2014-2015
NORTH ADAMS PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Review of Results for Incoming Students & Development of Student Learning Goals
Guidance for Educators
Purpose: The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to teachers and teacher teams to assist them at the beginning of each school year in the review of prior year outcome data for their incoming group of students. The data provided for you to consider varies with your position.
r Most classroom teachers and those who work directly with small groups of students to teach various curricula will consider a variety of assessment data (including MCAS, district assessments, prior grades). These are all direct measures of student learning.
r Educators who provide non-academic supports and services will examine indirect measures of student learning, such as attendance or discipline rates, retention or graduation rates, etc.
r Administrators will work with outcome data at the building level.
The goal of this data review is to inform the development of your Student Learning SMART Goal(s) for 2014-2015. Each educator must develop at least one Student Learning Goal. The key question you should ask yourself as you review your data is “What do I hope to achieve with this group of students by the end of the school year?”
You are encouraged to work with colleagues who share your students or who have similar positions or teach the same courses to create common Team goals. These Team goals may be adopted/adapted as your individual Student Learning Goal that will become part of your individual 2014-15 Educator Plan. Principals and supervisors may direct you to concentrate on Team and/or Individual goals.
For educators working directly with assessment data, during this process you may also reflect on areas of weakness that may require some re-teaching of prior year skills/knowledge to enable students to access current year curriculum. You may also identify areas of strength that will allow you to reduce the amount of time you need to devote to certain new skills and concepts for some or all of your students. This reflection may not help in developing your Student Learning SMART Goal(s), but will provide you with information to assist in planning your instruction.
Alignment with District and School Goals:
You are also encouraged to align your Student Learning Goals with district and school goals. The district’s main goals continue to be to:
1. Improve proficiency rates for the core subjects (ELA, math, science, and social studies)
Note: You can also think about moving students who are well below proficiency to the next level. For example, some educators may choose to focus on moving students out of warning/failing level performance. Proficiency or progress toward proficiency might be measured through MCAS scores, district assessments, class or exam grades, etc.
2. Improve high school graduation rates
Note: This district goal is supported by a number of intermediate outcomes such as school attendance, passing courses, earning promotion to the next grade, etc.
3. Improve college and career readiness
Note: Measures of college and career readiness include enrollment in AP courses, scores on AP exams, completion of MassCore requirements, measures of social/emotional learning and development (including low frequencies of disciplinary referrals and suspensions), etc.
Your principal or district department head may share school or department goals with you to help you further refine and focus your goals.
Process
1. Collect the Data
Your first step will be to assemble all the relevant data you need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your students as a group. This data may include reports from your principal, supervisor, the building ILT or team leader on students’ prior performance on district assessments, or other indicators of student success such as attendance rates or disciplinary rates.
You should also be actively collecting your own data during the first month of school on your students to help you understand their strengths and challenges.
2. Examine the Data
Spend some time examining the data provided or other data you have that pertains to the group of students with whom you will be working this school year. Ask yourself and/or discuss with your colleagues the following questions:
1. What strengths do I see among this group of students?
2. In what areas have they struggled?
3. What one thing could I change this year for these students to make the biggest contribution to the district or school goals?
4. Are there things I am seeing in the data that I can actually impact through my work with students?
2. Draft a SMART Goal for these students
Develop a tentative Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-Tracked learning goal for these students. You have until October 15th to finalize your Student Learning Goal and the associated Educator Plan for working towards that goal.
In choosing numerical targets for your Student Learning Goal , a good general rule of thumb is to try to improve performance by 10% to 20% over the prior year’s or September baseline performance levels. If 10% of students performed at your desired level last year, your goal for this year might be to increase that to 11% (a 10% gain) or 12% (a 20% gain). If 50% of your students have an outcome you would like to reduce, your goal might be to reduce it to 45% (a 10% change) or 40% (a 20% change). You can also set goals that call for larger changes if these seem doable and appropriate. It is sometimes appropriate for 80% or 100% of your students to achieve some goal, regardless of where they started. With effective Tier I instruction, 80% of your students should be able to reach grade level goals by the end of the year.
Note: If you link your Student Learning Goal to measures that may not be available until after the end of the school year (such as MCAS scores, final grades, or other end-of-year statistics (e.g. retention rates, student support center referral rates, etc.)) you should submit other evidence of progress toward your goal to your evaluator next spring. Then, the next fall, report whether or not you achieved your goal, based on its measure, during your self-assessment process .
Remember, focused and faithful implementation of your Educator Plan (see 3 below) and significant progress toward your goal are what is important for your overall performance rating on your evaluation, rather than whether or not you actually achieve the goal.
At the end of this document you will find sample Student Learning Goals for educators working in various roles and grade levels.
3. Develop your Educator Plan
After setting a challenging yet attainable Student Learning Goal, you will develop specific plans regarding the action steps you will take to work toward your Student Learning Goal in the Action plan part of the SMART Goal. You will establish benchmarks to track students’ progress toward your goal over the course of the year. These will be due to your evaluator by October 15th.
