Date:May 29, 2013
To: Dr. Keith Marty, Superintendent
Parkway Board of Education
From: Dr. Rebecca Langrall, Curriculum Coordinator, Secondary English Language Arts
RE: 2011 Program Evaluation Update
Abstract: Recommendations from the 2011 Secondary English Language Arts Program Evaluation fell into four categories: Curriculum Audit and Revision, Assessment, Instruction, and Stakeholders. This memo describes accomplishments to date in each area and project plans for completingadditional work between now and the next ELA program evaluation in 2017.
Curriculum Audit and Revision
Align the enduring understandings, knowledge, and skills to the mission and vision, as well as to the newly adopted Common Core Standards: 40% complete as of now for both levels.
In the Summer of 2012, middle school (MS) curriculum writing teams revised two of the five MS units per grade level with these features, Unit #2, “Writing to Understand” and Unit #5, “Writing Nonfiction,” respectively. This summer two MS curriculum teams will do the same for Unit #1, “Reading to Understand” and Unit #3, “Reading Fiction” for all three MS grades.
Last summer three high school (HS) curriculum action teams began writing sample units for Grade 9, Grade 10 and Grade 11 with these features. The units for Grades 9 and 10 will be completed bythe end of June 2013 and posted on the Online Curriculum Guide. The sample unit for Grade 11 will be completed by August, 2013.
Audit the curriculum to ensure outcomes are rigorous and aligned between sixth through twelfth grades: 75% complete for MS; 30% complete for HS.
To increase rigor at the MS level, Hillock’s levels of questioning have been integrated into Units #1 and #3 “Reading Fiction.” These entail moving student response to literature from addressing basic stated relationships (Level 1) though structural generalizations (Level 7). Further, we have integrated more complex text (both fiction and nonfiction) into these units. In addition, to address this goal and the increased rigor of the Common Core State Standards, argument writing has been integrated into Unit #5 (Nonfiction Writing) and the District Benchmark Assessments for Grades 6 – 8. (Argument writing has since spread to many social studies and science classrooms, where students are asked and are able to supply a claim, evidence, and a warrant from others’ writing or within their own.)Next steps include documenting and sharing examples of student work from Grade 5 through Grade 11 with the following year’s teachers to help them understand the level and scope of student performance in the preceding grade. Especially with entering Grade 6 and Grade 9 students, expectations have been lower than appropriate resulting in less than optimal use of instructional time. One MS is experimenting with ‘looping’ which will allow teachers to pick up where they left off and encourage positive growth from the outset.
This spring the HS Department Leader Curriculum Action Team (CAT) and I developed the Parkway Grade 9 - 12 ELA Framework, which synthesized the building-specific curriculum documents of each HS ELA department into one set of guaranteed and aligneddistrict commitments. In 2013 – 2014, we will extend the longitudinal writing development rubrics from Teachers College (Columbia University) from K – 8 to Grades 9 – 12 using Parkway anchors as a way to guide instruction and assessment of writing development in the narrative, informational and argumentative writing modes. Starting in July 2013, I will begin to organize the OCG by strand (Reading, Writing, Listening/Speaking, and Language) within English 1 - 4. Each strand for each course will contain lessons and formative assessments addressing the associated priority standards, with the goal of increasing options for re-teaching for students who do not reach a target and for extending the learning for those ready to move ahead. Finally, this goal will be addressed beginning this June, through the creation of District Benchmark Assessments aligned to priority Common Core State Standards that the HS Department Leaders finalized this past winter.
Evidence that Parkway has been making progress on this goal comes in the form of district achievement as measured in the following ways:
2011 / 2012 / ChangeEXPLORE - Reading / 57% @ BMK / 58% @ BMK / Gain
EXPLORE - English / 74% @ BMK / 74% @ BMK
PLAN – Reading / 63% @ BMK / 71% @ BMK / Gain
PLAN - English / 80% @ BMK / 84% @ BMK / Gain
ACT - Reading / 56% @ BMK / 58% @ BMK / Gain
ACT - English / 73% @ BMK / 80% @ BMK / Gain
MAP Grade 6 / 65.3% Prof or Adv. / 68% Prof or Adv. / Gain
MAP Grade 7 / 69.2% P or A / 71.2% P or A / Gain
MAP Grade 8 / 69.3% P or A / 70.4% P or A / Gain
English 2 EOC / 84.8% P or A / 84.7% P or A
Increase opportunities for transfer of learning, creativity, and civic responsibility through reading and writing. We have made more progress on transfer and civic responsibility with MS than HS. Social justice is part of MS Unit #4 (Reading Nonfiction); and, as stated earlier,we have anecdotal evidence of students transferring their knowledge of argument writing across the curriculum. Future work in this area will include greater emphasis on student interests and learning profiles as part of the differentiation work TLA began this year; global collaboration,as more technology is integrated into the units; as well as work with all content teachers on content literacy, with the hope that we canshare rubrics, before/during/after reading strategies, writing-to-learn, representing-to-learn, and academic vocabulary strategies. To build a foundation for the latter, in 2010 – 2011 and 2011 – 2012, I led book studies with core content curriculum coordinatorson content literacy, These studies, along with the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in the Content areas, have helped to foster interest among coordinators in transfer of key academic skills across content areas and between grade levels.
