Sean C. Morgan
On a Friday morning earlier this month, a group of second-grade teachers from all of the district’s grade schools are gathered in a classroom at Hawthorne Elementary School, animatedly discussing test scores.
Down the hall, fourth-grade instructors from all of Sweet Home’s schools are discussing what their students need to learn to better meet state educational standards. Teachers from other grades are gathered in other classrooms up and down the halls.
These meetings are part of a new effort, begun by administrators, to address shortfalls in student achievement in the district.
In October, Sweet Home Schools Supt. Tom Yahraes told the School Board just how poorly Sweet Home students were performing collectively on state assessments, and he outlined a plan to do something about it.
Over the past five years, Sweet Home’s performance has fallen significantly in relation to statewide averages.
Student achievement is a key priority for Yahraes, he said, and his action plan is to lift and support core instruction by aligning curriculum to the standards, ensuring effective use of instructional time and student engagement strategies and aligning and connecting assessments to the core.
He identified and is implementing four specific steps to achieve this.
They include implementing a district academic leadership team, school performance plans, pushing resources and supporting high-need areas and identifying other student success indicators.
That’s what those Friday morning meetings earlier this month were all about.
The academic leadership team of district teachers are dedicated to exploring data and providing recommendations to administrators.
“This is the model that helped me as an administrator improve various schools that I worked at,” Yahraes said.
He used the model at Terrebonne Community School in central Oregon, where leaders worked side by side with teachers during professional development time to take the students to where the state test was asking them to be.
Sweet Home’s team includes 15 teachers, two from each of the four elementary schools, three from Sweet Home Junior High School and four from Sweet Home High School. They meet with Yahraes, Director of Student Services Jennifer Sedlock and Rachel Stucky, director of curriculum and instruction to empower the district by looking at its pockets of success, those places where large numbers of students are meeting assessment standards, to drive instructional excellence across the district.
“The academic leadership team a way to connect the district office with each of the schools,” said team member Barbi Riggs, who teaches first grade at Hawthorne. As a team, the teachers and administrators meet to talk about how to help students be successful.
“We focus on our students, not just the students at individual schools,” Riggs said.
The new team has looked at state testing data, and it’s taken the tests, Yahraes said. The team looks for “aha” moments, such as when teachers notice that a particular topic taught in the fourth grade is really measured in the fifth-grade test.
The team wants to make sure teachers truly understand the target standards, Riggs said. To that end, as part of the process, teachers across the district took the Smarter Balanced test on a professional development Friday earlier this year.
“We really wanted to understand what the SBAC (Smarter Balanced test) is to our students,” Riggs said.
Yahraes said teachers are interested.
“The feedback has been right on target. The conversations are frank, rich and very informative.”
When their students took the test, it was an eye-opener for kindergarten through second-grade teachers, Riggs said. Their students don’t take the tests each year. Students start taking the test in the third grade.
It’s helping teachers understand what they need to focus on to align with the standards so third-graders are prepared, she said.
At the same time, Riggs said, she thinks many parents and students may have given up on the state testing. The SBAC is intimidating, and the news is full of reports of students and parents opting out of the testing.
Riggs is among those who doesn’t want to “teach to the test,” she said, but educators are focusing on teaching students concepts and understanding information and skills that could be on the test.
When they understand the concepts, she said, “the kids are going to be very prepared for the test,” Riggs said. When they have the competency in their education, they don’t need to be scared of the test.
“I really feel like our district office has a vision, and for the first time in a long time, they want to hear the voice of the teachers,” she said.
The district is moving forward as a group instead of keeping isolated silos of success. Yahraes likes to describe it as collaborating.
For the first time, teachers are getting together at the same grade level districtwide, Riggs said. “We’ve looked at some of our curriculum together, but we’ve never sat and looked at data or compared notes on curriculum.”
“I like it because I get to have feedback from my peers,” said Oak Heights sixth-grade teacher Mindie Medina. She is not a member of the team, but she is benefiting from the concept. “I get to see what they’re working on.”
She’s participated in a similar concept before, while teaching in Arizona, Medina said. She has been in Sweet Home for three years.
“I think it made all the difference in the world,” Medina said.
Over the next five years, the Academic Leadership Team will address teaching techniques, strategy and resources necessary to help out, Yahraes said. It will unify the academic language used throughout the district to make instruction as seamless as possible.
Among the things team members have noticed is that many young students lack typing skills, Yahraes said. They may know the content, but they may not have the skills to communicate it.
Young students are often used to using tablet-style keyboards on a screen, but they’re not used to a keyboard on a Chromebook or laptop, Riggs said.
The new Smarter Balanced tests require more writing in long answer format instead of the multiple choice of the previous OAKS tests, Yahraes said. This is something the team can push out this year, providing necessary skills to students, so they can demonstrate that they know the content.
With teachers sharing out what they find, the district may find other barriers it must address, he said.
The district created the team by calling for applicants from among the teaching staff.
“We posted a job description,” Yahraes said. “What we asked for is for teachers that have highly effective teaching and instructional strategies in using assessments to lift the teaching and learning at their grade level to help us.”
Teachers applied for the position, which provides a stipend, Yahraes said. District principals followed a screening process to select those they thought were highly effective instructional leaders, “teachers that are stepping forward that we believe can really help drive our pursuit of excellence at the core.”
It’s not a top-down approach designed by a consultant, he said. Rather, it is a collaborative effort between the schools, teachers, administrators and Central Office.
The team is an alternative to hiring outside consultants to come to Sweet Home for professional development on Fridays, Yahraes said. Sweet Home has the experts it needs, who know their community and students.
“Our instructional leaders know how to lift our grade level performance,” Yahraes said. “They will help drive our professional development Fridays.
“We work together. We look at data. We’ll be looking at our curriculum. We’ll be looking at instructional pockets. We’ll be looking at assessments.”
The group looks at the alignment between the curriculum and the assessment tests, he said. From there, the team develops lesson plans for professional development Fridays, held every other week for district teachers.
The team works with principals in each building to fine-tune the lesson plan for the specific school, Yahraes said.
In the past, professional development efforts throughout the district haven’t been unified, Yahraes said. There were different plans and different programs. The expectations were different at different sites.
The formation of the new team “felt good – K-12, we were all on the same page,” Yahraes said. “We are becoming unified in our topics and objectives for district level professional development Fridays.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Medina said. “Once we get the elementary schools lined up with each other, there won’t be any holes.”
Students transfering among Sweet Home schools may be at different places in the curriculum, Medina said, having already completed fractions at Holley, for example, while finding they’re just starting fractions at Oak Heights.
At this point, the team is looking over the 2015-16 data to figure out where the district needs to go in 2016-17, Yahraes said, transitioning to a football metaphor: “We need to go back and review the tape, go back and coach the players.”
They’re looking at how the district played the game last year, he said, and sharing it with the teachers, who reflect on what stands out to them.
They will align their “formative assessments,” the practices along the way, the routine tests and assessment tools they use throughout the year, to the “summative assessments,” the state tests, game day, Yahraes said.
The information this team develops may help schools develop the second part of the superintendent’s effort: performance plans and concrete, measurable goals for improvement at each school.
“Teachers help other teachers with coaching,” Yahraes said. “We have great teachers that can help us step up.”
Riggs believes the district is taking the steps it must to drive student achievement, student success.
“We’re coming in with a different mindset, a growth mindset,” Riggs said. “I do have hope. I think that’s the feeling of all the teachers in the district. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
The transformation won’t be instantaneous, she said. The district is at the beginning of the process.
“I think the organization and systems that are in place create stepping stones for success.”
The New Era will publish a story about the school performance plans next week.