Small Group Instruction at Oneco 2017

This school year was met with more enthusiasm for the small group structures.  In analyzing the feedback provided from teachers, they very much appreciated the small group structure as well as the additional support during their 60 minute literacy block, but were concerned with the consistency of the staff members providing the small group instruction in their class.

We made some tweaks to the format as we became an L300 school in the 2016-2017 school year.  We were given, what we can only consider a gift, with an extended day.  Let's be honest, the students need as much time to learn as they can get and we need as much time to teach as we can, so there are absolutely no complaints coming from Oneco with this gift of time.  Logistically with coverage and scheduling, a lot of problem solving was required, but not with the time in and of itself.

We began the school year with additional support staff being placed in each classroom during the Extended Day/Power/Additional Literacy time.  This required a specific schedule, first of all, ensuring that adequate staff was provided for this push-in support.  Additionally, this required a shift in the mind set.  Our paras, who once ran the management of the campus, would share largely in the instruction of all students.  We worked to build the capacity of our support staff with the support of our instructional coach, our literacy teacher, as well as several district support personnel.  The idea that we had to be mindful of is that we had to ensure adequate time and ongoing training and support for these individuals if we were to keep building their capacity.

Our teachers and support staff have been incredible.  We began this year with fidelity to small group instruction.  The best part for me, is that teachers who were resistant to the idea of small group instruction in the beginning phases of this roll out, not fight for their small group time.  Once upon a time, they felt as though this model would be tough for their classroom management, they now rely on this structure.  Additionally, they are bringing small group instruction into other content areas.

Implementation of Small Group Instruction during the 60 minute Literacy Block

This was the end result of the first six months of the implementation of small group instruction inside of our Literacy Block.  Teachers were initially resistant to us "hijacking" their structure, but as Dr. Stancil so appropriately put it ... "when we see the results of this structure being effectively implemented, we look at the data, and we look at the SIP plan, we cannot NOT respond to this information,"  We recognize that there are situations where, as administrators and teachers, we have to be responsive to data with more immediate changes that aren't always convenient.  There was resistence, but you will see the end of the year survey showed that we had nearly 100% buy in to this structure, because they too, noticed the difference it made in student achievement.  

Our visit to Wynnebrook Elementary- Where it's being done!

The school district of Manatee County challenged us with finding a sister-school to visit.  My Principal and I began to look for a school that had a similar student demographic that was outperforming us.  As we reviewed the data, one school began to glare at us.  Wynnebrook Elementary in West Palm Beach.

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.

Paolo Freire's Influence on My Practice ...

Grade level passages, comprehension worksheets, rereading for understanding, an emphasis on fluency and questions pulled from the text that are written to get to the bottom of what children understand implicitly and explicitly are all the things that define whether a student is or is not successful.  Have we overlooked and missed the heart of the purpose of reading?  The act of reading within the classroom seems to have turned into a compliance and functional task.  If a student is successful at reading grade level passages and answering a set of comprehension questions that consists of low, moderate and high levels of complexity, then that student can be classified as a proficient reader and therefor, success has been defined.  But is this the reality? 

Paolo Freire has defined the importance of the act of reading as having the ability to read the world.  He expresses the notion that reading is a way of connecting oneself to the world in which we live.  A statement that resonated with me in Freire’s article entitled The Importance of the Act of Reading (1983), was that “mechanically memorizing the description of an object does not constitute knowing the object,” (p.9).  It almost seems as though this is the assumption.  If a child is able to recall facts, then the student really “understands” and “knows” the content.  The idea of this word “know” implies a deeper understanding and connection.  We do know that a child simply having the ability to transfer information from text to a workbook does not mean that there is a deep connection and a real “understanding” that exists.  To read the ideas from individuals that preceded us and to gain an awareness of how their identities and experiences are shaped, will help us to better understand ourselves.  There is no way that we can have every lived experience to provide us with the opportunities to know and grow to maximize our greatest potential.  

