FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)
File Name: Voices E28 Matt McKinley.mp3
File Length: 00:09:16
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Introduction: Welcome to Voices, a podcast brought to you by the Seneca Valley School District.
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Jeff Krakoff: Hi, this is Jeff Krakoff. Today I'm with Dr. Matt McKinley, assistant superintendent of secondary instruction at Seneca Valley. Matt, thanks for joining us today.
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Matt McKinley: It's my pleasure.
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Jeff Krakoff: So what let me just ask a big, broad question is we're still in the COVID-19 pandemic and people are starting to look forward to the next year for grades 7- 12, which is secondary. What's what's coming around the pike for folks?
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Matt McKinley: Well, you know, I'm glad you brought that up. It's we don't know what the future holds. And so we're trying to plan for everything. And and we we are still moving forward with a lot of the projects that we had. So we do have some new courses that we're going to highlight. We have some new business courses that we're excited about offering. One specifically is personal finance II. And of course, that will be a continuation of personal finance I. Many of the topics that we discussed there and we are we're going to go deeper into credit and borrowing and investing in things, topics like that.
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Matt McKinley: So we're excited to offer that course. And it's always been my opinion that students and adults could all use more information in the area of personal finance. So we're excited to offer that. In addition, we're we're going to be offering a new course. Back in August, we had a group of students come to present, alumni, and they were asking for us to start an African-American history course, and they want us to mandate it for every student to take.
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Matt McKinley: So we've had much discussion back and forth. They've been great to work with. I brought it to in October, brought it to our social studies department and asked for somebody if they were willing to step forward and be a champion to create this course. Write this course and hopefully teach this course. And I did about two minutes after the curriculum meeting ended, I had somebody email me from that meeting and say, yeah, I'd be very happy to to dive into this. So we are offering of course, it's going to be called diverse voices in US history.
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Matt McKinley: Right now, it's an elective. It will be an elective for next year. It'll be a semester course. And we're looking at just seeing what the response is going to be from the students as they as they sign up for it. We're going to be looking at at four different groups of with backgrounds, with American Indian, with African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Chicano or Mexican Americans, and spending time on each of those groups and really having hopefully the students to learn more about who they are, how they maintain their own cultural identity, the triumphs and struggles that each group may have been going through, contributions to American life will be another theme.
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Matt McKinley: And then one thing we want to try and do throughout the course is tie in contemporary issues. That's that's just been huge. And hopefully we're doing that in a lot of our social studies classes. But this course will really lend itself for that. So so we're real excited about offering that for our students for next year.
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Jeff Krakoff: Will that be available for what grades?
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Matt McKinley: That will be available for grades 11 and 12. We're going to start there and again, just see how the sign ups go and the volume and move from there then.
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Jeff Krakoff: OK, so do you see things changing with a course offering? Just again, getting back to the world we live in today with the mix of remote and class learning, the idea of synchronous versus asynchronous.
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Matt McKinley: Yeah, we've learned a lot over over the course of months and teachers have come so far with their efforts in technology and in virtual learning. And we have something we call live streaming, and that's where teachers have students in front of them, hopefully in our cohort model that we're in now and then students online and virtually attending the class. And, you know, it's been difficult for teachers to make that adjustment, but I think we've made great gains in that.
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Matt McKinley: So as we look ahead toward next year, we want to take the things that we've gained and hopefully be able to offer a new model for our students in synchronous learning. And what we're going to do right now, we have a very robust Seneca Valley Academy of Choice. That's our cyber program. But it's completely asynchronous at this time. What we'd like to do is offer another branch of that which would be synchronous. And we're going to start small with and I can't even tell you right now how many classes, but we're we're going to start small and let it grow organically in year to year as that happens.
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Matt McKinley: So we're really excited about that. In those synchronous courses we're going to have the teacher will just have students online virtually. They won't have any students in front of them. We found that having that dual platform, so to speak, has been difficult for teachers to to manage kids in front of them and kids on the screen. And so we want to just give them that one platform, the virtual platform, and learn and grow from that. So that's in the plans as well.
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Jeff Krakoff: OK, and if that's a discipline area, it lends itself to remote online, that that would be it. So let's talk about timing. When will registration take place for secondary students?
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Matt McKinley: So right now, our teachers are in the process of making recommendations throughout the month of February and then beginning in March, specifically March 4-12, we're going to be opening up online the registration tool to our parents and students and allowing them to make the choices for the next year. So it's coming up rather quickly.
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Jeff Krakoff: OK, so I'm a parent. I'm a student. I want to see what the offerings are. I understand there are some some changes that have been made to the program of studies.
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Jeff Krakoff: That's on the website. Let's talk about what those are.
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Matt McKinley: Sure. Yeah, we have an amazing I.T. department, and I went to them with a vision maybe eight years ago to create a program of studies online. And they made it very intuitive. And that the problem, as I see it, is we just have so much content, so many courses. It just became too much to navigate. And so I went back to them a few months ago and said, is there any way we could streamline this and just make it more user friendly for the parents, for the students, even for myself? And so we've offered; they created some filters in there. So it has a much neater, streamlined look? I think it's very intuitive that parents and students can use it.
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Matt McKinley: We have a lot of additional information, for instance, academically challenging courses. We have a list of that. We also have sequences for math and social studies, computer science and different groups. And so those are on the side, as they always were. But it's kind of hidden until you hit the plus sign and then they all flow from there. So, again, it's a it's a much more streamlined look. I'm very pleased and appreciative of the work our I.T. department did on it. And I'm interested in getting feedback once parents and students try to use it and hopefully they'll find it much better and easier to use.
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Jeff Krakoff: All right. Well, thank you so much. Lots of good info. Again, if I'm a students or a parent getting ready to take a look at the class offerings and register in March. What are some of the main takeaways that they need to think about?
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Matt McKinley: Well, we're always looking for, you know, what's their area of interest in? And we've done through our school counselors on different interest surveys and things like that. But what are they really interested in? What and what type of learning will they really be engaged? And that's that would be my recommendation. Look look towards that. Of course, there are certain mandated required courses that they have to take, but even through those which ones really appeal to them, then the second thing I'd say is if they have questions, ask an adult, ask their teacher, go to the school counselor.
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Matt McKinley: They have all the information, their administrators can help. And again, for parents to call in or email us, and we're more than happy to help. So it's it's it's a great process. It's an important process. But we want people our biggest thing that I always say is let's get the students appropriately placed in those courses and then we can they'll be able to move ahead with their learning.
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Jeff Krakoff: All right. Well, again, that's Dr. Matt McKinley. Thanks so much for joining us today. You have a great rest of your day,
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Matt McKinley: Jeff. Thank you very much. You also
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Jeff Krakoff: Take care.