February 23, 2010 - Participating school teams gathered to share insights and questions about developing learning partnerships with focal students. Participants examined their English and math assessment and intervention approaches and tools, and began to explore ways in which their teams' learning can inform school-wide planning.
Elmhurst Community Prep Impact 2012 Inquiry Team Video (9min 37sec)
Several members of the ECP Inquiry Team who attended the network day presented on their progress in improving English instruction to below-grade level students. They discussed their focal students and their formative assessment data-based approaches to improving reading skills that they developed with their BayCES coach Mark Salinas.
Elmhurst Community Prep - Impact 2012 Project Update
School overview. ECP serves approx. 350 students in grades 6-8, with over 85% qualifying for free or reduced meals. The new small school was opened in 2006-7 as one of two schools along with Alliance Academy that were created to replace the former larger Elmhurst Middle School. ECP has shown improved student proficiency rates in the CST compared to the former school since 2007 in both English Language Arts and math. ELA proficiency rose from 10% to 18% in two years (2007-9), compared to a high of 13% in the big school, and math proficiency has remained at 21%, compared to a high of 12% at the big school. Despite the gains, these low proficiency rates have recently landed the school on the official California list of the "Persistently Lowest-Achieving" schools, increasing the urgency of this initiative.
The Inquiry Team has 6 members including the principal, working with 19 focal students in 6th and 7th grade. The team consists of all the English teachers in the school except one 8th grade teacher. All school administrators are on the team and have taught English in the past. Four team members attended the network day for the presentation in the video above.
Focal student selection and work plan steps: o Assess all students with a variety of tools and examine larger data set o Determine a target population that is low-performing and shares salient features o Identify a small (under 20) set of focal students from the target population. o Identify a sub-skill: fluency, which is directly related to comprehension and reading enjoyment. o Identify an initial learning target: prefix recognition.
Selection of target population through a battery of assessments: • One Minute Oral Fluency Assessment (read aloud passage). • Grade-level Cloze Passage Assessment. • SRI (Lexile) Assessment. • CST ELA cluster data (Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension). Examining this set of data, they identified patterns to discern a Target Population, which consisted of about 30% of the student body.
Focal student selection: • Reading speeds below 120 WPM. The fall target for 6-7 graders was 125 WPM for grade-level texts. • High frustrational level in the Cloze passage. • FBB/BB in CST. • Not in the Read 180 (computer-based reading intervention) program. They selected 19 focal students from these criteria. Many of these were students who were just getting by, completing their work and able to pass classes but testing very low in fluency and comprehension.
First Learning Target Selection. "You see the whole target population and you want to work closely with all of them. It was heart-wrenching to see the whole group and narrow down, but you need to have a manageable group. Then we had to narrow on a sub-skill, also very difficult to select, there are so many needs, but we landed on fluency. Then for the learning target: if students could automatically recognize and comprehend the 13 most commonly used prefixes, that would add significantly to their overall word recognition, fluency, and comprehension."
Preliminary Focal Student Results. It is too early to expect a wide impact on standardized assessments, but initial tracking of focal student indicators shows consistent gains, indicating that participating teachers are developing effective literacy assessment and intervention skills:
• Fluency gains. Over three months, October 2009 - January 2010, 14 of 16 focal students with complete scores increased their reading fluency. Of those, 53% improved by 10% or more, and 16% (3 students) improved by 20% or more. • District benchmark exam. The benchmark is designed to be predictive of CST scores. In the early fall, 14 focal students scored Below benchmark, and 4 scored Approaching or At Benchmark (1 student did not take the exam). In the winter assessment, 10 students scored Below benchmark, and 9 scored Approaching or At Benchmark.
Leadership Prep High School Project Update
School overview. Leadership College Prep serves approx. 400 students in grades 9-12, a Title I school serving a low-income population of African American (60%) and Hispanic/Latino (35%) students. This new small school opened in 2004-5 as one of several schools that were created to replace the former comprehensive Castlemont High School.
Since opening, Leadership has demonstrated improvement in early indicators such as increased student attendance and a reduced dropout rate (from 39% in 2007 to 28% in 2008). Strategies include personalization through advisory programs, project-based learning, and other small school approaches. However, student proficiency rates as measured by the California Standards Test (CST) have remained persistently low, with ELA proficiency at 8-9% since 2005 and math proficiency remaining between 1-3%.
The Inquiry Team consists of five faculty who serve 9th graders, an interdisciplinary team comprising English, Algebra, Social Studies, Biology, and ROTC. The team is working with 15 focal students to anchor and focus their conversations on student learning. The team focus is on literacy skills, taking an interdisciplinary approach, with some coaching in Algebra as well. The team meets as a team twice a month and in various configurations with each other and/or their coach several other times.
