessing our improvement process and the extent to which our professional development work uses the evaluation of student work to inform and improve curriculum design, teaching strategies, and student engagement.  Perhaps most important, all faculty members will play an active role in the visit, not only those who teach a particular subject.

This new approach is an outgrowth of discussions by a working group of the Consortium, the 21st Century Task Force. Other districts using the model include Scarsdale, Weston (CT), Chappaqua, and North Salem. Founded in 1992, the Tri-State Consortium is a group of 43 school districts in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut committed to enhancing student performance. Bronxville was a founding member. 

The visiting team will explore our guiding questions by looking at action research studying the questions students and teachers ask (Elementary School), examples of assured experiences and student work (6-12), observing teacher teams in action, interviewing students and teachers, and visiting classrooms. The three-day visit culminates in a feedback session for the staff, in which the visiting committee asks questions and offers insights and preliminary conclusions about what they have seen. The findings help shape future professional development plans.