At theHS level, a cultural shift is needed to help everyone understand that our ultimate goal as educators is about what students can do on their own after they leave us. Teachers and supervisors need ‘look-fors’ to help with this, e.g., the number of connections students are making within and across topics, and examples of actual use of learning. ‘Cold reads’ and performance tasks that require synthesis of multiple multi-modal ‘stimuli’will be included in the District Benchmark Assessments (DBAs) to be written this June, which should help to measure transfer. Like the MSDBAs, the new HS DBAs will also include a post-assessment reflection lesson to increase students’ understanding of learning targets and their progress toward mastery. In terms of creativity and civic responsibility, in 2013 – 2014, a group I lead as part of the Diversity in Action district team that is focused on “Equity in the Curriculum” will obtain feedback from the Social Emotional Action Team on an audit tool designed this year to measure the extent to which students are engaged in work that addresses inequities in the status quo through real world problem-solving. The Equity team will then review sample units in all content areas at the elementary, middle, and high school level as a step toward more focused attention on integrating civic responsibility and social justicethroughout the entire Parkway curriculum.
Integrate lessons aimed at helping students develop a positive online presence. Not yet started.
This goal falls outsidecurrent priority standards, so has not yet been addressed in a systematic way. Students have exposure in library lessons and some classrooms where online discussions are held. Some lessons are embedded within research units at the HS, but mostly the emphasis is onciting sources correctly to avoid plagiarism.Administrators and counselors are helping with the social media challenges in some buildings during Ac Lab through ‘Pause before you post’ plugs related to Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram. More lessons are needed around netiquette, privacy, and student online profiles. Focused attention on this will start in 2014 – 2015, as TLA moves deeper into integrating technology into instruction and assessment.
Assessment
Develop and implement a balanced assessment system for both reading and writing, including benchmark, curriculum-based, performance, diagnostic, and formative assessments. MS: completed. HS: 30%.
In the MS, we have expanded the range of assessment types to include DBAs, Collaborative Learning Team-based formative assessments, and diagnostic assessments within the Reading Intervention classes like the Jerry Johns Basic Reading Inventory, Fountas and Pinnell’s Benchmark Assessments, and RAPS 360 -- an online diagnostic reading assessment that produces 8 different measures including comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency. Professional development began this year on integrating the Fountas and Pinnell classroom assessments into regular and intervention classrooms and will be ongoing. The DBAs contain a variety of item types, selected response, constructed response, and extended constructed response opportunities to assess both reading and writing. Still needed on the DBAs and on end-of-unit assessments are multi-modal performance events akin to those we will see with the Next Generation Assessments. We are working with Coordinator of Assessment, Kevin Beckner, to putthe DBAs online and improving data upload/transfer to PARS.
For HS, there is currently one district common assessment, the Grade 9 District Essay. This will be supplanted in 2013 – 2014 by the DBAs to be developed this June and field tested in 2013 – 2014 in English 1 – 3 and fourth credit courses. The DBAs will include both reading and writing targets and involve selected response, constructed response, and performance task item types. Formative assessments are the focus within the collaborative teams that were begun this past year. In two HSs, formative data are shared within the CLT/PLC and in two, they are housed in teachers’ individual grade books and are used as the basis for discussion about commonalities.Curriculum-based and diagnostic assessments are in their infancy at the HS level. The longitudinal writing rubrics mentioned earlier will be developed in 2013 – 2014 and help with diagnosing writing needs. The HS Reading and Literacy Think Tank has begun to identify possible assessments that could help with diagnosing reading needs. Use of RAPS 360 has just started at the HS level. Next steps include identifying additional curriculum-based assessments, one of the goals of the Think Tank in 2013 – 2014. Next steps will also include training teachers -- all teachers, not just ELA, not just intervention teachers -- on these measures to help with targeted support in the regular (Tier 1) setting.
Develop a system to ensure systematic assessment data collection and analysis for all grade levels. MS, 75%; HS, 25%.
