In round two of our data review for the PROPEL Lab at LHS, we looked at all of the quantitative and qualitative data we have gathered this year and dialogued about what it meant for students, for staff and for LHS as a system.  Our focus was on the 83 targeted freshman students who had been identified during middle school as being at-risk of failing and/or who were identified early in their freshman year for the same risk at LHS.  Our dialogue led us to break these 83 students, each with their own very personal story, into three groups.

Who did PROPEL Lab work for pretty quickly?  Who needed time to build relationships and now we are starting to see positive change happening?  Who is the PROPEL Lab not working for?

Given our data sets, we were able to determine that about 50-55% of the students who were targeted, benefited fairly quickly from the Lab with minimal assistance.  For student X, this meant that he had no failing grades at the end of first semester at LHS, in comparison with 5 failing grades at the end of first semester of eighth grade.  His attendance is solid and he isn’t having any discipline difficulties.  Student X  is an example of someone who is benefitting from the structure of an assigned block of time where he can get academic and social/emotional support in a small, safe learning environment.

There is another identified group of students who needed time to build relationships with Ms. Munoz, the other staff in PROPEL, the student tutors, and the other students in the Lab.  About 40-45% of the targeted students fall into this category.  Again, each of these students has a very personal story of who they are as a person and who they are as a learner.  They typically don’t have established habits for studying, time management, use of resources, etc.  They are distrustful of the system and need to build on one success after the other to really believe in themselves and the system that is supporting them.  Student Y is an example of this group of targeted freshman at LHS.  At the end of first quarter, he was still failing several classes and was in danger of failing others.  He was coming to the Lab regularly, but wasn’t necessarily using all of his time wisely.  As the year has gone on, he has established his place in the Lab, has increased his confidence in himself as a student and his current grades are all passing.  His obvious pride in this accomplishment is shown each day.  This is a new feeling for this student…and he likes it!

And finally, as with all supports offered to students, there is no one perfect plan for everyone.  About 5% of the students targeted for the PROPEL Lab have not been successful academically and/or social/emotionally at LHS.  For these students an alternative supportive intervention is being identified. 

PROPEL Lab in its first year at LHS has touched the lives of hundreds of students, teachers and parents.  As with any  system, adjustments are made, data is used to drive both the instruction in the lab and the process for how it runs, and believers are born.  Other schools and districts are asking questions about the Lab and scheduling visits to see how it operates.  LHS….you should be proud of this work!

Read this blog  from a school psychologist in Virginia who writes about how difficult RtI implementation has been to sustain when there are RIFs, school closures and other major budget cuts.  I will post her follow up when she blogs it.

http://bit.ly/sl2LSr

Just read this blogpost from Elaine and I think it has some good information about what works well in an “RtI World” and what continues to be problematic.

Read on:  http://www.niusileadscape.org/bl/?p=550#more-550

I am spending the day with 40+ teachers from TSD who are participating in a SIPPS training.  This is our second full year of SIPPS implementation and it is great to hear the thoughtful questions from our teachers.  Last year most of our teachers who were trained in SIPPS were instructional coaches and interventionists.  This year, the room is full of classroom teachers as well as interventionists and their ideas for how to include SIPPS in their daily instruction are great.  Many are working with their entire class and others are using SIPPS with targeted groups of students.  The trainer from Developmental Studies Center, Ann Leon, is wonderful and has a great grasp on both the materials and the instructional skills necessary to use the materials.  I am excited to see how SIPPS use continues in our district and how that leads to increased student achievement and confidence in themselves as readers!

As we are wrapping up our first quarter of the 2010-2011 school year, I have been getting many questions about progress monitoring and how to best make decisions on measures to use, how often to monitor, etc.  When we first began progress monitoring two years ago, our expectations were more standardized:  select a few students who you have identified as struggling and monitor them every two weeks with a long term goal of end of semester or end of year progress.

However, we are becoming more sophisticated in our use of progress monitoring and while this can feel uncomfortable to some, it is much less black and white and much more individual student focused.  Many of you are asking great questions about progress monitoring and what tools are best, etc.  This indicates that we are starting to make more of an adaptive change than a technical change as we think about what progress monitoring truly is.  It isn’t just one more thing to do and check off the list.  It is meant to be done with intention and purpose…this requires us to think about what we truly want to measure and to determine what tool will be best for collecting this data.

In recent weeks, more questions and thoughts and wonderings have come up around how often students should be progress monitored.  The rule of thumb is that the more significant the gap, the more intense the intervention and the more often the student should be progress monitored.  For some students this may mean weekly progress monitoring and for some it may mean once a month.  Teaching teams need to have these conversations together to discuss what measures to use and how often to monitor for their students.  When having these conversations, ask yourselves “does the identified area of concern match the selected intervention and does the selected progress monitoring tool align with both the identified area of concern and the intervention?” 

We are continuing to grow in our use of progress monitoring as a district.  Keep the questions and wonderings coming!

Lincoln Elementary Leadership Team

Over the past few weeks, groups of administrators and teacher leaders in Thompson have begun their work in planning for the upcoming school year.  Much of this work has revolved around school improvement and the use of the Collaborative Inquiry Cycle to assist in this planning.  This cycle is based on the work of Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman and includes three steps.

Many of the district instructional coaches, administrators and other teacher leaders completed a Data Dialogue class and/or a Using Data class during the 2009-2010 school year to learn and use this process.  The work completed this summer with district leadership teams built upon those skills and the capacityto  use  the collaborative inquiry cycle will continue to be developed with all staff in the district.

Collaborative Inquiry Cycle

As the school year begins, opportunities for creative scheduling present themselves.  While much of the planning for how to deliver differentiated services takes place in the spring and is refined over the summer months, there are always situations that need fine tuning as the year unfolds.  The RtI Action Network has a current blog regarding this topic that you might be interested in reading.  The link to this blog is located on the right side of my blog page.

As we move into our third year of RtI implementation, I am looking forward to our implementation of math interventions, social/emotional core instruction and interventions and our continuing work with assessment and data dialogues.  I would like to thank the district staff who have worked on our RtI leadership to make all of these things…and more, happen.

Creative scheduling and use of limited resources shows that our administrators, teaching staff and support staff are fully invested in helping every child in our schools be successful in all areas.  We are working hard to get more community and family involvement at the school and district level.  I am excited to see the collaboration that is happening with all stakeholders in the education of our most valuable resources…the children in our community.

As school starts again in August, more information will be shared via this blog.  Ideas for content are more than welcome!