NO CHILD (OR EDUCATOR) LEFT BEHIND:

A SUCCESSFUL MODEL FOR ASSESSING

ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS

Shelly Solomon Huggins

Towson University

Adequate Yearly Progress! Let's talk instead about Student Achievement Through Daily Instruction (SATDI). After all, are increments of growth or decline really made on a yearly or daily basis? Students don't just become a year behind in school by the end of the year! It happens daily, as they continuously fail to meet each day's learning goal. The SATDI model, developed and implemented at Lansdowne Middle School in Baltimore County, helped to show an average of 30% growth in student achievement in targeted areas over a three-year period. Key to this model are instructional leadership, professional development, and strategic data collection focused on analyzing student work.

How can we hold students and educators responsible for the continuous improvement of achievement? One visionary administrator in the Baltimore County Public Schools asked that question of his school, and we spent the next three years answering it together.   Lansdowne Principal Thomas DeHart knew well his school population and its particular areas of need. The school's demographics indicated an at-risk population. The school was receiving Title I funds, 64 % of the students received free and reduced meals, 15% of students did not operate with English as their first language, there was a 34% mobility rate, and 15% of students were receiving special education services. The school's MSPAP scores were not close to meeting standards.

Lansdowne Middle School's 1999 MSPAP Scores

Mr. DeHart was concerned for the school and his students' achievement. He had a vision of holding students and teachers accountable for each day's learning. As a staff, we were energized by his vision and his proposal to create a position in the building for an instructional leader to be called an achievement facilitator. He offered me this position and encouraged me to make it my own, focusing on the instructional program, the school improvement plan, and professional development.

After spending the summer reviewing the school improvement plan and data, we were perplexed by the discrepancies in the state reported data points. The school's Maryland Functional Reading Test scores indicated 97% of our students passing. Our students were able to perform proficiently on a functional reading test but were having trouble with MSPAP, which required students to communicate what they learned in their subject areas through writing.   We realized that, if we could improve students' ability to communicate through reading and writing, they would be more productive citizens and the MSPAP scores would climb as well.

Around this time, the Baltimore County Public Schools assigned our school two new mentor teachers. Mentor teachers are placed in sites that have a large number of new, non-tenured teachers. The mentor teacher role is to provide support to new teachers in their first two to five years of teaching. The two mentor teachers who joined our leadership team were instructional leaders of the highest caliber.   Susan Domanico and Sam Richman embraced and constantly enhanced the SATDI vision.

Revitalized by two fresh eyes on the issues, the enlarged leadership team had several discussions to identify our targeted learning goals. We adopted aggressive reading and writing school improvement plan goals, which included a management plan component. Under the plan, teachers were going to be held accountable for daily student achievement through weekly data review sessions focusing on the analysis of student work. The data collected would reflect instructional growth on each of the four reading stances through the use of the reading strategy ACE and the language usage standards using the writing strategy of CUPS.

ACE is a strategy that helps organize students' responses to stance statements by leading them through a three-step process. First, they are encouraged to create an a nswer stem for the question. Second, they are asked to use c itations from the text to support their response. Third, they are prompted to e xtend their response into a broader experience for the reader. The CUPS strategy helps students organize their editing process through four areas: c apitalization, u sage, p unctuation, and s pelling. Targeting these strategies with the faculty and collecting weekly data for each section of students provided us with valuable diagnostic information, but it wasn't enough. We next needed to connect our students' growth with the MSPAP.

To make the connection between classroom learning and the large-scale assessment, we created quarterly simulations of the MSPAP.   The assessments had parallel activities so progress could be gauged across time. For example, the first activity in each simulation always assessed students' ability to create a content-based summary statement, which addressed the Global Stance.

Each simulation activity measured one of the four stances as well as the language usage standard. The content and context of the text changed with each quarter, but the assessed standard was the same. The scoring tools for the simulations were also maintained throughout the three years. The resulting academic growth in targeted stance statements is represented in the following table:

All Student Comparison

(Percent at Satisfactory)

* Note: Activity 6 was designated as a “wild card” question. It did not measure the same standard for each simulation and therefore cannot be compared over time.

