Karen Harris
Baltimore County Public Schools
In the best-selling book Good to Great , Jim Collins maintains that we don't have great schools in America mainly because we have good schools. Perry Hall Elementary School, in Baltimore County, took up the challenge! How do you take a good school and make it a great one? How do you help all students achieve at a higher level?
Our students came to school well prepared and well supported by their parents. Perry Hall was and continues to be a stable community. Yet our scores on both national and state assessments were relatively flat. Our boys were under performing our girls in most areas. As a staff, we needed to decide where to put our focus in order to improve the achievement of all of our students. Over the last several years we have implemented three different-- yet connected-- initiatives in an effort to provide focused staff development, improve the quality of the work that we give students to do, and ultimately improve the achievement of all our students.
We began by embarking on a partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation as one of the nine Bay Schools in Maryland. Our connection with the Bay School Project provided our staff with intensive, focused staff development. The entire staff began working together in teams as they learned how to use the environment to create engaging lessons for the students. Each grade level team worked collaboratively to develop authentic, integrated lessons that engaged the students in solving real life problems related to our local environment.
For example, as part of our second grade curriculum, the students study the relationship of animals to their environment and animal habitats. During this unit, the students investigate the overarching question, “Is our schoolyard critter friendly?” and discovered that there were very few birds indigenous to Maryland around our schoolyard and local community, especially blue birds. The students decided to create a bluebird trail to attract bluebirds back to Perry Hall. During science lessons, they studied the habitats of bluebirds. During social studies, they studied neighborhoods and communities. As part of their language arts lessons, they wrote letters to the local newspapers about their project.
The culmination of their project was to work with Forest Oak Middle School in Montgomery County, one of the middle schools involved in the Bay School project, to construct bluebird boxes and create a bluebird trail throughout the schoolyard and local community. The students then began to monitor their boxes, used math skills to record their data, and wrote stories about their findings. When several of their boxes were vandalized, the students learned about having a political voice and wrote letters to the local newspapers describing their project and what had happened to it.
This project required the students to apply math, reading, writing, science, and social studies skills. The teachers were impressed with the quality of the student work. The students were motivated to learn, saw meaning to their learning, and were presenting to an authentic audience, all characteristics that lead to higher quality work. One student was overheard telling a classmate, “Working outdoors is like recess with learning!”
This project is just one of many that our teachers have learned to design through our connection with the Bay Schools Project. It is not unusual to see classes using our outdoor learning environment to teach descriptive language, measurement, poetry, and many other topics. Instruction is focused, students are engaged, and they are learning with a purpose. Our connection with the Bay School Project has been an exciting journey for all of us.
The same year that we became a Bay School, we looked at ways to help our teaching teams develop their capacity to plan, observe, analyze, and revise lessons based on the results of student work using the Lesson Study format. All the staff read the book The Teaching Gap by Stigler and James (1999) over the summer of 2000, and we developed a structure that would support lesson study in our school. We started small. One grade level decided to try the lesson study process. They selected a concept that had been difficult to teach, worked long hours to plan the lesson, and then took the plunge. The first teacher taught the lesson while team members and administrators observed. Immediately following the lesson, the entire team processed what had been observed and analyzed the work that the students had produced. Based on student behaviors during the lesson and the level of work that the students produced, the lesson was revised and the process repeated until all teachers on the team had a chance to teach the lesson.
By the end of the process, the teachers had created a high quality lesson that they all “owned.” Conversation had evolved from low level compliments to specific feedback on the types of questions teachers asked the students, the work that they were giving students to do, and the changes that needed to be made to get all students to work at a higher level. In short, the teachers were having deep and rich conversations about the components of effective instruction.
At the end of the year, the fourth grade team presented their findings to the entire staff. Lesson study was powerful and contagious. The next year, all but one team decided to participate in the lesson study format. Now, lesson study is part of the culture of our school. As a teacher remarked, “The lesson study process is collaborative. My grade level partners and I discuss our lesson during lunchtime, before school, as an inspiration occurs to one of us on the way to a break, and during playground duty in the afternoon! It is wonderful – ideas flow; one teacher's idea will spark a thought from another teacher. Each of us has a vested interest in the success of the plan, not as a bother to another teacher, but as a contributor to a process that can only benefit each of us individually and our students collectively.