Two initiatives undertaken in 2012 – 2013 have helped to address this goal: The MS and HS Reading Intervention Think Tanks and Professional Learning Communities. The K – 12 Reading Intervention Facilitator, a HS Reading Intervention Specialist, Progress Monitoring Coordinator John Barrow and I have convened MS and HS Reading Intervention Think Tanks this year to develop systemic practices for the identification, placement, support, and monitoring of students needing interventions. We have defined risk point ranges and shared best practices in Progress Monitoring using a rubric one of the work teams within the district Assessment team developed this year. While the middle schoolshave had the benefit of a district-supported reading intervention program for many years, this has not been the case at the high schools. Parkway is now shining a light on the needs of struggling HS students, with the hope that if the structures are built, the needed resources will follow.
The PLC initiative supported by late start days once a month this past year has allowed teachers to begin to collect data on SMART goals. Some schools have a refined set of baseline, formative and summative assessments in place (SH Grades 9 and 10 PLCs, in particular), while others are just starting to develop them. Next steps include aligning HS PLC SMART goals with the priorities the Department Leader Action team finalized in 2012 – 2013 that will be assessed on the new DBAs and eventually, on the patterns of need they surface.
Develop structures and programs to ensure that parents receive clear information regarding student progress based on assessment reports that are easy to understand. Not yet started.
Individual ELA departments have local expectations for ways to partner more consistently and effectively with parents. Needed are ways to make the Online Curriculum Guide more parent-friendly,efficient ways to share the priorities for each grade level and unit with parents through group messages,ways to link parents to teacher webpages where learning targets are posted,and ways to make Infinite Campus more understandable for those who check it. Current feedback indicates that some parents don’t see commonalities in what is graded or how it’s weighted across courses within a student’s schedule, which they find confusing.
At the MS, in 2013 – 2014, two schools are pursuing standards-based grading, which will entail common reporting standards displayed in a consistent way on Infinite Campus for parents of students in those settings. This architecture will remain consistent from Grades 6 – 8 and should help increase clarity of learning targets and student progress for parents and for students. Some schools have implemented student-led conferences, which have helped both students and parents understand the learning targets and progress toward them. In 2013 – 2014, as teachers create their webpages usingEdline, the new course management system Parkway adopted this year, and as more teachers offer online components to their courses, parents will be able to see even more of what is happening within students’ classes and thus be better positioned to ask informed questions and support student learning from home.
Instruction
Emphasize development in and integration of the learning principles. MS: 66%, HS: 33%
For MS, the learningprinciples we have addressedmost explicitly in the last two years through district development and curriculum writing have been “understand the purpose and outcomes of their learning as well as the standards required for success” (as seen in an intentional posting of EQs, I Can statements for lessons), and “use feedback to improve products, performances, key skills and transfer of learning” (as seen in the post-assessment reflect lessons and the many metacognitive reflections embedded in exit slips and other daily means for giving and receiving feedback). Field work with teachers in Years Two and Three has emphasized ‘construct[ing] new knowledge by building on prior knowledge and activating earlier ideas.” While some work has been done in the area of “mak[ing] meaning within helpful conceptual frameworks” as seen in the introduction of the Hillocks’ Levels of Reading Response, more work is needed and will be done as the Teachers College longitudinal (developmental) writing rubrics and the Fountas and Pinnell classroom reading assessments are more fully integrated. These will be focal points for development over the next two years. In terms of the “capacity to learn is not fixed; ability and understanding can always improve,” in August of 2012 I provided development to elementary and MS instructional coaches on Carol Dweck’s work with ‘growth’ vs ‘fixed’ mindsets. In the schools where they were asked to track their performance on priority “I Can” statements by collecting ‘evidence’ of learning to prove mastery, MS students were readily able to adopt a growth mindset.
For HS, the learning principle most fully present is “self-assess and self-adjust learning through reflection against rigorous goals,” as seen in students learning to evaluate their writing against anchors and the Parkway on-demand and processed writing rubrics. A post-assessment reflection lesson accompanying the District Essay provided Grade 9 students a chance to engage in these processes. The learning principles need to be explicitly modeled in district development and teachers need to see how and why they affect student performance. I am offering a session on content literacy at the 2013 Parkway PLC Institute that will include modeling an ‘interactive read aloud/think aloud strategy,’to help teachers help students think like experts do within particular disciplines. This will help with the learning principle “make meaning of content within helpful conceptual frameworks.”
In the next two years, for both levels, more development is needed on the following principles: “transfer their learning to new situations beyond the classroom and school,” which should occur as more real world problem-solving is introduced into the curriculum; “test ideas, take intellectual risks and learn from mistakes” which should occur naturally in classrooms that migrate toward standards-based grading and mastery learning; and “experience learning challenges that match their abilities, needs and interests,” which should occur with TLA’s work this spring on a differentiation guide for addressing students’ readiness, interests, learning profile and career paths.
Ensure that teachers and students connect their work to the Essential Questions (EQs) and priority “I Can” statements/standards. MS – 90%; HS – 20%