Using Data, Collaboration and a Pyramid of Interventions to Close the Achievement Gap

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Using Data, Collaboration and a Pyramid of
Interventions to Close the Achievement Gap
A Case Study

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Check-Up

• List the three most important take-aways from
  the conference thus far.
• Share them with a partner, and explain why they
  are important to you.
• List one piece that is still missing. What
  information, strategy, concept are you still
  looking for?
• Report out.

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Prevention and Intervention

• Building a successful model requires change

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Managing Complex Change
Vision
Skills
Incentives
Resources
Action Plan
CHANGE
Incentives
Skills
Action Plan
Resources
CONFUSION
Incentives
Vision
Action Plan
Resources
ANXIETY
Skills
Vision
GRADUAL CHANGE
Action Plan
Resources
Incentives
Skills
Vision
Action Plan
FRUSTRATION
FALSE STARTS
Incentives
Skills
Vision
Resources
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The Impact Of Change
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Pyramid Of Intervention

• Our pyramid of intervention to address the ninth
  grade failure rate

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Intervention At All Levels
Community
District
School
Grade Level
Classroom
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PYRAMID OF INTERVENTION
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Parental Involvement

• Critical to success
• Engage early and often
• Focus on assets
• Develop a team approach with parents
• Over-communicate
• Emphasize accountability and responsibility
• Stress support on the home front

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Summer Transition Program

• 80 identified middle school students
• 3 week program
• 3 hours a day
• Program components
• Academic
• Socialization
• Recreation

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Interdisciplinary Teaching Teams

• 100 students/4 teachers
• Core disciplines
• Two year cycle
• Minimum two interdisciplinary units/year
• 4 periods per week of team planning
• Creative scheduling
• Tutorial support

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Tutored Study Halls

• Requirement for all 9th graders
• Replace traditional study hall
• Academically driven
• Enhances instructional programming

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15 Day Identification

• Identify students who are not meeting standards
  by the end of the third week of school
• Teachers determine criteria for meeting team
  standards
• Identify cause(s) of failure
• Attendance
• Behavior
• Failure to do homework
• Lack of basic skills

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Tutor Pullout

• Tutors work with individual or small groups of
  students based on the criteria for failure
• Advantages
• Individualized instruction
• No audience
• Chance to catch up
• Highly structured
• Defined outcomes

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After School Study Hall

• Parental cooperation
• Mandated for selected students
• 1 hour, 4 days per week
• Supervised by team tutors
• Attendance records kept

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Credit Recovery

• All courses semesterized
• After-school option for students who previously
  failed a core course
• Time is equivalent to summer school
• Needed to maintain a C in current class of the
  same subject

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Success Team

• For 9th and 10th grade non-special education
  students who are unsuccessful in the regular
  class environment
• High level of accountability and structure
• Designed to help them matriculate back into the
  mainstream

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Life Program

• Off-campus location
• Last stop for students who exhibit significant
  behavioral and/or attendance problems
• Focus on basic life skills
• Components
• Academic
• Counseling
• Vocational

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On-Line Courses

• Serves the smallest population of youth
• Students can earn up to 2.5 credits on line
• Courses are accredited

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PYRAMID OF INTERVENTION
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Activity

• Write down on take-away from the model I just
  presented
• Share your take-away with your neighbor
• Report out

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Spectacular achievements

• are often precededby unspectacular preparation.
• Roger Staubach

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• Collaboration

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Some Evidence That Collaboration Exists in a
School

• Schools establish a shared mission and vision,
  and agreed-upon values and goals
• Decision-making meetings are driven by the
  schools mission
• Collaborative Teams are utilized to support
  students and teachers
• Schools focus on establishing a climate that is
  based on constant improvement and measurable data
  and results

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Creating Collaborative Cultures Helps Teachers

• Build on existing expertise
• Pool resources
• Provide moral support
• Create a climate of trust
• Confront problems and celebrate successes
• Deal with complex and unanticipated problems
• Become empowered and assertive
• (Hargreaves 2004)

