You hit what you aim for

It's August.  Schools are opening or getting ready to open.  Bulletin boards are decorated, gym floors are refinished, fall sports are practicing, and principals and teachers are preparing for opening day.  Students and their parents are shopping for new shoes and everyone is counting the days until summer ends and school begins.  Hope, excitement and nervous anticipation are in the air.

Principals are meeting with their custodians to ensure every classroom is ready, and someone is counting desks in every classroom to ensure each student has a seat or a desk.

Principals are preparing their opening staff meeting agendas and remarks, and teachers are looking at their class rosters and preparing materials.

As a former high school principal, I always loved the opening of school.  Hope, joy and enthusiasm mixes with nervous expectations.  Every one has a fresh start.

With every thing else to do, have you taken time to set your data goals for the year?

Remember, we usually hit what we aim for, so aim high.

Graphic courtesy freedigitalphotos.com

Taking time to set very specific data goals and communicating those with your staff, students and parents will unite every one in the shared vision of the school, helping improve student learning.

Our administrative team took time each summer to analyze our various data sources, including Ohio graduation test results, ACT, SAT, AP and IB data as well as discipline and attendance data.

We chose one to three areas that required our best work for the upcoming year and communicated those with our staff.  As a professional learning community, each of our same-subject teams also set specific learning goals based on the previous year's data, and aligned it with our building goals.  For example, teams in a graduation testing area set a SMART goal (Strategic, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, and Time-bound) for performance related to student achievement on that testing area and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate course teams aligned to student achievement in that specific subject.

All SMART goals relate specifically to improving student learning and are monitored then throughout the school year by teachers and the administrative team.

Teams met in a one-hour delayed start each Wednesday as well as in time provided in the master schedule.  Teams viewed results on an ongoing basis and made instructional, intervention and differentiation decisions regularly to monitor progress on the goals.

This goal-setting process also included communication to parents as well as students also engaging in monitoring their own learning progress, increasing student choice and voice.

We were a school focused on learning rather than on teaching, and that made the difference in our culture and academic success, resulting over time in being named a National Blue Ribbon School and National Model PLC at Work School.

Want to have a great start to the school year?  Be sure and set clear and specific learning goals in order to guide your work for the year.

If you and your staff don't know where you are going, how will you get there?

Graphic courtesy of freedigitalphotos.com

Build your own great pyramid

Do you have a great pyramid at your school?

Photo by Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

No-- not a great pyramid of Egypt.

The pyramid that will truly enhance and ensure student learning at your school-- a pyramid of intervention.

In schools that truly focus on learning, creating a pyramid takes a good school to great.

Many good schools today are employing educational research of having teachers work in collaborative teams to focus on one or more essential questions of Professional Learning Community work, whether they are aware of it or not.

The four essential questions, as identified by DuFour, DuFour and Eaker, focus on teachers working in collaborative teams to identify clearly what it is we want students to learn, how we know they are learning it, how we respond when they do not learn it, and how we respond to students who already know it.

The most difficult of these principles to implement is employing systemic intervention for students who are not learning what we are teaching.

Many schools and districts readily lead work on aligning curriculum that all students learn and developing common assessments.

But a pyramid of intervention is the one step that few schools or districts implement.  Typically students are either lucky or unlucky.  Some of them have teachers who analyze data, make instructional decisions based on the data, and employ re-teaching, re-testing, or other intervention strategies.  But some of them don't, and that means all students are not given the opportunity to learn what they have not yet learned  It means that in many rooms, and in many schools, time is the constant instead of learning.

With a school's development of a systemic pyramid of intervention, all students are given the opportunity to learn each of the intended essential learnings in a caring culture and climate of learning.  All teachers utilize intervention strategies, same-subject teams develop team intervention processes, and the school builds a systemic pyramid of intervention.

Our school developed and implemented a pyramid of intervention and it truly made the difference for each student's learning. The bottom of our pyramid was all of the effective school-wide strategies we employed to help every student in our building.  These included the implementation of effective educational research strategies by every teacher, including good instruction, effective feedback, the four questions of PLC work, our freshman transition program, new student program, counseling and scheduling personalization and other whole-school programs.

If a student became unsuccessful academically, behaviorally, or social-emotionally, he or she moved to the next level of support in the pyramid.  Just as collaboration is not invitational, neither is intervention.  The next stage of our pyramid paralleled our RTI process, with teachers, counselors, social works, administrators and other professionals responding to student learning needs.

Graphic by Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

  

A student who was not learning became a learning emergency, with mandated responses by the school staff, including teachers, counselors, and administrators.  These responses also involved the parent and student, with mandated intervention for students struggling academically.  Teachers indicated which students needed extra time and support to learn, and students received Gold Cards mandating intervention.  Mandated intervention lasted 4.5 weeks as grades were monitored at interim and quarterly.  