Team Purposes: • To collaborate across disciplines to understand in detail the role of vocabulary in student reading comprehension in various subject areas • To transform the school's learning conditions in a systematic way to accelerate student independent reading skills
Content Focus: Vocabulary Development and Analysis through Word Study
In response to: • Recognition in data of patterns of low vocabulary interfering with comprehension • Student unfamiliarity with academic vocabulary • Student lack of internalized repertoire of word analysis skills
Inquiry Team Objectives 1. Systemic Learning Conditions: Build capacity to study the school's learning conditions through the lens of struggling students in regard to curricular and instructional decisions and practices that meet or fail to meet specific students' needs 2. Assessment Literacy: Build understanding of what different assessments tell us about student learning; build capacity to use tools for screening, diagnosing, monitoring, and checking progress; and build skills in analyzing fine-grained formative assessment data. 3. Intervention Strategy: Build capacity to choose the right instructional strategies and content to close the student learning gaps (instructional decision-making); build capacity to design and implement instructional strategies that build student capacity to accelerate their own learning (building independent learners).
Team members have made significant practice progress by developing 9th Grade Common Instructional Routines: • Checking for understanding tools and practices • Vocabulary routines • Test taking routines • Classroom reading routines
Teachers made instructional decisions about high-leverage Power Standards based on an analysis of pacing guides and assessment blueprints (i.e., CAHSEE, CST, Benchmarks). Teachers are also building instructional routines for students to analyze their individual benchmark results and set goals for improvement to increase student investment.
Student gains or promising improvements
ELA 9th Gr. Benchmark Assessments (Focal Students) • Of the 10 focal students who took both the fall and mid-year benchmark, 8 moved up at least one performance level (2 moved up two levels) • Of the 13 focal students who took the mid-year benchmark, 11 scored Approaching or Benchmark (4 at Benchmark) - only 2 at Below Benchmark
ELA 9th Grade Benchmark Assessments (overall) - Inquiry Team Students • Fall - Standards with performance averages of At or Above Benchmark: 2/ 11 • Mid-Year - Standards At or Above Benchmark: 8/11 • Fall - % of students scoring overall Approaching/Benchmark/Above: 41% • Mid-Year - % of students scoring Approaching/Benchmark/Above = 76% • The # of students scoring Below dropped from 59% (Fall) to 24% (Mid-Year)
Oral Reading Fluency Assessment • Of the 12 focal students who took the fall and mid-year oral fluency assessment, 10 made increases of 10-20% on their correct words per minute (WPM) • Increasing students' WPM (automatic word recognition) allows for students to focus more on comprehension (vs. decoding words)
Some student examples... o Student A (ELL) - Fall 116 WPM, Mid-Year 146 WPM o Student B (ELL)- Fall 97 WPM, Mid-Year 113 o Student C (ELL) - Fall 91 WPM, Mid-Year 101 WPM 140 WPM is the mid-year grade-level target.
Futures Elementary
Futures is a K-5 elementary school with approximately 300 students. It is a new small school founded in 2007 on the site of a phased out larger school. In its second year, 2008-9, Futures was the most improved district school in terms of Academic Performance Index (API) results. Futures is in its first year with Impact 2012 although it worked with BayCES last year as well.
The Futures inquiry team is very pleased about the progress they are making. There was a lot of groundwork to get to this point. First the principal Steven Daubenspeck worked with his BayCES coach and others to reconfigure the school's professional learning community (PLC) structures and then created an Impact 2012 team that pulled members from each of these PLC's (K-1, gr 2-3, and gr 4-5).
The 2012 inquiry team fully launched in January, just a few months before, and began their assessment of the target population (students reading below 70% of grade-level fluency) with a core phonics inventory. They discovered a trend of students with difficulty recognizing and producing short vowel sounds and short vowel-consonant blends. They realized that this was a skill that was not taught after the first two months of second grade, so if a student doesn't master it, they can fall farther and farther behind. This felt like the discovery of a root of achievement gaps right at the source.
Each 2012 team member selected 4-5 focal students with this particular sub-skill gap who had no IEP's and reasonable attendance. Team members have begun doing phonics exercises with focal students and monitoring changes in their skill level. The Futures team has made quick and early use of video by taping this phonics sessions with students and sharing the video with team members to talk about what is effective in these interventions.
Teachers and coaches view a video of a student reading intervention.
"We're rethinking the meaning of ‘intervention' as something where students are pulled out of a classroom," said Principal Daubenspeck, "to something that every teacher is directly involved in. Our teachers are invigorated, it's opened up a whole new world for the average teacher. It's a real professional learning community structure, a good model for doing it right."
Teachers made instructional decisions about high-leverage Power Standards based on an analysis of pacing guides and assessment blueprints (i.e., CAHSEE, CST, Benchmarks). Teachers are also building instructional routines for students to analyze their individual benchmark results and set goals for improvement to increase student investment. 