Sep
9
September 2008 – Learning Focused Schools
September 9, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
Superintendent’s Blog
September 2008
Learning Focused Schools
In the 2008-09 school year, the Milton Area School District is undertaking the Learning Focused Schools concept to be implemented across district levels. The thought behind Learning Focused Schools is looking at exemplary schools, which are defined as a school with 90% or more of its students on or above grade level. Dr. Thompson, in reviewing schools that met this definition of exemplary, found that only 10,000 out of 93,000 schools in the United States met that criteria in 2006-07. Five thousand one hundred of the 10,000 were highly diverse where over 35% of the students were highly impacted by poverty, language or minority discrimination.
Looking at these exemplary schools, Dr. Thompson tried to also look at exemplary practices to find those strategies or activities that exist on a consistent, pervasive basis in those schools. The schools were identified as 90/90 schools or 90/90/90 schools. The 90/90 schools are schools where 90% of the students on or above grade level are passing a state or national test at proficiency meeting adequate yearly progress in all academic areas – the second figure is 90% of the students are on free/reduced lunch indicating the school is highly impacted by poverty. There are approximately 1,100 schools that are 90/90 of the original 5,100 that were identified. In the 90/90/90, one more layer was added which is 90% of the students were minorities and the school was highly impacted by low expectations and racism. There were only 350 schools in this category.
The focus was on the 350 schools that were still achieving despite all of these criteria. Some major concerns these schools dealt with were: 1) they need to increase student achievement and accountability to match increasing national and state standards; 2) many districts are trying to decrease the minority/majority achievement gap, and 3) too many students coming into the school are already behind and the number of students below grade level is decreasing by increments that are too small.
In order to address these concerns, the Milton Area School District knows that it needs to implement some strategies locally. The strategies that are recommended by Learning Focused Schools are: to raise the standards for students you have to raise the standards for teachers; to raise the standards for teachers you have to raise the standards for principals; and schools must focus on learning and have one goal, which is continuous improvement.
In order to implement this at the district level, the school district is taking a variety of Learning Focused initiatives, the first of which is curriculum maps where the district will begin to look at the Capitol Intermediate Unit curriculum maps and apply this to the district curriculum. This will allow for a smooth transition between the old district curriculum and the proposed state curriculum.
The second approach is a lesson plan template which will integrate Learning Focused curriculum maps and will also use a lesson plan template which was developed in the 2007-08 school year.
The third approach will be observations of teachers with accountability for Learning Focused initiatives using a walk-through method which is a 5 by 5 by 5 model, meaning that the principals will try to observe five teachers, for five minutes each day of the school year. There is a new district observation form that will have new criteria added to it relating to the Learning Focused model.
Fourth, the district will be looking at summary point writing at each of the levels. The teacher will ask students to summarize, explain, clarify, list and give examples in writing during the lesson. All this basically entails is one or two sentences with concepts of Blooms Taxonomy. The goals is to have one summary point writing per day in K-2, in grades 3-5 in Language Arts and Math each day, in grades 6-12 three times per week in all areas except band, physical education and chorus.
These new approaches will allow staff to begin to implement the Learning Focused strategies into the classroom and also allow the principals to model and monitor these strategies as they are implemented during the course of the school year. The overall goal of these strategies is a continuous improvement for academic success for students in schools.
