November Board of Ed: Kaleidoscope collective

Komal Bhasin and Tera Carr presenting on Kaleidoscope Collective
Bhasin tells a story of her own experience in third grade in not understanding what skipping was and her teacher teaching her how to skip
"my teacher gave me a school assignment and I was so motivated to complete it...to try to acquire mastery"
"what if kids in the Commonwealth were that excited not just about PE but about math?"
thus the reason for the Kaleidoscope
1 1/2 year fellowship for schools and districts
"looking to find where it is working in diverse setting"
"work with them to leverage the power of the department" to overcome obstacles
professional development days "to create deeper learning experiences for all students"
"this is fundamentally a ground-up approach"
by definition it is not, as it is a DESE program
"to study what is working in the field and make that part of our model"
standards taught in a way that "build 21st century skills" in aligned curriculum
authentic experiences
"we need to pair clarity about what a task is" with trainings
"capture best practices"
"what's the magic happening in room 202 and how do we capture it"
"as an agency, we'll work with passion and precision"
build tools and build trainings so teachers have access to this
"to create equitable outcomes for all learners"
"we're thinking long term about a light touch involvement" on those outside the Collective "and a social media strategy"
making recommendation to the Commissioner about which districts next week
districts in January
convenenings in March
"taking deeper learning from a buzzword to reality"

West: do you have a sense of what flexibilities districts will want?
Bhasin: time, scheduling
around assessment
Hills: say something about the range of districts
Bhasin: rural and suburban, higher and lower performing end
have far more applications than we can take
Rouhanifard: how do you think about the small fraction of districts that are already using quality curriculum?
and what about resources?
Carr: sometimes quality is the "extra" activities
or too sparse or too far between or "not aligned to power standards"
Bhasin: how do we train teachers to use them well?
"how do schools get to the place where we can implement this and how do we scale to get other schools there quickly?"
Fernández: your story got me thinking of the number of students we have across the Commonwealth
"that are you" role of diverse teaching and how that comes to this?
Bhasin: having a diverse teaching corps is crucial
"want to spotlight and highlight the work of our rockstar educators and we know that includes many teachers of color"