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CATHER SCHOOL RATED NUMBER ONE IN READING GAIN NEW LEARNING PROCESS HELPED MAKE THE DIFFERENCE
CHICAGO - August 29. The Willa Cather Elementary School, with a lot of hard work and creative problem-solving, is now rated Chicago’s number one school in reading improvement for the past school year out of 481 Chicago public elementary schools.
At the heart of the school’s success is its work with the Focused Instruction Process. It brings together Strategic Learning Initiatives’ (SLI) fifteen years of experience in Chicago with some of the most successful school reform efforts from across the nation. Over the past 16 months, ten schools in the Chicago Public Schools (Chicago Public Schools) have been adapting the process to their needs and are seeing the benefits.
Cather, located in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the City’s West Side, is also number one with its composite score gains which combine reading, math and science, all measured by the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT).
Cather’s ISAT reading score increased 12.5 percentage points from 35.2 in 2006 to 47.7 in 2007. The citywide average for reading increased 1.8 percentage points from 59.1 to 60.9. Cather showed reading gains at a rate of increase that is nearly seven times faster than the City average. (The Chicago Public Schools average is based on all the students, regardless of schools, while the network average is the school average not taking into account the different number of students at each school. The difference between the two is minimal.)
Cather, a K-8 school, is part of a network of five elementary schools on the West Side which volunteered to work with Strategic Learning Initiatives for four years to implement the Focused Instruction Process. The network schools, in their first year of participation, showed reading gains on the average per school that were twice as fast as the Chicago Public Schools elementary schools citywide.
Strategic Learning Initiatives is a Chicago-based nonprofit. It works with school and district leaders to accelerate student and adult learning by implementing research-based strategies through networks of neighborhood schools. In its efforts to help improve urban school districts, SLI also supports effective systemic change through policy research and publications.
Cather Principal Hattie King described what has happened as a “complete turnaround.” She explained what made the difference in her school:
“When I started here we were in the fourth year of restructuring, on probation, and ready to be reconstituted or closed. We dug into the data to diagnose where the problems were. We realized that we had to prescribe a plan that would address those problems in a systematic way. And we needed to act fast.”
“Strategic Learning Initiatives’ Focused Instruction Process provided a framework for what we knew we had to do. This meant diagnosing the ills in terms of students; looking at their assessments, seeing what they needed and where they were falling short, and then providing a plan which targeted instruction for groups of kids.”
“We were not only trying to get a plan for differentiating the instruction for different students, but also for the teachers. We provided professional development to guide the teachers. We wanted to make best practices routine.”
Dr. John Simmons, president of Strategic Learning Initiatives, notes that “The Focused Instruction Process is a process, not a program. While programs come and go, a process can be continuously improved and adapted by the teachers, parents and administrators. It relies on weekly assessment rather than yearly assessment. It can be adjusted to meet the particular needs of different schools and it is low cost per school. This process is grounded in forty years of education and business related research.”
The Strategic Learning Initiatives approach is built around teams that focus on shared leadership, professional development, and parent engagement. The SLI teams work with teams of parents, students, teachers, and the principal in each school and across the neighborhood network of schools to accelerate learning, often by two to three times that of comparable Chicago schools. As Cather teacher Barbara Relerford explains, “FIP was so successful in our school, with its focus on reading, that we used aspects of the strategies in other subject areas as well, such as science and math.”
Key ingredients of the Focused Instruction Process:
1) FIP is a data driven process, using classroom observations and teacher-selected assessments on a weekly basis rather than relying on once a year statewide testing. Teachers and students get the results back the next day, not three months later.
2) The data motivates teachers and students to improve their results and focus their daily effort. It provides teachers with the opportunity to reflect on how well they taught a specific lesson as well as what aspects of a lesson the students did not understand.
3) Students are motivated by a desire to do well on each lesson learned. Students who reach mastery are provided with enrichment activities and students who need additional instruction are provided small group tutoring.
4) Teachers become less isolated by attending regularly scheduled meetings with their grade level teams both inside the school and across all ten schools. They share strategies on what they have learned by discussing “what’s working” and “what needs improvement”. A shared curriculum calendar and input into the shared assessment tools provides teachers and school leadership teams with a new and empowering common ground.
5) Parents are engaged. Through a year long series of workshops, SLI’s award winning parent engagement team offers parents the tools (in Spanish or English) to provide support to their children at home. They are provided with the same instructional calendar used by the teachers. In 2007, for the third year in a row, Strategic Learning Initiatives has won the Partnership Organization Award from the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS) at John Hopkins University. “SLI is demonstrating that researched-based approaches can be used to increase family and community involvement in ways that contribute to student success in school,” said Dr. Joyce L. Epstein, Director of NNPS.
6) The leadership teams from the ten schools (principal, teacher and parent representatives from each school) meet regularly to share best practices, solve common concerns, review assessment results and improve the process at their school and across the network.
7) A unique support team comprised of Chicago Public Schools central office executives, area instructional officers, principals, teachers and SLI staff also meet regularly to identify and resolve systemic issues.
Congressman Danny K. Davis visited one of the FIP schools in his Congressional District. He had the opportunity to hear from a third-grade boy about his struggle with one week’s lesson, his opportunity to get extra help in the tutoring group when he didn’t do so well, and his vow to get into the enhancement group in the following week by working even harder in class.
As a former Chicago Public School teacher himself, Rep. Davis is working to close the achievement gap in schools across the nation. “I’m impressed with our progress in Chicago and haven’t seen this kind of progress in any other urban area in the country. I am committed to bringing the Chicago model to other cities. Strategic Learning Initiatives acts as a highly effective resource for schools. Cather staff, students and parents, plus the results that they have achieved are a model for the nation.”