TEAM+SUCCESS

Team Success will be working collaboratively to ensure that all our common students achieve success. Members: Paul Conlon, Perla Bautista, Daniel Emmanuel Date: Sept. 22, 2011 Agenda: 1. Establishing Norms Discussion Notes: We set up our wiki page. We discussed one norm - Decision Making Process and talked about target students in 852.

Action Plan: Out team will get the ELA and NYSESLAT scores of these students from ARIS. Deadline: First week of October, 2011

2. Establish Routines and Foundations for the year Discussion Notes: We will work collaboratively with each other in terms of teaching strategies and techniques so we could target common problem areas.

Action Plan: Share lessons on what worked and did not work. Deadline: On-going

Date: Oct. 6, 2011 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We talked about the 20 students we plan to target. We discussed our common class ( 852) in depth.

Date: Oct. 13, 2011 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We continued our discussion of which students to target. We agreed and selected the 10 students from our common class. We each selected an additional 3 - 4 students from our individual classes with similar needs. We used ARIS in our selection.

Date: Oct. 20, 2011 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We entered our 20 students onto the spreadsheet

Date: October 27, 2011 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We discussed report card grades for common students. We looked for patterns and made note of students doing poorly in all three classes. We also looked for students who were doing well only in one class, but poor in another.

Date: December 8, 2011 Room 106 Present: P.Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

Going over our 9 common students we decided to remove 2 students named Aqsa J. and Parth P. We replaced them with Mohsin A. and Randy R. We felt that they should be included in our targeted students because they struggle in ELA and Science. Aqsa and Parth on the other hand can perform more independently. With the 2 students we added, our strategy would be to provide a list of vocabulary words that the students will encounter in future lessons. It is our hope that with the vocabulary words given ahead would help them in comprehending the lesson.

Date: December 15, 2011 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We feel that 3 of our 9 common students do not perform the way they can because of their behavior and lack of focus. We feel that addressing these students' behavioral problems will help them in our subject areas. One strategy we discussed in addressing students' behavior is the location of students' seats. We will create a seating plan that may help the students' behavior.

Date: December 22, 2011 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel. P.Bautista

We discussed strategies being used in class. Teenbiz has a variety of ways to teach vocabulary. Mr. Emmanuel used prefixes and suffixes, Mr. Conlon used context clues, and Ms. Bautista did the SEED. These vocabulary strategies help our ELLS. In the coming weeks we will continue to use different methods of teaching vocabulary.

Date: January 5, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Colon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

This week we are focusing on writing exercises. In ELA they are doing response to literature, while in ESL, persuasive writing. In Science, they are explaining their research, as well as how they came up with their predictions and inferences which is similar to the skills they are working on in ELA during their response to literature unit.

Date: January 12, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We discussed the sheet that was distributed on Analysis of Student Work. Mr. Conlon will bring 6 - 8 student samples of work next meeting for us to begin the 5 step process.

Date: January 19, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

Mr. Conlon brought 6 student work samples for the team to analyze. The task was to write a 4 paragraph comparative essay based on 2 texts. The standards were RL.8.1, RL8,2 and W.8.9. He brought a Literary Essay Rubric for reference. We each took one of the 6 student samples and gave it a score on the scale of 1 through 4. Based on what we looked at so far each student scored a 2. Next week we will look for common mistakes which we can use as reference for our instruction.

Date: January 26, 2012 Room 106: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We reviewed the steps we did last week and we came up with the common mistakes the students ( Mohsin, Ever, Murad, Paula) made that we will use as reference for our instruction. They are: use of possessives, paragraphing, and run-on sentences. They were not able to interpret and analyze evidence from the text. Our next step is to focus on paragraphing and mechanics in ELA, ESL and Science. Because we are trying to create rigorous tasks, we will also focus on helping improve students' ability to analyze grade level texts.

Date: February 2, 2012 Room 109 Present: D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista Mr. Conlon was attending a Tenure Meeting with Mr. Faraci

This week we were working on paragraphing. Mr. Emmanuel was working on persuasive essay focusing on the steps of the writing process. The students in Ms. Bautista's class were rewriting and editing their response to literature following Writing Matters. Next week, Mr. Emmanuel will begin to revise the students' writings and Ms. Bautista will introduce writing editorials. We will continue to target the common mistakes students have made on their writings based on last week's team assessment meeting.

Date: February 9, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We compared the Marking Period 2 grades of our target students. Then we compared and contrasted the MP1 and MP2 to see if there was progress.

Date: Feb. 16, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, P. Bautista Absent: D. Emmanuel

Based on the common mistakes we found from the students work we decide to used the following strategies: 1. continue differentiating 2. after our mini-lesson, once the entire class is engaged in independent and group work, we will conference with our target students to reteach 3. assign work out of the coach books, focus books, etc. that will reinforce our lessons.

Date: March 1, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, P. Bautista, D. Emmanuel

After doing all the above and talking to their parents, we can say two of our target students (Murad and Mohsin) have improved both academically and behaviorally. This was a big step in improving their scores.

Date: March 8, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We looked at 852's Science test and focused on the questions that required sentence answers. In particular we looked at the question that dealt with inferencing. Inferencing is one of the areas we are looking at as a team. We focused on our 4 target students and found out that we need to continue working on inferencing with 2 of our 4 students.

Date: March 15, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel. P. Bautista was absent

We discussed our common class 852, and thought about engaging and meaningful ways of incorporating test prep into our teaching. We want to make sure our focus is on all three days of the exam. We will focus in particular on day two (listening section) as many of the students have trouble writing the extended response based on their notes.

Date: March 22, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We were factoring the ELA Mock Exam and we realized that the students were struggling with the reading passages because they had difficulty answering the questions and even understanding the answers due to their lack of vocabulary. While trying to understand the questions and find the correct answer, they cannot rely as much on context clues. Therefore over the next 2 weeks we will continue to re-emphasize root words, prefixes, and suffixes.

Date: April26, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We discussed about the Speaking part of the NYSESLAT which assessed the language proficiency of our ELLs. Some of our target students had substantial improvement. We will continue to engage them in more vocabulary words to increase their speaking proficiency. We will continue to incorporate nonfiction articles into our instruction. We will do this to help our ELLs improve their level.

Date: May 10, 2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, P. Bautista, D. Emmanuel

We talked about what to prepare for the Quality Review: updating our classrooms, adding visuals to the word wall, and work displayed must have feedback with next steps. We brainstormed specific ways on how we differentiate rigorous lessons.

Date: May 24, 21012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We discussed about our students who have improved because of our team collaboration. To ensure that the next 5 weeks will be beneficial to our target students, we will continue to create activiites that will help them improve their reading and writing skills.

Date: June 14.2012 Room 106 Present: P. Conlon, D. Emmanuel, P. Bautista

We went over the end of the year assessment of the target students. The things we looked for were improvements in the following areas: supporting ideas, sequence of events, transitions and paragraphing, descriptive language, word choice, sentences and voice. Based on the results the greatest gains were organizations and conventions.