Department Meeting - 7:40 am

We met as a department this morning in Mr. Hughes' room. Issues discussed:

* Blogger - Check the site every couple of days. It'll only take five minutes. We're going to post tons of stuff on here. I'm going to use this as my main way of disseminating department information. If you accept my invitation to join, you can post directly to the site as well. This could be a great tool for discussion. Hopefully, it will help increase dialogue and remove isolation.

* AP Vertical Planning teams - Ms. Doerfel, Mrs. Chambers, Ms. Albano, Mrs. Boquard, and myself have signed on to use the College Board's AP Vertical Planning Guide to help us backmap the curriculum. There are a lot of acronym type analysis methods and rhetorical strategies in that guide that could be implemented across grade levels. If we as a department could start to use the same language when discussing literary analysis, and the same language when discussing composition, I think we could make serious gains with student understanding (and, by extension, test scores). Likewise if we all use similar language in discussing composition and rhetoric. Common language, common goals...giddeyup.

* Barack Obama "What if McKinley Read the Same Book" & Schoolwide Memoir contest - Ms. Albano shared that Gear Up is ordering the Obama books today, so we should have 150 soon. We're going to start the memoir contest now, and this will lead up to the book project. We're creating a blog for the memoir & book thingy...we'll post the address ASAP.

* Regents Practice Task 2 - Back in September, we raised the possibility of doing a sample task 2 essay with all the juniors. The English department would then grade the papers based on the Regents rubric, fill out a rubric, and then give feedback. We could then discuss patterns that we noticed and areas that need strengthening. We're going forward with it. Details to come.

* Fluency - I need fluency stats as soon as possible. I need them by my February lead teacher meeting. I need post test and pre test results (or vice versa). Per Anne, make sure you are addressing fluency.

That's about it. If I remember anything else, I'll post it.