An LYS Superintendent shares thefollowing:
SC,
Asuperintendent and a teacher asked me essentially the same set of questionsyesterday - two different districts, two different roles, but the same dilemma.Both districts have just completed a testing cycle of "curriculum basedassessments” with seemingly poor results. The following are my thoughts.
1. Great jobdoing common assessments! I will add that waiting 6 to 9 weeks is toolong. You are now finding out 9 weeks into the school year that yourinstructional practices are maybe, and I add MAYBE, not as effective as youthought they were. You could have known that with a short assessment 6weeks ago, after only 3 weeks of instruction had passed. Teachers, ifyour district persists in doing 6 weeks and 9 weeks assessments, it falls toyou to make 3 weeks assessments, in the same format as the district's commonassessments. These can and should be less than 10 questions long, andshould not take an entire class period. You can and should spiralquestions from identified holes onto these assessments. In other words, follow the Cain model.
2. Bothdistricts are implementing C-Scope for the first time this year. Now itmust be made clear to everyone that this is NOT the first year both of thesedistricts made C-Scope available to the staff, it is merely the first year bothdistricts have become concerned enough to mandate and monitor theimplementation of the curriculum. Leaders, you may want to sit down, becausethis may sting. What you have done as leaders, by not making an alignedcurriculum mandatory, is an egregious leadership failure. You KNEW you needed acurriculum, which is why you bought it, yet you failed to lead theimplementation of the curriculum. Your responsibility to implement bestpractices, including curriculum implementation, does not end simply because yousent teachers to C-Scope training. Enough said, now don't beat yourself up overit, let's fix it. Also, don't beat the teachers up either, as thissituation is mostly a result of your leadership failure, not teaching failure.
3. Earlytesting results in both districts were, to be generous, poor. Neither of thesetesting results should be a surprise. That is, I would bet a copy of theFundamental 5 (Cain & Laird) that neither district had TEACHERS conduct afocused analysis of their student's deficiencies AND develope a viable plan tofill in holes. Every teacher in my district was required to identify themost failed objectives from last year. Once that was conducted, weremembered our Schmoker: we concentrate on the deepest hole and begin fillingit weekly. Schmoker tells us that if we try to fill all learning holes,we fill nothing. However, learning is a complex interconnected web. If we beginby filling in the deepest hole, we will address some learning gaps andmisconceptions that are likely to partially or completely fill in other holes. Once the deepest hole is filled, and that may take a while, start on thenext one. The catch here is two-fold. One, your students have notbeen in an aligned scope and sequence, so there are certainly holes in thelearning. This will create low common assessment scores. Two, thisphenomenon of low scores was totally predictable had you put some thought tothe problem early on. This reflects back to point one: MAYBE theinstruction was ineffective, or MAYBE it was effective but there are just toomany unidentified and un-addressed learning holes.
4. The firstyear of common assessment implementation is likely to be chaotic. Again,leadership created this chaos; so don't panic in the face of your creation! Scores will be low, holes need to be identified, and strategies need tobe developed to fill in the holes, one at a time. The process is not asslow as it sounds, but don't be surprised when your common assessment scoresremain in the tank all year long. The trick is to look at next year'scommon assessment scores. Are the scores moving up, overall? If so,your system is beginning to add value to children, congratulations! Keep theword "system" in mind. You are now in the first stages of creating asystem approach to educating children. Before you were simply treating symptoms.System work will be much harder. Keep in mind too that it is likely youdo not fully understand instructional systems at this point. I startedusing an instructional system approach in 2006. It was not until 2009 that Iwould have called myself actually competent, three years. The 10,000-hourrule as described by Gladwell is in full play here.
5. Commonassessment data is valuable in the following ways: A. It puts a numerical valueon the health of your instructional systems. B. It verifies if instructional strategies and deficit filling are occurring, over time. C. And this is a distant third, it isstudent performance data. We seem to get common assessment data and thenwant to come up with student interventions, which is the LEAST valuable datafrom common assessments. Student interventions are symptom treating, andthat is OK as long as the main thrust is to treat the disease. In ourcase, the disease is an ineffective instructional system. I see teachersspending hours doing tutorials after school: symptom treating. I seealmost ZERO time spent anywhere trying to create a better instructional system. Those priorities are 180 degrees out of synch.
In closing,don't panic in the face of common assessment scores. Use the scores toimprove your systems. It took Lesa Cain three years of faithful andrelentless systems building in order to produce an exceedingly high performingschool with a student body consisting almost entirely of low SES students. Notto mention that Lesa had access to an incredible support network that too many ofus don't have (but you can). Just understand that system building iswork. Work this process diligently for several years and reap therewards. Leadership should concern themselves only with teachers whorefuse to implement the curriculum, refuse to adjust instructional practices,and refuse to fill in student learning gaps. For teachers who are on board, patthem on the back and a give them a little cover and a little time.
Think. Work. Achieve.
- Call Jo at (832)477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copiesavailable on Amazon.com! http://tinyurl.com/Fundamental5
- Call Jo at (832)477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary SchoolLeadership Tale” Individual copies available onAmazon.com! http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook
- Nowat the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite(Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool)
- Upcoming Presentations: TASSP Assistant Principals’ Workshop (Featured Speaker),American Association of School Administrators Conference (MultiplePresentations), National Association of Secondary School Principals Conference(Multiple Presentations)
- FollowSean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation
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