“We truly are a school on the move,” said Minor, who is in the midst of her first year as principal at Our Lady’s on Trapelo Road. “I have an awful lot of experience in curriculum and analysis, and when I first came to Our Lady’s I saw the need to take the school and move it forward.”

  Following her initial assessment of Our Lady’s, Minor has implemented new initiatives she believes will help the school reach certain standards and goals. Instructional leadership teams have been formed with a focus on using assessment as a tool to help form classroom instruction, according to Minor.

  “For instruction to go well, the entire faculty has to buy into it 100 percent, and they won’t do that unless they’re allowed to provide input,” she said. “There’s a wealth of knowledge in the school, and I want to tap into it to get the faculty involved in the process of running the school.”

 Minor said teachers were introduced to a rubric that helped them evaluate assessment information for their classroom, which they gathered in math, reading and writing.

“The rubric takes the subjectivity out of it, and creates uniformity to ensure we’re all measuring apples with apples,” she said.

Once teachers completed their own evaluations, Minor said teams of faculty members in other grade levels then perform their own using the same rubric.

  “The teams were so surprised to find that by using the rubric and having conversations with each other, the assessments came out the same in almost every instance,” she said. “The teachers learned a lot, and never realized how valuable something like this could be.”

  Minor said this also allows the faculty to better understand the needs of students, which is helpful in terms of another initiative, the creation of student support teams. Here, Minor said faculty representatives from each grade level look at everything from classroom work and test results to a student’s emotional needs, and as a team create individual plans for each child.

  If a student is identified as working above their grade level, that student’s potential will no longer be inhibited, according to Minor. For example, she said an Our Lady’s second-grader was recently moved to a fourth-grade math class, and Minor said the student is performing extremely well there. She said if students are at risk and not meeting expectations, resources within Our Lady’s are utilized to determine why and address it.

  “We’re looking at different strategies and it’s all on a trial basis,” Minor said. “Nothing is carved in stone.” A collaborative coaching and learning model will also be implemented at Our Lady’s, which Minor said will support faculty by providing hands-on professional development opportunities. The initiative is made up of an inquiry process where faculty meet to discuss a particular teaching strategy, and then teachers observe the actual strategy as its being implemented in a lab-site classroom at Our Lady’s.

  The school is also looking to create a pre-kindergarten classroom next year for 4-year-olds, which Minor said would have a full curriculum.

“It’s in the exploratory stage right now, but we think it will provide parents with a nice continuum all the way through eighth grade,” she said.

Our Lady’s is hosting an open house Sunday, Nov. 5, noon to 2 p.m. at the school, 880 Trapelo Road. For more information, visit www.ourladyschool.org.

Christopher Rocchio can be reached at 781-398-8009 or crocchio@cnc.com.