Samples of SMART Goals with Educator Plans for Student Learning Goals are available on the district website under the Educator Evaluation link.
FUTURE WORK:
If the Student Learning Goal you draft today requires you to “move” the performance of some percent of the students under your care, you may want to begin to develop individual plans for those students to assist you in focusing your work with them. Consider the research-proven strategy of involving students in their own goal setting and improvement efforts. After the official release of the MCAS data in mid-September, other reports are available that are suitable for use with students to assist them in goal setting. These reports also help you to better understand individual student strengths and weaknesses. Please get in touch with your principal, supervisor, or department head to assist you in obtaining these reports. If there is other, non-MCAS assessment or outcome data you wish to use with students, feel free to contact those same individuals for assistance.
Guidance for K-3 Classroom Teachers
NOTE: The student learning goal examples below are meant to serve only as examples of possible areas of focus and appropriate formats. They are NOT based on any actual review of your data.
“xx% of the students will be on grade level (as measured by DIBELS and AIMSWEB) in reading and math by June 2014.” This might be appropriate for K students based on the percent on grade level on their K screening assessments.
“XX% of the students will meet the benchmark level for the DIBELS composite score by June 2014.” If 80% plus of your students ended last year at benchmark, you may want to maintain that level. If less than 80% ended at benchmark, you may want to increase this to 75% - 80%. The individual subtests (phoneme segmentation, nonsense word, oral reading fluency, retell) could be part of your action steps.
“XX% of students in my classroom will move out of the warning category on the AIMSweb Test of Early Numeracy screening by the end of this school year.”
“XX% of students will have a gap of no more than ten points between their addition and subtraction fluency scores by June 2014.”
“XX% of students will show mastery of concepts six weeks after re-teaching based on assessment results.” After getting district assessment results, plan re-teach, and re-test students to see if goal was met.
Guidance for Grade 4-7 Classroom Teachers
Most of you will receive MCAS data for your incoming students. Social Studies teachers will receive data on their end of year assessment for your incoming 7th graders, as well as last year’s 7th graders which can serve as the basis for comparison and goal setting for this year's cohort. Social studies teachers will also receive, a print out from our students data profiles for your incoming 6th graders that focuses on ELA skills, particular reading comprehension. Your colleagues in ELA will be able to explain the DIBELS data, and will be able to share with you more detailed MCAS data for that cohort of students. You might think about goals related to reading comprehension of informational texts.
NOTE: The student learning goal examples below are meant to serve only as examples of possible areas of focus and appropriate formats. They are NOT based on any actual review of your data.
“Reduce the percent of students scoring “warning” on grade 5 ELA MCAS to xx% by June 2014.” You might choose a target number that is about 20% lower than the number of kids who scored in warning on their grade 4 MCAS.
“The overall percentage of students scoring Proficient or higher on the 2014 Math MCAS will increase to xx%.” Set the goal about 20% higher than the proficiency rate those students achieved last year.
“For 80% of students their end of year science grade will increase by 10 points above their 2013 end of year grade by June 2014.””
“Reading comprehension for social studies (or science) texts will increase by 20% as measured by performance on released MCAS passages from September to June 2014.” Note: to assess this you would develop your own assessment.
Guidance for Grade 8-12 Core Subject Teachers
MCAS or NAPS Assessment results from last year are provided for individual teachers by period (with the exception of science - only grade level data is available at present). You will see a graph of overall performance, as well as an analysis by strand and standards (MCAS only) for your students. You are also encouraged to examine pass/failure rates for students in your discipline from the student data profiles, final exam scores from last year and other analysis you have performed as a department on your formative/summative assessment data.
NOTE: The student learning goal examples below are meant to serve only as examples of possible areas of focus and appropriate formats. They are NOT based on any actual review of your data.
Appropriate Student Learning Goals might be…
“Reduce the percent of students scoring “warning” on grade 8 math MCAS to xx% by June 2014.” You might choose a target number that is about 20% lower than the number of kids who scored in warning on their grade 7 MCAS.
“9th graders will earn 65% of possible points on MCAS-style open response items by June 2014.” The example is actually based on your data. It closes the gap with the state average on OR items on the 8th grade exam. The goal assumes that you would develop an end-of year assessment to measure this -- maybe giving a couple MCAS passages with OR questions to as part of your English 9 final exam.
“50% of students will earning qualifying scores on the AP exam by June 2014.”
“30% of students will improve their scores on the district writing assessment by one performance level between the Fall and Spring Assessments in 2013-2014.”
“Reduce the percent of students scoring “warning” on the social studies skills assessment by 20% by June 2014. (or “to xx%” if you want to pick a particular target based on what they are coming to you having scored).
Guidance for Elementary Non-Core Subject Teachers
You have been provided with printout from our student data profiles for grades 6 and 7. Your task is to consider how you can best support the high and moderate risk students in these grade levels within your disciplines. You may also consider common assessments within your discipline you may have administered last year as a basis for your student learning goal.