2013 Pathways to the Prize - School Winners | Page 36
Pathways to the Prize
Lessons from the 2011 SCORE Prize School Winners
• At Fairview Elementary, Ms. Cupples listened first and then took action. She became familiar with
all of the strengths and challenges of the school, and then reorganized the school structure to maximize
strengths. She drew on the expertise of the experienced teachers and the energy of the new teachers. She
created synergy by regrouping the teachers into different grade levels and developing better communication to keep everyone well-informed. She centered the instructional program on children’s needs, providing
behavioral, social-emotional, and health services. She leveraged the expertise of the reading coaches and
stressed collaborative problem solving.
• At Power Center Academy, Ms. Lewis created a school from scratch. She hired a highly effective
and motivated teaching staff and created a new, fast-paced curriculum. Further, she made the curriculum
relevant to teachers, students, and the economically distressed community by giving it a finance, marketing, and business component. While moving rapidly to establish the school, she concentrated on only
one grade of scholars at a time so that she could develop and fine-tune curriculum each year.
• At Mt. Juliet, Mr. Brown organized his administrative staff so that assistant principals
could expand their roles beyond the traditional disciplinary function to become instructional
leaders in charge of a specific group of students. He used his data teams to uncover root causes
of academic challenges and executed a series of strategies to address them. He asked all staff
members to implement strategies that resulted in the greatest success.
Pathways to the Prize
Lessons from the 2011 SCORE Prize School Winners
update the cards with benchmark assessment data to show each student’s level of mastery and any areas
of need. The school communicates how each student is doing – and what areas need attention – to both the
student and his or her parents.
• Power Center Academy constantly tracks both academic and behavioral data, and teachers know
which students have mastered each objective and who needs more intervention. The teachers use exit
tickets as informal checks of student performance every day. If 85 percent of students have not met the
objective, re-teaching occurs immediately.
• Mt. Juliet uses a highly effective data analysis team to review data and communicate its
findings to the entire teaching staff, identifying students’ areas of need. The team routinely
studies the results from several assessments and generates diagnostic reports that show which
students and student subgroups have fallen behind, or are failing to make adequate progress.
Teachers monitor learning by giving common benchmark assessments every four and a half
weeks. In addition, the data analysis team conducts root cause analyses and what they call
“deep data dives” to isolate the source of emerging challenges.
Ensuring excellent teaching
Each of the schools has embraced the concept of collaboration. They reserve time for teachers to
co-plan lessons, examine data, and discuss student needs. Teachers have opened up their classrooms to learn what works from each other.
• At Fairview, teachers implement a balanced literacy approach for reading/language
arts, hands-on learning in mathematics and science, and integrated learning in other
content areas such as social studies. They differentiate instruction with flexible grouping
based on student needs and call in the reading coaches to provide Reading Recovery strategies
for any student from kindergarten through fifth grade who struggles with phonemic awareness,
phonics, vocabulary, fluency, or comprehension.
• Power Center Academy has developed and adopted templates to make sure that all lesson plans have the necessary components. The plans use the “I do/we do/you do” format, giving
students a compelling introduction to the material, engaging them in collaborative activities to
apply what was learned, and reserving time for independent practice.
• At Mt. Juliet, teachers in each department discuss the specific pedagogies that work best
in their cont V