Patrick C. Daly, Superintendent

The North Reading Public Schools are always looking to prepare our students for the future.  A large part of this transition includes a coordinated effort to understand digital learning and to look at the concept from many angles. The Alliance for Excellent Education, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education, have formed the Future Ready Schools program and offered summits across the country to work with school districts. Last year, Dr. Daniel Downs, Director of Digital Learning, and I brought the Superintendent the information about the Future Ready Schools program and as a team we decided to take the pledge.  This lead to a team of educators from North Reading attending the Future Ready Summit in late 2016 and to our administrative team exploring the Future Ready tools in order to better prepare our schools for what lies ahead. In taking the pledge, the District agreed to focus on the following areas: Foster a culture of collaborative leadership...

Next Generation MCAS In recent weeks the official MCAS results have been released for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the North Reading Public Schools have received their scores for the Next Generation MCAS and shared this information with individual parents and students.  As a District we have also presented our analysis to the school committee on November 13, 2017 and discussed this topic (among others) on the latest edition of Inside NRPS on local access.  The link to this video is available on our website under News and Announcements. While we have become accustomed to receiving standardized test scores over the past eighteen years there are some differences this year that are important to note.  For the first time we are seeing the results, in grades 3-8, for the next-generation MCAS.  This is a different and more rigorous MCAS assessment than we have seen in the past and one that is fully-aligned to our Massachusetts curriculum standards. The De...

Curriculum Update The 2017-18 school year will bring many updates and improvements to our current curriculum frameworks.  In early August I was able to attend, along with three North Reading teachers, a full-day workshop on the changes that are coming to our frameworks in Massachusetts.  At that workshopg several documents were shared that are posted here: http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/ and I’ve included some of the highlights below. English Language Arts and Literacy (ELA) The new 2017 frameworks include revisions that were gathered from a multi-year process that included feedback from teachers and other educators.  These changes incorporate some of the standards that were “Massachusetts only” standards that exceeded the Common Core standards, further improving upon our frameworks.  Below is a selection of the highlights from the document. ELA/Literacy Anchor Standards ·          Reading Standard MA....

The concept of personalized learning is not new but it is emerging as a trend in education due to several factors.  The students we meet in today’s classrooms need to be engaged and the learning needs to be relevant in order for them to transfer the knowledge beyond the classroom and to apply it to the real world situations that await them in the future.  The industrial model of education, where one-size-fits-all, is no longer appropriate for today’s learner.  With increased access to technology students can learn in self-paced, personalized spaces and at times that are conducive to the most productive learning.    For several years the North Reading Public Schools have been exploring the concept of 1:1 devices for our students.  Our first task involved providing a digital learning team to support our educators in answering this essential question: “What are the opportunities for improving instruction that are made possible through the 1:1 initiative f...

One of the proudest achievements for our district this year is our status as a catalyst district in the Massachusetts Personalized Learning Edtech (MAPLE) Consortium.  According to the MAPLE website, “MAPLE is a public-private partnership between the LearnLaunch Institute and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to catalyze personalized learning in the Commonwealth with the purpose of better preparing students for their future” whose vision is “to catalyze personalized learning enabled by technology in K-12 public education.” The concept of personalized learning is not new but it is emerging as a trend in education due to several factors.  The students we meet in today’s classrooms need to be engaged and the learning needs to be relevant in order for them to transfer the knowledge beyond the classroom and to apply it to the real world situations that await them in the future.  The industrial model of education, where one-size-fits-all, i...