The words of Langston Hughes in the poem “Theme for English B,” provide me with a perspective in life I can never authentically have as a white middle class woman.  I may never be able to live the experiences that he had and I may never be able to authentically connect, but I can get a glimpse into his experience.  This simple glimpse helps me to think about how complex the idea of understanding our “truth” is.  Perhaps, as I move forward, I won’t be as inclined to simplify the idea of the “truth.”  Perhaps now, I will think twice before asking someone to define oneself in the context of a single written paper.  This is not something I would have thought of had the words of Hughes not brought this notion forward.  Prior to understanding what I think was his attempt at expressing his feeling of being patronized with this assignment, I may have thought this a great example of a Literature assignment. 

This brings me to the next idea of Paolo Freire, where he begins to make us question quality over quantity.  He expresses this idea that students consistently read many diverse texts rather futilely.  Reading text after text after text without really connecting seems all but a waste of time.  We have to help our students work on this idea of “connecting and understanding” versus “mechanical memorization.”  Mechanical memorization and having the ability to answer a set of explicitly stated comprehension questions does not transfer to understanding our world.  Freire explains that “words should be laden with the meaning of the people’s existential experience, and not of the teacher’s experience.” (p.10).  As I reflect on my prior role as a teacher, I realize I lived inside of this framework of Social Efficiency.  I think as I reflect back on my instruction, it represented the idea that, as a teacher, I defined what I felt was exemplar quality literature.  I used these exemplar resources as my “read alouds” and they also adorned my bookshelves.  My text selection allowed my students to connect to and engage with the world around them.  The Social Efficiency component of my delivery is that I made declarations prematurely about what I considered significant and what I felt students should be able to connect with.  This was defined by me, the teacher, and my ideas and beliefs about society, as well as what I felt students needed to know in order to connect with their world and have empathy. So what does this mean for reading?  If we look at these two individuals Freire and Pearson, we can begin to see how kids can connect passionately and intimately with reading our world.  Freire expresses the goal in using reading to connect to our world and Pearson provides us with more of a framework to ensure this happens.  P. David Pearson indicates four criteria necessary to ensure that children get the “most” out of their reading.  Among these four things are: choice, optimal difficulty, multiple readings, and negotiating meaning socially.  The work of P. David Pearson expresses that students need to be able to connect with their reading in meaningful ways.  He lists the ways that we can ensure that quality reading occurs.  Pearson expresses that allocating time and resources is simply not enough to foster a love of reading to make reading applicable to their lives.  I will connect the concepts of Choice and of Negotiating Social Meaning to the work of Paulo Freire. Providing students with a “choice” in what they are reading, allows them to participate in the selection of texts that they connect with; texts that are directly related to their own learning.  The idea that Linda Fielding and P. David Pearson connects us to in the article, Synthesis of Research/Reading Comprehension: What Works? is that there is “no research that directly links “choice” to reading comprehension growth, we speculate that choice is related to interest and motivation, both of which are related directly to learning.”  If kids have an opportunity to select texts that are significant to them and relevant to their own world and that motivate them on their continued track for learning, then isn’t this the goal in reading, learning, and growing?            

The idea of Negotiating Meaning Socially is that reading is a social as well as a cognitive process.  We are using the cognitive process to get to a social response to reading.  The conversations that are a result of students who connect with reading on a social level “help to build the all-important community of readers.” (Fieldings, Pearson. p. 3).  Students will be able to shape their opinions, beliefs and ideas through the support of relevant text.  They will read the work of those who had experiences similar to and in opposition of their own.  They will live through pictures of the world and through the experiences of others.                

In summary, Paulo Freire, explains that reading can be a way to understand our reality as well as shape our beliefs, feelings, and how we see ourselves in relationship to the world in which we live.  P. David Pearson reminds us that reading “once thought of as the natural result of decoding plus oral language, comprehension is now viewed as a much more complex process involving knowledge, experience, thinking, and teaching.  It depends heavily on knowledge—both about the world at large and the worlds of language and print.” (Fieldings, Pearson. p.1).  We need to provide our students with rich texts that they find relevant to their lives and beliefs in order to promote a world of thinkers and culturally and socially responsive individuals.