If students no longer needed intervention, the mandated intervention ended.  If students were still unsuccessful, students continued to receive mandated intervention and may have continued to move up the pyramid.  The last tier of the pyramid was special education referral or highly intensive support. Other options along the way included online curriculum, reduced school day, and possible referral to our district's alternative school.  

Is your school focusing on curriculum mapping and alignment so that all students learn the intended standards and benchmarks?  Great.  Are teachers working in grade-level or same-subject teams to develop common assessments?  Terrific.

So be sure and take the next step.  Who is monitoring the learning?  And who is responding when a student is not learning?  By developing a pyramid of intervention, you are ensuring that each student learns and that the school responds systemically, consistently and purposefully.

Build your own great pyramid.  If the Egyptians could do it centuries ago, so can you.  

Mirror or Window?

How do you respond when despite your best school improvement efforts your school achievement data is largely unchanged?

How do you respond when despite your best motivational targeted efforts, you still have a pocket of staff members who do not outwardly or inwardly support your efforts to move your staff forward in focusing on student learning?

How do you respond when despite presenting and engaging your staff in the best educational research, whether it be PLC, Marzano, Hattie, William, Stiggins, Schmoker, Schlechtly, or others, your school culture and climate is still largely focused on teaching rather than learning?

 In thousands of schools across America, educators-- in fact really great educators-- are engaged in professional development to improve our schools.  There are a myriad of focus areas, including student engagement, technology reform, creativity, walkthroughs, literacy across the curriculum, focusing on instruction, professional learning communities, mindfulness, and others.

Yet, true significant progress in improving student learning, particularly at the secondary level, in reading, math and science, the three focus areas of the PISA International Assessment that ranks world school districts, is largely unchanged in the US.

What about the percentage of students who meet the College Readiness standards on the ACT?  What is the percentage of students in your high school of students who can meet these benchmarks in all areas of the ACT? Despite the validity and reliability of this data in projecting college and career readiness, even the best high schools do not have a significant percentage of their students meeting these standards.

What does it say when our students do not meet well-established global and national standards accepted to be a valid and reliable data?

It says that despite many of the initiatives, few are effective in improving student learning, or schools are ineffective in their implementation, often moving on or changing without allowing time to affect student data positively. Or, principals or superintendents change and even the most effective initiatives fade and lose momentum without a leader keeping the lamp lit and monitoring data progress.

More importantly, how do educators normally respond when we are not successful in our change efforts?

Do we look out the window or in the mirror? Looking out the window means that we seek answers outside of our school for the reasons our student learning data is not significantly improving.

Looking out the window for a solution? (Graphic by digitalart, freedigitalphotos.com)

These reasons are the ones we have known for a number of years-- our students are unprepared for school by their parents: we have a large number of special needs, English Language Learners, and/or economically disadvantaged students.

Other "window" reasons include, but are not limited to some of the following: initiative overload by our own district offices, unfunded mandates by our legislatures, low pay for educators, a shortage of qualified teachers, and a lack of time or money for quality professional development.

And yes-- many of us see only these external influences when we examine our student learning data.

But what if we looked in the mirror? Richard DuFour discussed this concept of window or mirror in his educational research involving Professional Learning Community work. He clearly demonstrates the power of looking in the mirror to positively affect student learning.

Can we look in the mirror for our solutions? ( Photo by Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.com)

When our schools face challenges, what if teacher-leaders, administrators and educators chose to look in the mirror?  That is, what if we decided to focus on our learning problems ourselves by developing a culture and climate systemically focused on student learning?

What if we chose to embed collaboration time in the school day so that 100% of our teachers could focus on 100% of our students each day? By doing so, how much would our school data improve if we chose to ensure that each student learned the intended curriculum?  What if we chose to develop valid and reliable assessments with clear learning targets in same-subject teams?

What if teachers analyzed data regularly in same-subject teams and provided intervention to each student who did not meet the established team SMART goal for student learning? What if every teacher utilized student performance as feedback to him/her on their instructional effectiveness?

And what if that same-subject team provided enriching instruction and support for those students who already know the materials before we teach it? What if every teacher committed to improving learning for every student?

Each of these questions mirrors the four essential questions of Professional Learning Community work as first established by Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker.

Want to truly improve your student learning? Then be a leader of leaders in your school organization and, utilizing research that focuses on student learning, devote every day to transforming your school culture to one of learning rather than teaching.

In The Six Secrets of Change, Michael Fullan states that schools must focus on consistency or what we do every day while simultaneously instituting innovation.  The fourth secret, "Learning is the work," states that schools should and can focus on improving classroom instruction and build continuous improvement into the culture of the organization, monitoring each student's learning and responding to it through personalization.

Are there external challenges in education? Absolutely.  Do some schools have more than others? Yes. But rather than try one initiative after another one, we should establish goals that focus on student learning, monitor learning progress, and stick to them.

It won't be easy.  It takes passion and persistence and a longterm systemic focus.

And don't look out the window-- look in the mirror.