Program Improvement 2

Chapter 5: Improving Literacy Achievement in Elementary Schools

There are 4 guiding principles elementary schools must keep in mind when they are investigating methods and infrastructures to improve literacy in their schools: 1) creating infrastructure capable of sustaining effort; 2) taking a constructivist approach; 3) following a well-defined change process; 4) building ownership.

There are 3 pillars needed for a successful high-functioning infrastructure: 1) an active, involved principals that attend PD and allow adequate collaboration; 2) a curriculum leader responsible for overseeing and managing the SBC process; 3) a vertical leadership team that monitors the staff’s pace and progress.

The Standards-Based Change (SBC) process begins with the To Do cycle which consists of 4 processes: 

1. vision statements: two are needed - one vision for graduate and one vision of an excellent reader, writer, literate thinker based on the vision for the graduate
2. end-of-year learning goals: create staircase curriculum that is built through teacher discussion and collaboration 
3. evidence systems: teachers must create tasks, texts, and scoring system to support the goals they created
4. evidence-based teaching: teachers must take the evidence from step 3 and plan out when and what will be taught and assessed.

To sustain the To Do cycle, teachers must assess and share data 3 times a year and document their curriculum, assessments, and instruction to ensure that literacy is improving and to address any changes in curriculum that need to occur.

Chapter 11: Evolution, Change, and Program Improvement

There are 10 Principles needed to engage evaluation of change.

1. Develop Relationships to Support Change: literacy specialists must establish healthy, respectful relationships with teachers and spend ample time positively interacting with them.
2. Build Capacity for Change: a bottom-up approach is more effective than a top-down approach because teachers buy-in to the program as they reflect and they’re able to set shared goals, establish a plan and work together to ensure success.
3. Survey the Reading Program: a survey is needed to establish what a program is through examination of PASS: Purpose (goals of teachers), Actions (actions developed to achieve goals), Students (what will students learn, and how will they know they learned it), and Standards (expectations are established and used to identify clear goals and set a path to reach them).
4. Analyze the Data: evaluations should show the strengths of the program and which need to be readdressed so that focus is on what should be rather than what it is.
5. Build on Strengths: evaluation results should focus on what could be done to strengthen what teachers are doing.
6. Support the Change Process: CBAM (concerns based adoption model) allows progression from concerns about self and task to the impact strategies have on students which allows for innovations to be created with mutual adaptation. Flexibility and fidelity in the literacy specialist are a must for this to happen, and the innovation process must also focus on the level of use and address the nonusers, mechanical users, routine users, and refinement users.
7. Evaluate the Innovation: literacy specialist uses interventions and observations to determine outcome and success of innovation. Specialist must actively engage with resisters to build relationships and keep open lines of communication.
8. Negotiate Bottom-up and Top-down Pressures: when external mandates are created, literacy specialists need to manage change by using data and collaboration to create a plan and implementation schedule.
9. Sustain Change: literacy specialists and teachers must continuously reflect and collaborate to ensure that growth is being made.
10. Accept the Mandate for Continuous Improvement: literacy specialist much have “evaluator’s life” by making improvement the focus of their work and ensure that innovations are occurring and academic and social needs are being met.

Reflection Questions:

1. How does the infrastructure at your school support literacy improvement efforts? What changes might be necessary to ensure sustained change?

• We are have time built into our daily schedule that easily allows for the support of literacy improvement efforts. We meet each day for an hour to discuss interventions and to study and analyze new strategies as well as existing ones. We use student data and research-based strategies to help students. I know our grade level is very open to exploring and trying new strategies, but getting buy-in and increasing the analyzation and monitoring of new strategies are always useful.

1. What steps has your school taken to ensure teacher ownership over the curriculum? How well aligned are expectations across classrooms and grade levels?

• Our school ensures teacher ownership in several ways. Teachers are able and encouraged to create innovative projects and assessments, and we celebrate each other’s successes regularly. We have been given instructional days as whole departments to plan vertically to ensure that we have divided up curriculum requirements and are being consistent with language and student expectations. During our Collaborate Time, grade levels also have discussions to ensure that we are being consistent both as a grade level and as a core team. 

1. How does your school balance institutionalizing new curriculum efforts with a continuous cycle of reflection and improvement?

• When new curriculum is introduced, we typically able to be a part of the decision-making and creation process. Our school (and district) provides us many opportunities to discuss new curriculum and plan implementation. For example, last year we were told we would be administering writing benchmarks. All middle school LA teachers met together, we divided up into grade levels, and we discussed/modified the texts and prompts that we would be using for the benchmarks. We made modifications, established norms and expectations, and agreed on the dates the tests would be administered and results be reported.

Questions:
1. What strategies does your site use to successfully create staff buy-in on new curriculum or strategies?

2. How big of a role does data play in making decisions about strategies? What types of data do you typically use?

3. Does your site have a vision statement? Did the staff create it together or was it just presented to you?