Colorado Elementary Science

Funding News: The Colorado Department of Education will provide partial funding for the 2009 FEATS project through State Title II monies. The caveat is that the project needs to be self-sustaining by next year and FR BOCES needs to replicating the project outside the metro Denver area.
Two Objectives for 2009 as specified in the Request for Grant Funding:
1. Facilitate a process through which elementary schools that are currently implementing FEATS may share practices and products for the purpose of extending and refining learning and thus implementation.
2. Conduct a FEATS Summer Leadership Academy 2009 for the purpose of expanding the implementation of the model or approach to instruction to additional schools (beyond those that began implementation during the 2007 – 2008 and the 2008 – 2009 school years.)
Going Deeper in Facilitating Elementary Achievement through Science –
1. The Team determined that a half-day event be held in April 2009 (date to be determined) (possibly 16^th or 23^rd) to partially address objective above. Please see attached DRAFT agenda for that day. Please provide feedback on how accurately this document represents the team member recommendations. Feedback should be sent to csauer4510@msn.com.
2. The audience members for this event are principals and teachers who are in their first year of implementing the F.E.A.T.S. model.
3. As soon as the agenda is approved by the Design Team (December 11), the information will be ready to provide to pilot school principals and teachers.
FEATS Summer Leadership Academy 2009
1. The Team determined that we would offer a two-day summer academy structured similarly to the ones held in 2007 and 2008.
2. The audience will be composed of NEW SCHOOL TEAMS. Ideally, we will have ten schools from ten districts with ten participants from each of the new schools. The principal of each new school MUST attend both days of the training.
3. We want to include more life science examples of FEATS lessons in addition to the physical science lessons.
4. The current eight districts that have “pilot” elementary school teams participating will have the first opportunity to send a team from a new elementary school in each district. The Metro FR BOCES Board will have the second opportunity to send a new team of teachers to this event. Other districts will be informed of the opportunity through the Colorado BOCES Association and the Regional Managers. The cost for the pilot school team members is $50 per person. The pilot schools will be registered through the Design Team representatives and/or principals of schools.
5. An additional 100 participants may register on a fee-for-service basis as teams or as individuals. Those slots will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis. This will be an online registration through the FR BOCES website.
6. Registration will be offered for the Summer Academy 2009 after March 30^th. Pilot school teams must register prior to April 15^th. At that time, NEW school teams on a waiting list may register.
7. Dr. Michael Klentschy is holding the dates for this event. He will now be contracted.
8. The local teacher-trainers (identified last summer) will conduct the break-out sessions. We will attempt to have six break-out sessions to keep the number in the break-outs to approximately 35 and to allow some adaptations in instruction for primary teacher participants.
9. Specific planning for this event will begin about March 1, 2009.
FEATS Website Development
1. Each Design Team member is asked to send artifacts (student work, classroom video segments, rubrics for grade-level notebook entries, website resources for links) to Ryann Patrick-Stuart (email above).
2. Rob Beam will build at the “claims and evidence” section of the website first. If you have helpful video segments, rubrics, or student work to share for this element of the instructional model, please send them to Rob Beam. (email above)
3. Jeremy LaCrosse is working on connections between the FOSS lessons and the FEATS model and will begin to link those to the website.
4. The Design Team is welcome to become more involved as administrators of the site.
Design Team as a Professional Learning Community – Promote Sustainability
1. The Design Team wants to expand the planning meetings to include time and structure for their own learning about the FEATS model. Coaches, principals and Design Team members are invited to attend these meetings.
2. The first meeting will be held at Central Elementary in Adams 14^th on December 11 (12 – 3:30 PM). Hollene Davis will arrange a classroom walk-through opportunity followed by a debrief after each visit. The last hour will be used for event design facilitated by Charl Lee Sauer. We will need to have you RSVP so that we can arrange the walk-through schedule. We will also share copies of our engaging scenarios and/or rubrics/criteria/protocols for creating the scenarios. Please bring 12 – 15 copies of your engaging scenarios to this meeting.
3. The leadership for the PLC structure will be shared among the Design Team members.
4. Our intention is to develop a schedule for January, February, and March at the next meeting.

NEXT MEETING: December 11 (Thursday) at Central Elementary in Adams 14 (12 – 3:30 PM) More location information to follow. If you have questions about this meeting, please contact Hollene Davis (phone above).

feats-design-team-november-17notes
feats-agenda-november-17

FEATS meeting

robertbeam — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:06:28 +0000

Our FEATS web design group met in person for the first time this past Friday. We had a very productive meeting where some key decisions were made about the design, purpose, timeline and content for the site. Jeremy, Ryann, Charl Lee and I engaged in dynamic and thoughtful conversation that generated some fantastic next steps for our work. Below is a list of some of the key outcomes.

Pages will include—HOME/GETTING STARTED-PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT-BLOG/NEWS-LINKS- PRINT RESOURCES-SUBMIT YOUR WORK
The Getting Started page will include the seven components and each of those will have five “resource” categories
The site should be as interactive as possible
A request for funding for storage and discussion forums should be submitted
A survey Monkey survey will be designed in preparation for the summer session based on Ryann’s notes
Klentschy’s new book will be a key resource
Key link http://sciencenotebooks.org
Professional Development opportunities will be posted and updated
Share at summer session

Over the next week or so I hope to construct at least one complete “section” of the site and lay out the general framework we intend to use.

As you see the site begin to take shape please offer feedback to assist me in creating a site that is most likely to meet the needs of our teachers.

I was also able to begin a conversation with Katie Eck at PBSteacherline about connecting to the courses offered through the PBS education department.

Finally, our communication will continue through posts and comments to the site.

Planning the meeting 05-16-08

robertbeam — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:28:21 +0000

Hey team,

I really appreciate all the great feedback we have gotten so far. You are all contributing really useful ideas. Please try to document all of this great thinking as you have epiphany moments over the next week and a half. Drop by the this blog and add your thinking as a comment. I am going to paste some of the emails messages I have received as well to keep the info in one place so I apologize if I duplicate information. I will hopefully send an agenda out to you via the blog and/or email early next week before the meeting. If you have items you’d like included please send them to me when you have a chance.

Welcome FEATS team members

robertbeam — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:36:30 +0000

This is the first post on the new site. Please let me know that you’ve made it here. Leave a comment. Over the time between now and when we meet pleas feel free to comment on what you’d like to see included both from a structural sense and specific content items. Additionally, play around and try to add features and pages to practice. If you’d like access as a contributor/administrator let me know and we’ll work it out. You’ll also see a number of categories attached to this post. Please begin to think about what “categories” we might want to use to organize our work.

Hello world!

robertbeam — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:25:10 +0000

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