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Burning Questions?
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Data-Based Approaches to Prevention and
Intervention
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Data-Based Approaches to Prevention and
Intervention

• One of the primary responsibilities of a leader
  is to help people confront problems. The way you
  confront problems is you identify them. And the
  way you identify problems is by looking at
  data.
• -Terry Grier, School Superintendent

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What gets measured-- Gets managed.
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Our Prevention/Intervention Model Focused on
Ninth Graders

• Our model was a result of
• Years of data collection
• Research
• Evaluation
• A change in attitude
• Regular adjustments and modifications based on
  the above bullets
• Remember, your model should be a living and
  evolving process based on current data

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The Catalyst for Our ModelProblem Identification

• The problem 9th Grade Failure Rate
• 41 of 9th graders were being retained
• Lack of staff ownership
• someone elses problem
• not the kids we used to have
• Limited parent involvement
• Lack of coordination of services

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• Six Steps In Building AData-Based Model Of
  Prevention and Intervention

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Critical Questions

• Ask the right questions
• What is your mission and vision?
• Do you believe that all children can learn?
• What is it that you want all children to learn?
• How will you know if they have learned it?
• What do you do with students who are not
  learning?
• Realize that it takes courage, vision, and time
  for complex change to take place.

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Where Are You Now?

• Identify assets and problems
• Perception vs. Reality
• Inventory current programs that are intended to
  address student achievement
• Are they working?
• How do you know?
• Where are the gaps?

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Collaboration

• Work as a team
• Need to create ownership of identified problem
  and contributing factors
• Involve all stakeholdersinternal external
• Create a sense of shared responsibility and
  accountability
• Focus on results/outcomes

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Analysis

• Collect and analyze data
• First, decide what data you are going to collect
  that is relevant to the identified problem(s)
• Quantitative Qualitative
• Multiple Sources
• Relevant
• Consistentover time
• Collected by users
• Disaggregated by total school population,
  subgroups and individual students

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What Does The Data Tell You?

• Once identified and collected, you need to ask
  several questions based on the data
• What trends can you identify?
• What does it tell you about student performance?
• Are there surprises?
• Which groups are being better served?
• Which groups are not being served?
• Which subjects show the largest gaps?
• What might be the root causes or contributing
  factors?

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What Does The Data Tell You?

• Questions continued
• Are the achievement gaps growing?
• Note If achievement gaps are shrinking or
  staying the same, you need to make sure that its
  not because higher performing students are losing
  ground.

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Best Practices

• Whats working elsewhere? What does the research
  tell us?
• Conduct a review of the research
• Identify best practices
• Seek out other schools/districts with similar
  demographics that have had similar problems. What
  data did they collect? How did they address the
  problem?

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What Did We Do?

• State the problem and target the achievement gaps
  you want to address
• For us the problem was the ninth grade failure
  rate
• What did the data tell us?
• African American and Latino students were falling
  behind disproportionately in all subject areas
• Attendance was an increasing problem

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What Did We Do?

• What did the data tell us (continued)
• Some students lacked basic skills
• Other students failed to complete out of class
  assignments
• Discipline referrals were on the rise
• Students lacked a connection to school and to
  adults in the building
• Shifting demographics in the community

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What Did We Do?

• Based on the data analysis and research into best
  practices we
• Identified causes of student failure
• Decided on what was already in place that was
  working
• Identified the gaps
• Developed programs to meet the identified needs
  of our students
• Set clear, measurable, and attainable goals and
  benchmarks

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Getting Buy-In

• Creating ownership
• Using your data
• Finding the champions
• Divide the resisters
• Pilot project (give it legs)

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Teamwork and Action Planning Around the FNO
Principles

• Closing The Achievement Gap

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Activity

• NowYou Will Begin To Work On Your Pyramids(40
  minutes)

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Activity

• Turn to the pyramid in your notebook

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Activity

• Report Out

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Activity

• Final Thoughts