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A Culture of Learning:
STUDENT-CENTERED GOALS

Schoolwide professional development is aligned and embedded in the school improvement plan. Grade-level and individual professional development is also aligned with school goals and student needs. The latest fad or entertaining speaker has no place in the school.

– Teacher, Shallowford Falls
Elementary School

Clear, student-centered goals have focused teacher learning in each of these schools. Each in its different way identified and translated important student needs into a plan for action, creating shared goals for raising achievement in every classroom and across grades. Such a plan becomes the driver and the yardstick for teacher growth. It channels learning, energy, and commitment; serves to screen and shape professional development activities; and becomes the gauge for teachers’ progress and success.

Looking at this goal-building process across the eight schools, at how staff reached consensus around concrete, student-centered school improvement aims and chose instructional programs to foster them, several common points stand out.

First, these goals don’t spring into being overnight. They grow out of an intensive, collaborative process of looking hard at where the school is now and how students are performing across the curriculum, and then deciding where the school wants to go. At each school visited, a student-focused planning process, usually linked to formal requirements, was in place before dramatic change became visible. At Woodrow Wilson, the Kansas Quality Performance Accreditation program requires an annual plan for improvement with specific student achievement goals. Similarly, at H.D. Hilley, the Texas Campus Improvement Plan establishes the expectations for continuous growth. Hungerford’s curriculum committees set standards for student performance that align with its district improvement plan. The Coordinating Council at International High School determines the focus of all faculty-run committees based on extensive teacher input. Everyone in these successful schools knows the goals and supports them. Then, with a clear sense of what results they want, all work together to achieve them.

Often the process started small, focusing initially on one or two specific areas, and then, with growing success, expanding to others. Teachers at Woodrow Wilson initially set out to improve their students’ mathematical problem solving and ended by raising student performance not only in math but in science and writing, as well. Quite often, in fact, these award-winning schools focused early reform efforts on issues not at the heart of classroom practice – such as increasing parent involvement or improving staff relationships – only gradually shifting more directly to issues of teaching and learning. International High School staff point out that starting "small" was critical to their success. Smaller, they believe, means more control and flexibility, and rapid response to issues that arise. Begin with just one change, they suggest, perhaps starting with a teacher portfolio process, and then bring that to the student level. But do it thoroughly and deeply.

Using test results and student data to identify specific areas for improvement, these schools selected or designed interventions to help tackle them. Montview saw the need for more consistency in reading instruction across grade levels, and after a few teachers piloted a Literacy Learning Network program with remarkable success, the entire staff decided to implement it schoolwide.

At Ganado Intermediate, student-centered goals were developed from the staff’s vision of what they wanted for their students. As one teacher recalls:

    A couple of months into the school year the principal asked us, ‘What do you want for the students? What is your wish list?’ Boy, did we brainstorm. We talked about what we hoped for and wanted down to the grade level. She had us project five years from the time we brainstormed. That’s how we started.

Focusing on language and literacy to raise student achievement, Ganado’s five-year professional development plan included English as a Second Language, writing, Navajo culture and language, Collaborative Literature Intervention Program (CLIP), and technology.

In every case such choices are guided by student improvement goals. "There needs to be a vision," one teacher at Samuel Mason school explains:

    And there needs to be a process for how you’re going to achieve it. Once you can get through those things – and they are painful, working as unified as you possibly can with the understanding that sometimes you just have to live with it because it is what’s best for the population at large – you develop an understanding of what everyone’s doing and where we’re going. And through this process we always go back and ask if this is what we want: Does it match the vision? Is it what we want for our children? And if you can answer yes to both of them, then you know it’s something to look into.

The process takes time. As student and teacher needs are continually assessed, as new ideas are tried out, the plans themselves may change. A good example of this incremental forward motion is the path of change at Shallowford Falls. The principal describes how the beginning year’s goals were weak, focusing on such things as bonding as a staff and physical aspects of the school plant. The second and third years’ goals targeted improving working relationships and self-esteem. Then the Georgia Department of Education offered an opportunity to apply for merit pay. Through this Pay for Performance program volunteer schools were required to identify rigorous goals tied to improving students’ academic performance. Shallowford Falls teachers, now comfortable enough as a staff to challenge themselves with more significant goals, focused on literacy and, eventually, expanded that focus to include the entire instructional program. (For more details, see "Evolving Goals at Shallowford Elementary.")

In each of these professional development programs, what teachers learn is driven by student needs – across the whole school, at specific grade levels, and in individual classrooms. This sustained focus over time is also key to ensuring the follow-through and reinforcement that make professional learning pay off, and it provides an axial point around which an increasingly collaborative learning culture develops. The point to emphasize here is that in each of these schools, the improvement plan drives teacher learning. It’s both compass and touchstone, preventing professional development from being peripheral, disconnected, or fragmentary, and making it serve established needs for instructional improvement. An H.D. Hilley teacher sums it up this way: "Before, it felt like everyone was doing his or her own thing. Now it feels like the whole school is pulling together, trying to meet the goals that we have all discussed and created together. It feels like learning is seeping out of the school walls!"

 

At each school a student-focused planning process, usually linked to formal requirements, was in place before dramatic change became visible.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Often the process started small, focusing initially on one or two specific areas, and then, with growing success, expanding to others.


 

 

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

The process takes time. As student and teacher needs are continually assessed, as new ideas are tried out, the plans themselves may change.


 

 

 

 

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

"Before, it felt like everyone was doing his or her own thing. Now it feels like the whole school is pulling together, trying to meet the goals that we have all discussed and created together."


 


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