We also disaggregated the data collected for simulations 2 and 3 by race and gender and found that our achievement gap data declined slightly between our minority students and our Caucasian students, as opposed to the gap in MSPAP scores, which had been increasing. Not only did overall achievement increase, on average, the racial difference of   9.2 % in the second simulation declined to a 7.5 % difference by the last one.

Disaggregated (by race) Simulation Scores

Percentage at satisfactory, all students

                                                        Average difference of 7.5

Of course, we couldn't hold teachers accountable for growth without professionally arming them for instructional changes. After a series of whole group professional development sessions, which helped us to set a framework and build a general knowledge base for reading and writing in the content area strategies, we were able to differentiate the professional development for all faculty members.

The two mentor teachers and I divided up the faculty into groups by needs as indicated by a self-reporting survey and by administrator observation. Novice teachers were always grouped together, focusing on the same content as the more experienced teachers but in more depth and breadth. The other teachers met in heterogeneous groups, differentiated based on need. Many times, a third year teacher was working aside a twenty-year veteran. This type of differentiated instruction for faculty continued throughout the next three years.

These professional development sessions were often focused on aspects of reading and writing in the content area. Pre, post, and during reading strategies were presented and applied in the first few sessions. Anticipation guides were of particular interest to our faculty. Because vocabulary retention was an issue for our students, some of the professional development sessions focused on research-based practices for introducing content area vocabulary. The creation and application of scoring tools were also topics of several professional development programs.

After arming the faculty with the instructional strategies necessary for improvement, we also had to give them some basic understanding of data collection practices and statistics. Teachers were provided with a crash course in data and statistics that covered just what they needed to know to participate in the analysis of student work.

Eventually, teachers were held accountable for weekly submissions of data that directly reflected their students' attainment of daily objectives. Teachers collected data on the percentage of students in each section that were able to satisfactorily address the targeted stance statement within the content text. The data were also disaggregated so that teachers could focus on individual student strengths and weaknesses in addressing the stance statements.

After these data were collected and collated, the achievement facilitator met with each team of teachers to discuss the student work reflected in data. During these collaborative sessions, diagnostic information was reviewed and instructional alternatives were discussed.

Because teachers had data on individual and group growth over time and across content areas, they were able to adjust their instruction. If one particular teacher found success with a student others were struggling with, the successful teacher's strategies and pedagogy were explored, discussed, and adopted by others. If one teacher was struggling with a particular aspect of the standards addressed, the data clearly reflected the need for the team to help address that weakness.

For example, teachers began to realize that their students had a limited ability to extend their responses. It was decided that less instructional time would be spent on addressing the answer stem and citation statements of the responses for ACE and more time would be spent on the extension techniques. It was so exciting to see changes in instruction celebrated and heralded by colleagues. Teachers problem solved and struggled together, and students made unprecedented gains!

The collaborative nature of the weekly meetings was enlightening to new and veteran teachers alike. Instruction was the topic of concern everywhere in the building. Teachers were holding their students, their colleagues, and themselves to higher expectations than ever before. This focused effort paid off when MSPAP was next given in 2002 as the following growth was reported:

Lansdowne Middle School's 1999 and 2002 MSPAP Scores

How does this model apply today? Although the state mandated assessment has changed, in Maryland, the standards have not. The instructional standards, indicators and objectives that comprise the Maryland Voluntary State Curriculum could be the basis of this model.   Keys are teacher collaboration, data accountability for the continuous improvement of student work, and differentiated professional development.   Together, they help ensure Student Achievement through Daily Instruction and make Annual Yearly Progress a certainty!

About the Author

Dr. Shelly Solomon Huggins is a member of the Department of Secondary Education in the College of Education, at Towson University.   She may be reached at shuggins@towson.edu .