What better way to experience personal professional growth, mentoring, and team building, while at the same time, doing what is right for our students.” The lesson study process has taken our professional development to a higher level. Teachers now spend their free time sharing ideas, discussing effective teaching strategies, and collaborating on lessons far beyond the lesson study process.
This past year we added the third prong to our professional development. Our staff read Working on the Work, by Philip Schlechty (2002). At an initial meeting, we discussed how the 10 design qualities outlined in the book related to what we were already doing at Perry Hall to create engaging work for our students. We also evaluated which of the design qualities we needed to focus on to make the work we were designing for the students more engaging. As Schlechty says in the book, “One of the primary tasks of teachers is to provide for students work with which students engage and from which they learn what it is intended that they learn.” Our staff had made incredible progress over the past several years designing meaningful work for students, but we believed that the W.O.W. framework could help us refine our efforts.
Again, we began small. As a staff, we identified which one of the ten design qualities-- authenticity, content and substance, choice, product focus, affirmation, organization of knowledge, affiliation, clear product standards, novelty and variety, and protection from initial failure -- we were going to focus on for the first half of the year. Because so many of the design qualities were being addressed through our Bay School Project, we were already well on the way to implementing the framework successfully. However, we concluded that we didn't provide our students with sufficient “Choice” in their instruction.
We decided to make a commitment as a staff to include choice at least once during the week. Some teachers provided options for formative assessments. Others allowed students to select the focus of their project or how they would present their knowledge to the rest of the class. During faculty meetings, teachers shared samples of student work and some of the ways that they had used choice in recent lessons.
Teachers were also encouraged to investigate how they could weave choice into lesson study conversations. These conversations helped teachers become familiar with and deepen their understanding of the language of the Working on the Work framework. Finally, as teachers planned their Bay School projects, they looked at ways to incorporate choice. For example, one team allowed the students to individually decide which outdoor learning site they would investigate as they wrote descriptive phrases. The Working on the Work framework was a natural fit to what we were already doing, helping our teachers create more engaging work for their students.
In the last three years, there have been many positive changes in our school's climate and culture, and substantial improvements in student achievement.
When students, parents, and visitors enter our building, it is obvious that we are focused on students, teaching, and learning. There is quality student work posted everywhere, teachers are sharing ideas, parent volunteers are working with individual students, and there is an energy in the building. Our teachers have a positive attitude about what they do. They work closely with their colleagues to plan lessons, look at student work, and have fun. They want to be at Perry Hall Elementary because it is an exciting place to be.
There have also been improvements in students' academic performance and behavior. Throughout the building, students can be found working with their classmates, applying teacher feedback to their writing, and investigating real life problems in order to make our school and local community a better place. Students are definitely learning with a purpose, and they know what that purpose is.
In addition, we have seen steady improvement on our CTBS scores. In 1999, 88.7% of our second grade students and 86.1% of our fourth grade students were reading on or above grade level. Last year, 97.2% of our second grade students and 90.7% of our fourth grade students are reading on or above grade level. We have also seen a 5.5% increase in our fourth grade math scores over the last three years. When the data were disaggregated, we also noted that our boys have made improvements. It appears that boys learn better through hands on, engaging work.
In addition to our academic improvement, we have seen a change in behavior. Our office referrals and out of school suspensions have continued to decrease. Students would much rather be in their classrooms than sitting in the office.
We are pleased with the changes that have taken place at Perry Hall and feel that a great part of our success is due to the fact that we maintain a consistent focus from year to year. Over the last three years, we decided to focus on examining the quality of student work. We have only added strategies that supported that focus. In these ways, we are becoming a great school for the Perry Hall community.
Karen Harris is principal of Perry Hall Elementary School in Baltimore County, Maryland. She may be reached at kharris@bcps.org .