References

Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), 5-11.

Fielding, Linda G., Pearson, P. David. (1983). Comprehension that works: synthesis of research, 1-3

Equity Analysis

Reflection:
The ability to study a school is powerful.  Before one begins to disaggregate any data, the only thing that there is to lean on is anecdotal data and gut instinct.  The work required in any school, but particularly a Turn-Around school, requires more than a gut instinct to drive decisions.  In order to impact student achievement, one must have the ability to analyze, disaggregate and triangulate data.  Using multiple data points that represent the school culture will assist a leader in driving decisions.  My ability to do this Equity Audit on two diffferent Title I schools in Manatee County allowed me an opportunity to know the school that I would serve in the 2012-2013 school year more intimately.  I was afforded the ability to go into this school with a handle on what the strengths and weaknesses were.  This data armed me with a foundation upon which I stood in negotiating conversations, assisting in moving the administrator's vision forward, and creating projects/procedures that were aligned to student need and teacher need.
Professor Leonard Burello provided the Gulf Coast Partnership cohort with a book entitled Studying Your Own School by Gary Anderson, Kathryn Herr and Ann Nihlen.  This book outlines the importance of understanding Action Research and how to best merge educational practices with the action research.  John Dewey launched a progressive movement in the 19th century on the importance of inquiry.  He stood on the basis that true inquiry required both common sense and science (Anderson, Herr, Nihlen. 2007 p. 18.)  This is what we are doing in action research; identifying the strengths and weaknesses in our schools by using data.  We make adjustments based on the data and then measure the outcome to determine whether our adjustments and implementations had any impact on moving the identified weakness towards becoming a strength and ultimately affected student achievement in a positive way.

Understanding By Design

Understanding By Design-Introduction of Metacognitive Strategies 

 Resource: The Comprehension Toolkit

Reflection:

This project was an interesting one.  I took a slightly different angle than what was originally asked by Dr. Vonzell Agosto.  The project, as it was assigned, was to deliver a lesson using an instructional design model that I thought would best lend itself to the lesson or training that I would be providing.  The instructonal framework that I chose to utilize in my staff development is the Universal by Design framework.  In an article written by Meia Chita-Tegmark from Boston University, et al., entitled Using the Universal Design (UDL) For Learning Framework to Support Culturally Diverse Learners, it is expressed that "UDL can be extended to capture the way in which learning is influenced by cultural variability ... create a curriculum that is responsive to the cultural dimension of learning"  (Meia Chita-Tegmark, et al. 2011.)  When I look at the needs of a Turn Around school and my school, in particular, an awareness of cultural diversity and having the ability to look at our diversity through an "asset" lens as opposed to a "deficit" lens.  This framework is beneficial for the above referenced reason and also because it is a commonly observed framework for lesson planning and creation in Manatee County.  

So ... in creating my Professional Development, I decided to deliver the content by using the UBD framework and also demonstrate to the teachers what the UBD framework actually looks like so that not only will they take the information from the inservice on incorporating Metacognitive Awareness into their Literacy instruction, but also understand how to create their own lessons by using this UbD Framework. 

The presentation above is one I created for Staff Development for the first grade team in incorporating Metacognitive Thinking Strategies with the resource the Comprehension Toolkit.  I began by identifying the outcome or goal that the students were to achieve.  The next step was to identify the term "quality."  In order to move students to proficiency, quality must be tangible and defined prior to moving into a lesson.  I personally believe this is why many students are not proficient.  The notion of what proficiency looks like is different depending on the evaluator.  A great deal of conversation revolved around this concept.  Rubrics were then created to identify the various levels of proficiency.  Then activities and procedures were created to move the students toward a high level of proficiency.  

This project served multiple purposes.  It not only provided the first grade team with an awareness of how to use this resource in their instruction, I was able to model a lesson and then debrief with the team to identify strengths and weaknesses in the lesson.  The UbD framework was also imbedded in a "capacity building" spirit.  If the teachers can understand how to effectively use the UbD framework for creating their own unique lessons, then moving students towards proficiency is a greater likelihood.