Action Plan

These are two action  I created for Kentridge High School to address areas of need in communication and collaboration. Some context is given about the school and it is evaluated using OSPI’s 9 Characteristics of Effective Schools. This is the culminating assignment for a class on collaboration and communication.

Ryan West- Action Plan

One School’s Action Plan Process

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, the school I teach at is currently in the process of re-evaluating our school-wide action plans due to the accreditation process. To provide some background, Kentridge High School is located in suburban Kent. It has 2400 students and 110 teachers. There is strong community and parent support although from a smaller population as our school becomes more diverse and transient.

Our principal recently conducted a staff meeting where a large amount of data was presented to provide a snapshot of our school. The goal was to look for trends in the data which we could relate to our action plans for the next seven years. Teachers were then asked to develop one or two action plans using the SMART goals criteria. It was not referred to specifically as a SMART goal but the criteria was all there. Teachers were then randomly grouped into fours and picked a goal everyone thought best met the criteria of a SMART goal. A member from each group then went wrote their goal on a large piece of paper and those were collected. Certain committees were already in place to determine SMART goals for areas of the school but a few needed to be created. The principal asked for volunteers and choose about 10 teachers to look at the school’s mission statement. In two weeks, the principal announced the SMART goals and asked for feedback from the teachers in a large group setting. After questions had been answered and feedback received, the goals were accepted by the staff.

As evidenced from a few discussions (see “Annnnnnd ACTION” by Erin Power Kozloff) in the class this week, there are inherent difficulties in a large school such as Kentridge. The most formidable one is to get all the staff members to “buy in” to a goal they did not have a direct hand in creating. Many times, these action plans or goals are created in small sub committees and the end product is only seen. Staff members accept the action plan but feel no ownership. The way Kentridge created the goals by including everyone in the data and idea process, incorporates more people into the process. It simply isn’t wise to have all 110 teachers write an action plan. A smaller group of teachers representing and getting feedback from others is a good way to approach it.

Action plans provide a common, focus way for schools small and large to impact student learning and the learning environment. It is important for everyone to be included in the creation of an action plan but concessions need to be made in the case of a large school or a specific area such as Special Education or English Language Learners. Using the SMART goal steps, these action plans can bring a school together and enable students to learn.

Data and the District

The website 3D2Know offers a quiz entitled “Data-Driven Decision Making” which allows educators “to determine their readiness to use data-driven decision making both accountability and continuous school improvement. Upon taking the test, I confirmed what I had already assumed- the Kent School District does not provide individual teachers with timely data on their students. The level definition I scored at was “Early” which was defined as “Aware of the area. The district has begun actively working toward achieving its goals for this area.”

The data I receive from the district are WASL scores from elementary and middle school testing along with one or two other assessments which I am not familiar with. The data is linked to the individual student in an online database and it isn’t sorted according to my individual classes. If I wanted to get a snapshot of my entire class, it would take a considerable amount of work. The district also grades a required end of course assessment but I don’t see those results until the end of the following year and even then, they aren’t presented in a useful format. The district could do much more to enable teachers to make data-driven decisions in their instruction.

On a more positive note, the district does seem to be compiling or at least sharing more school-wide data about our student populations. We identified certain areas for needed improvement using data collected from the WASL, GPAs and SAT scores. For now, this data is only available school-wide but I am hopeful that it will eventually be offered at the department or individual teacher level.

For now, I am satisfied to collect and analyze data on my own. Using scantron forms makes the process easy but I don’t like to give too many multiple choice tests. While data collection is a long and tiresome process, it greatly improves my ability to see where problems and gaps lie in my instruction and improve it.

Bringing Hedgehogs to School

In Jim Collins bestseller, Good To Great, he discusses common practices of successful companies. One of those is called the Hedgehog Concept. The idea is that hedgehogs choose one thing to be good at and put all their energy into that which ensures their survival despite being small and otherwise defenseless. Collins argues that weaker companies are involved in too many ventures and haven’t found the one thing they can be the best at. Schools function in the same way. OSPI lists a “clear and focused goal” as one of its Nine Characteristics of High Performing Schools.

There are many goals in a school. As we have seen in our weekly discussion on these topics, departments, grade levels and even teachers all have different goals for students. The federal government has dictated some of these goals through standardized testing, NCLB and AYP. It is easy for schools to become disullusioned and fractured with so many objectives. Our school is going through a valuable and necessary process of creating a common mission statement and school-wide goals as part of the accreditation process.

A recent staff development day began by looking at raw data from student, teacher and parent surveys regarding a variety of topics. We also analyzed test data and school demographics. This provided us with a big picture of our school’s successes and shortcomings. The second half of the day was spent reworking our mission statement and goals to account for what was discovered in the data.

The objective of this day was to come up with our Hedgehog concept. What can Kentridge High School, given the faculty, students, and community, do best? We did not finish this work but I am excited about what we have discovered so far and hope we can come to a consensus in the next six months about what our Hedgehog concept will be.

Teachers, not Technicians

In the article “Teachers, not Technicians”, the authors focus on some keys school districts should follow to help teachers integrate technology effectively into their classrooms. The author’s main criticism of many school districts is that the focus is on how to use the technology and troubleshoot problems rather than how to develop better curriculum.

My classmates and I have some interesting thoughts on these suggestions. First, some kind of technical training must be done to simply allow teachers to navigate the new software or hardware. This could be done in a variety of ways such as a video presentation, written steps or a live tutorial. The majority of time and funding training teachers to use the new technology should go toward integrating it into the curriculum.

The Kent School District has this opportunity. Thanks to a recent technology levy, all incoming 7th graders are being given personal laptop computers to use for the school year. The laptops will follow those 7th graders through middle school and into high school. In five years time, all students from grades 7-12 will have laptops. This will mark a significant change in classroom instruction and the school district should follow the advice of the researchers. Rather than showing teachers how to troubleshoot laptops, time should be spent giving examples of how to use the laptops to enhance curriculum. In a science classroom for example, probeware such as Vernier could be used with the laptops to gather, analyze and graph data from lab experiments. Students would be much better served if troubleshooting was left to technicians and teachers were allowed to teach their curriculum.

This classroom is lacking technology integration.