When I was first trying to decide what my action research project was going to be, I knew that my biggest concern was the decline of reading achievement at my school. Unfortunately this is our second year not meeting AYP and we are now in stage one of campus improvement. Because of the situation that we're in, our campus is having to take a second look at our Campus Improvement Plan (CIP) and make adjustments. Lucky for me I was asked to participate in the revising of our plan! I wonder if by making the adjustments to the CIP and making teachers aware of this, we will be able to make some gains towards increasing student achievement in reading.
Today we had our first meeting where we looked at the current goals, strategies to get there, and evidence of success for each strategy. One of the first things we noticed is how vague the strategies listed were. We worked on making them more precise and aligned with the current needs of our campus. One of the biggest complaints we hear from teachers is that the students "just don't know how to think". This is the reason we added the strategy of "Engaging daily in the modeling, instruction, and practice of metacognition strategies". I believe that if this is done on a daily basis, we can push our students to become greater thinkers. However, we have to make sure that teachers are equipped with the knowledge and tools to be able to do this effectively in the classroom. There also has to be a way to document that this strategy will result in greater student success. This is definitely a work in progress! I am looking forward to delving into this more and working collaboratively on this with the rest of the Instructional Support Team.
I have also had a hand in working with our campus plan for the last 3 years now. One of the big changes we made this year was to put individual faculty members names next to each strategy listed on the plan. Our hope is that this will create better oversight throughout the year. If certain strategies aren't progressing the way our campus improvement team would like to see them progress, we can go to individual people and find out what the problem is, troubleshoot it, and hopefully make whatever changes need to be made to make the strategy work. In some cases we put the persons responsible simply as department heads. Whatever it took to make sure that oversight was possible. Perhaps your team could utilize this strategy for a greater impact of the plan on the reality on your campus.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great idea! Right now our column on who's responsible is very general, like "classroom teachers". I like the idea of having specific names. Hopefully it will give them more ownership and sense of responsibility for making sure that's happening. I will definitely share this at our next meeting! Thanks!
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