Impact & Innovation Awards 2013 s1
Quality Teacher & Education Act
Impact & Innovation Awards 2013
Impact Strategy #1
The goal we selected to focus on was Access and Equity, Making Social Justice a Reality
English Learners are 61% of Cleveland’s student body--our largest group of struggling students. In the past few years our staff, ILT, and SSC have put in place a number of educational structures, laying the foundation for increased progress, in our Annual Measurable Achievement Objectives as determined by our CELDT results, as well as our CST proficiency gains, both in ELA and Math. We have an increasingly solid English Language Development program, augmenting our ELD class time from the mandated 30 minutes per day to 40 minutes. Our teaching staff has intensive professional development in ELD instruction and strategies which are utilized throughout the school with increased efficacy. We also continued to target funds for a .75 FTE Spanish language arts resource teacher and a full-time Spanish bilingual paraprofessional to support early literacy.
To align our work and provide support for classroom instruction, on Tuesdays each grade level works with our IRF to focus on student work, review and analyze assessment data, and align instruction. Special attention at the Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades to administer and analyze F&P assessments has also been extremely helpful.
ELD, Tier II interventions through literacy support both in English and Spanish language arts and strong language arts instruction have yielded AMAO's rising from about 40% to more than 60% in the last two years. This increased performance in achieving at least a year’s growth in English acquisition has dovetailed nicely with increased ELA and Math proficiency rates as measured by the CST cumulative assessment. Our ELA proficiency rose 8.6 points (24.2% to 32.8%), and our Math proficiency rate increased 10.0 points from last year (41.7% to 51.7%).
All subgroups made significant gains, as measured by API and AYP.
Impact Strategy #2
We know that great instruction, consistent attendance and well-managed classrooms lead to good results regardless of the measuring tool. At Cleveland we have all of that. As well, we have spent time on test preparedness. For the past two years teachers and students have employed a number of strategies to ensure that test taking in itself is seen as a genre in education; that regardless of the negative aspects involved in how we test students, the testing in and of itself is not likely to go away, all the way up until they partake in their SAT’s to get into college. To that end, teachers engage their students in recognizing a series of test taking strategies to utilize particularly during the CST and SST and also during CELDT assessment time. Our students are taught to use a rubric with which they can rate their adherence to the strategies they’ve learned during each testing block. Their teachers review their rubric scores. When a teacher agrees with a student’s high score he/she offers the student a small token or prize. We’ve found that this works quite well as evidenced by increased proficiency in our CST results.
1