http://www.edline.net/pages/Wynnebrook_Elementary
Demographics of Wynnebrook Elementary School:
We decided to utilize a record day as our school is much too busy to simply take our leadership team out of commission for a day. It was very fortunate for us that Wynnebrook Elementary was in session. We hopped in two cars and drove across the state the night before so that we would be ready to go by 7:00 a.m. to journey through a day at Wynnebrook. Our experience was nothing short of amazing. This Title I elementary school was housed in a building that was over 50 years old and that included more than 900 students. To walk through the halls, one wouldn't begin to believe that many students were a part of this school. The organization and flow of their day begged only order and routine. Students were well mannered moving through the hallways quietly, but what was more impressive was the dynamics of the more than 20 classrooms we walked into. Each classroom included two adults during their literacy block. All students appeared to be engaged and on task working on grade level material. The skill set of the teachers and the support personnel made it difficult to discern who was the lead teacher and who was the support. Students were engaged in small group instruction in every single classroom. Wynnebrook's magic is through their small group approach to instruction which has been going strong for the past 16 years, of which the past 13 have included a school grade of A. They have had the same principal for the past 16 years, Mr. Pegg and he has had his assistant principal as his side kick for the past 13 years. Mr. Pegg explains the first 3 years on his journey to achieving his score of an A, his focus was reading on instructional levels. He used his Title I dollars to buy leveled books and took the basals and "put them away." Mr. Pegg knew his students couldn't read and he knew he would need strong scaffolds to get them to a place to be able to read. His mission worked. His proficiency rates in Literacy and Math average in the 80%-90% range consistently. The vast majority of his students are clearly reading on grade level now.
Mr. Pegg touts his initial success to learning gains for his students. What is even more impressive is with the shift from FCAT 2.0 to FSA. This year, we were faced with two different assessments that couldn't be compared. This creates a challenge as learning gains cannot be determined and/or factored into a school grade. Mr. Pegg and his school, Wynnebrook Elementary, still made an A in the 2014-2015 school year without learning gains factored in. Once again, his students were over 80% proficient in both areas: Reading and Mathematics.
So ... what does this mean for our school? We visited their school on a Friday. We returned that evening. Over the weekend, my Principal asked me to revamp our schedules to create a plan that could most resemble the work that Wynnebrook was doing. This served our school two-fold, according to our SIP, we have a goal of incorporating more small group into our work with students. This visit allowed us an opportunity to see "small group" work in action. So ...I began working to create a schedule first whereby we had literacy blocks that were stacked. This was an initial challenge. Our teachers continued to believe and explain that they feel their students are most easily engaged in learning first thing in the morning. This became a difficult conversation ... we continue to make these statements about our children with no backing of data. If we only average 20% of our students reading proficiently, we are not showing that the time of day (what we have been doing all along) was effective. By adjusting literacy blocks school-wide, we could leverage resources to provide additional support. Tina (my Principal) and I believe this payoff would be greater than having our students "fresh." So, I staggered everyone's literacy blocks. This allowed me to take our existing personnel of paraprofessionals and repurpose them. I was able to create a schedule where each classroom 1st through 5th grade had an additional person in for small groups for 60 minutes.
It was a rocky beginning, as we visited our sister school on a Friday, we came back to school and met with our team leaders on Monday to discuss our observations. We had a staff meeting on Tuesday and rolled out new schedules to begin on Wednesday. We rushed to provide support and training to all personnel that would be flooding into classrooms. We knew we would be starting off somewhat rocky, but we figured, we needed a place to launch from and this was it. We decided we would go "full speed ahead" and assess the implementation and modify the plan as needed based on our findings after a week. We were pleased to recognize that not much tweaking to the model itself would be necessary, but rather, we would need to adjust staff based on need, experience, personalities, and provide additional training to make the implementation of small groups the best experience it could be.
We continue to work our small group model. We are four months into the implementation and we await FSA data to support our belief that small groups is how to grow readers. We currently rely on our DRA's and ORF's to demonstrate student growth.
Thank you to Mr. Pegg and Suzanne Berry for your hospitality at Wynnebrook Elementary School.
