Carle Place, NY 11514
Phone (516) 812-6770
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Report on the ISA Sustainability Inventory Visit
to ISA Sample School
April 4, 2010
Members of Visiting Team:
XXXX, Facilitator, ISA Coach
YYYY, ISA Coach
ZZZZ, Counselor, ISA Prep
AAAA, Principal, ISA Creative Academy
BBBB, Math Teacher, ISA North School
CCCC, Science Teacher, ISA South School
Introduction
The purpose of the ISA Sustainability Inventory school visit is to present your school with an external perspective on the components of the ISA model that are being effectively implemented and the areas for further development. The findings of this visit, along with the other data, will help your school and ISA determine the supports needed to sustain your achievements and provide further development.
We would like to thank you for the opportunity to visit your school. We always learn a lot about our own situation when we see others engaged in activities and challenges that occupy us. This report is based on our experience visiting your school. It describes the components of the ISA model that your school is implementing and areas for further development. During the course of our visit, we had an opportunity to learn about the your school through your presentation, our visits to classes, a review of samples of student work and corresponding teacher assignments, and interviews we conducted with your teachers, students, and parents. We are aware that this report is based on evidence of one day’s visit and therefore a slice of life at your school, rather than everything you are doing. Understanding the limitation of a one-day visit, we nonetheless believe that our findings can be useful in the development of your school and we hope you concur.
The Visiting Team’s Findings
From the evidence we collected, we conclude that there is effective implementation of these components of the ISA model:
1. Distributed Counseling
2. Dedicated interdisciplinary grade level teams of teachers and counselor and common planning time
3. Extended Day and School Year
4. Parent Involvement.
We found evidence of some implementation of a college preparatory instruction, inquiry, higher order thinking, and literacy across the curriculum
Here are the data sources and evidence that led us to this conclusion:
1. Distributed counseling:
· In your presentation you discussed the use space to create a “hub” to ensure students’ access to administrators and sense of safety, security, and being cared for.
· Interviews with students confirmed the achievement of your goal to ensure students’ access to school adults, and a sense of safety, security, and being cared for. Several students said that they can point to more than one adult for academic, social and emotional support including teachers, administrators and counselors and that this was very different from their previous schools. One student said, “I have never been so close to another adult aside from my parents.”
· In interviews, parents reported that teachers, counselors, and administrators are always accessible demonstrating caring and commitment to students and families
· In your presentation, you discussed your 4-year advisory program that addresses students’ emotional, social and academic needs and college preparation. They also include character building, tolerance, peer counseling, and senior talk across grades. Advisories meet once a week and every student has an advisor who is the anchor for that student and who is responsible for communication with that student’s family. Advisors keep track of students’ academic, social, and emotional development.
· Your report on your 4-year college preparation program indicates that it is intensive. You use advisory for students to discuss with their advisors and peers what their college plans are, what colleges they want to attend, transcripts, anxieties and the application process. Advisories plan and go on visits to colleges.
2. Dedicated Team and Common Planning Time:
· Your school is organized into 3 grade level interdisciplinary teams of teachers and a counselor who have regular common planning time. The three teams are: 9th, 10th and a combined 11th and 12th grade.
· Each grade level team has a special education teacher
· Teams use the team structure and common planning time to do kid talk, look at student work, and do general, CTT, and advisory planning
3. Extended Day and School Year
· In your report, you discussed that extended day and school year are used to support college going and high school graduation:
· Extended day is used very effectively to keep students on track to graduation
· There are a variety of academic and college prep activities, including, math peer coaching, Books and Bagels, Mural club, Latino club, robotics club, and fashion club
· Saturday school is used for College Now and to keep students on track for graduation
· In summer school there are projects that engage students in primary research such as the Coney Island Project and secondary research such as creating your own civilization and comparing it with another civilization
· Test prep is conducted after school
4. Parent Involvement:
· In interviews, parents stated that they have strong access to the school through Teacher Es and by direct contact with staff—one parent commented that the principal returned a call over the weekend. There are evening interventions involving parents in problem solving around their child’s performance.
· Parents feel well informed about college. They explained that your support for college preparation is individualized by student need and interest, as well as financial need.
· There is a mechanism that ensures that each parent has 5 other parents to contact; so parents can be well informed by their peer group as well as the professionals in the school.
