2013 Pathways to the Prize - School Winners

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

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