Post by wvhsparent on Mar 16, 2007 7:15:17 GMT -6
District 204 lays out its development plan for kids
By Howard Crouse
Indian Prairie Unit District 204
Posted Friday, March 16, 2007
Quick read: “By the end of the school year, all buildings will have had professional development to meet the foremost district goal: to improve student learning.”
Our staff presented our School Improvement Plans this week to the board of education.
These would perhaps be more appropriately called School Continuous Improvement Plans to more accurately reflect the ongoing nature of our planning, teaching, assessing and analyzing cycle.
That cycle is repeated at the classroom, school and district levels as we become fixated on the timely improvement in what and how we teach to maximize student learning.
The School Improvement Plans for each building include similar sets of information. In addition to basic demographic data, we include a compilation of goals, academic indicators and the performance data by which we measure the indicators.
We are concentrating on reading and math at grade levels kindergarten through eight and 11. In both content areas, specific skills and global achievement are measured with tests, probes and assessments.
For example, we are measuring early literacy skills such as letter naming, letter sounds, nonsense words and phoneme recognition at the kindergarten and first-grade levels three times a year. Each of these skills has a high correlation to reading success.
We are transitioning from the Illinois Snapshot of Early Literacy in some schools to curriculum-based measurements, or CBMs, that we will use in all elementary and middle schools next year. CBMs are short, two-or three-minute tests of one or more skills that correlate well to overall achievement in either reading or math.
At the elementary levels, we also are using the CBMs to measure oral reading fluency. We begin measuring reading comprehension skills in third grade and continue through high school.
Similarly, in math we are measuring math computation skills, much as was done when we were students. Timed tests give us an indication of how well students have learned math facts and application.
Math computation is an area that we began to address differently two years ago. While our math problem-solving and concept scores were consistently increasing at very high levels, our math computation scores continued to languish.
Our analysis showed our students simply didn’t get enough practice time with math facts. We supplemented our textbooks with a short time period every day in which students practiced their facts.
The result is that overall math scores have risen to new highs at all grade levels.
During the year, we have been benchmarking current achievement levels across all buildings. This is critical to the continuous improvement cycle. By the end of the school year, all buildings will have had professional development to meet the foremost district goal: to improve student learning.
We are proud of our accomplishments and the underlying continuous improvement planning. We invite you to view each school’s plan and its Illinois School Report card online at www.ipsd.org/schools_report-cards.asp.
By Howard Crouse
Indian Prairie Unit District 204
Posted Friday, March 16, 2007
Quick read: “By the end of the school year, all buildings will have had professional development to meet the foremost district goal: to improve student learning.”
Our staff presented our School Improvement Plans this week to the board of education.
These would perhaps be more appropriately called School Continuous Improvement Plans to more accurately reflect the ongoing nature of our planning, teaching, assessing and analyzing cycle.
That cycle is repeated at the classroom, school and district levels as we become fixated on the timely improvement in what and how we teach to maximize student learning.
The School Improvement Plans for each building include similar sets of information. In addition to basic demographic data, we include a compilation of goals, academic indicators and the performance data by which we measure the indicators.
We are concentrating on reading and math at grade levels kindergarten through eight and 11. In both content areas, specific skills and global achievement are measured with tests, probes and assessments.
For example, we are measuring early literacy skills such as letter naming, letter sounds, nonsense words and phoneme recognition at the kindergarten and first-grade levels three times a year. Each of these skills has a high correlation to reading success.
We are transitioning from the Illinois Snapshot of Early Literacy in some schools to curriculum-based measurements, or CBMs, that we will use in all elementary and middle schools next year. CBMs are short, two-or three-minute tests of one or more skills that correlate well to overall achievement in either reading or math.
At the elementary levels, we also are using the CBMs to measure oral reading fluency. We begin measuring reading comprehension skills in third grade and continue through high school.
Similarly, in math we are measuring math computation skills, much as was done when we were students. Timed tests give us an indication of how well students have learned math facts and application.
Math computation is an area that we began to address differently two years ago. While our math problem-solving and concept scores were consistently increasing at very high levels, our math computation scores continued to languish.
Our analysis showed our students simply didn’t get enough practice time with math facts. We supplemented our textbooks with a short time period every day in which students practiced their facts.
The result is that overall math scores have risen to new highs at all grade levels.
During the year, we have been benchmarking current achievement levels across all buildings. This is critical to the continuous improvement cycle. By the end of the school year, all buildings will have had professional development to meet the foremost district goal: to improve student learning.
We are proud of our accomplishments and the underlying continuous improvement planning. We invite you to view each school’s plan and its Illinois School Report card online at www.ipsd.org/schools_report-cards.asp.