· There is a freshman parent orientation and fun day to inform and invite the parents into the school community.
· Parents have confidence that this is not a test prep school and their children are being taught to think, to do, and enjoy learning.
· You are planning to expand parent involvement through the development of a PTA.
5. College Preparatory Instructional Program
In our visits to classrooms and review of student work and corresponding teacher assignments, we saw evidence of opportunities for students to engage in inquiry and apply higher order skills:
· In science students read primary sources by Lamarck and Darwin;
· In two science classes text was used to help students analyze complex issues regarding evolution as well as research they were doing on topics such as swine flu;
· There was intellectual openness in a living environment class where students used real life examples to debate how quickly evolution occurs;
· In a living environment class, the teacher used open-ended questions to encourage students’ intellectual openness
· In an English class students made connections across media –text, images, song, and technology—demonstrating differentiation in instruction and learning;
· There was use of rubrics in most classrooms
· In a social studies class students made real world connections between the Reformation and school or societal reform
· In a science class students chose research topics for investigation
· A teacher assignment asked students to research an issue of interest, analyze it, and generate their own conclusions. This resulted in 6-10 page papers in which students demonstrated their knowledge of research paper conventions such as the proper use of citations and bibliography. We felt this was a college preparatory assignment because it generated student products such as the reports, Obsession Compulsive Disorder and Sleep Deprivation, which showed some in depth knowledge of the topics.
· In another assignment students had to research and apply findings to the design of a structure, for example the earthquake project
· In one project, students had to write a proposal to participate in government: The product demonstrated students’ capacity to organize an event, to reflect on the outcomes, to collaborate, to work independently, and to fulfill some type of community service. These are skills that will serve students when they are in college and after.
The Visiting Team’s Recommendations
In your report, you presented plans for effective implementation of organizational improvement and some ideas for the effective implementation of a college preparatory instructional program. We recommend that you move forward with those.
From the evidence we collected we recommend further development in the area of inquiry based instruction and higher order thinking as they are integral to a college preparatory instructional program:
· Learning through social development and social interaction is very strong at your school, as evidence by comments of all students and parents interviewed. Learning through intellectual development is not as strong as evidenced by your own assessment in your presentation to us this morning and in students’ comments such as this one: “that academically at times it has been weak here, but the social aspects of the school have made up for the academic deficiencies and I feel better prepared for college than my other friends at other schools.”
o We concur with your assessment in your presentation on the need to develop academic rigor. In pursuit of academic rigor, we suggest that you define rigor more clearly. Additionally, we recommend that your definition of rigor be operationalized for each of the four years of high school and in each subject area. We suggest that you use your instructional framework to guide you in this pursuit as it is rich in indicators of rigor.
o We suggest that in your development of a more rigorous instructional program, you explore these questions in individual content areas and as a school as a whole:
§ What are the indicators of rigor your will focus on in each subject area in each grade?
§ What are images of rigorous teaching and learning in classrooms?
§ What are indicators of rigorous teaching practices that you will expect of teachers?
§ What are indicators of rigorous project assignments?
§ What are indicators of rigorous student products?
o We recommend that you assemble samples of teacher assignments and students’ work that demonstrate these indicators of rigor so that you have a common vision of what rigor is and so that you have exemplars that can be used by teachers and students to strengthen their work.
· We concur with teachers who said:
o More professional development in college preparatory instruction is needed during the school year in school. They said that they have opportunities for such professional development at the ISA summer institute, but need to expand this during the year at the school. School-embedded professional development will support your goal of increasing the rigor of your instructional program.
o Teachers suggested that your graduates be invited back to the school to help the faculty understand what is needed in college and to use that feedback to inform their instruction.
We realize that the development of rigor in your instructional program is a multi-year pursuit but feel confident that you have the commitment to accomplish it.
Conclusion
Again we thank you for the opportunity to visit. We appreciate the time and effort you spent putting together your data and presentation and organizing people for us to interview. Please extend our thanks to the teachers who invited us into their classrooms and those who contributed their work for us to review. We saw many ways in which your school is effectively implementing the ISA model. We hope that our report will be useful to you in your continued development and that you will share it with the members of your school community.
I
Inspiring Students to Achieve
www.studentachievement.org