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Without the teachers, schools, and administrators who are willing to step out of their comfort zones and give SIM a try, our efforts would be consigned largely to musty journals or seldom-visited bookshelves. These individuals and groups breathe life into our work. To express our gratitude, we bestow the SIM Impact Award on schools or school systems that have incorporated many components of the Strategic Instruction Model(TM) throughout substantial segments of their entire school or school system. Recipients of the award contribute significantly to the work of the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, strengthening SIM, enabling us to develop needed tools for educators, and ultimately leading to more effective instruction and better learning experiences for students. This year's recipient is Alameda Unified School District in California. For 10 years, the district has nurtured strategic instruction, from small and isolated SIM "seedlings" to an orchard that now includes all of the district's secondary schools. Though their work is not complete, Alameda stands as an exemplar of how a group of persistent and committed people can unite to bring about improved outcomes for schools and students.
SIM's Alameda roots can be traced to one underperforming elementary school and its principal, Rosalind Davenport. Rosalind, a SIM Professional Developer, used her administrative power to infuse SIM throughout her school and raise its academic performance index score by nearly 170 points. Her aspirations, however, extended to improved academic experiences for all 10,000 students in the district.
A decade later, Rosalind is part of a dedicated team of administrators and teachers expanding SIM to the district's six middle and high schools.
"My experience is that when you have an administration that is committed, you can overcome all obstacles," says Rosalind, who is now the district director of special education. "If you only have staff, SIM will last as long as staff, but staff turns over."
Alameda launched its SIM expansion with a professional development session for 90 teachers and administrators. The district has kept the ball rolling throughout the past year with monthly coaching and monthly support meetings, and several Alameda teachers are on track to become certified SIM Professional Developers. District administrators have made it clear that this is no "flavor of the month" program.
Alameda is an island city in the San Francisco East Bay. Its students are vastly diverse, with students in many of its schools speaking 26 different languages. Some schools also serve a large transient population. Meeting the needs of all students under these conditions can be particularly challenging.
"We have a focus of excellence and equity. This program appears to address both areas very, very well," school board member Mike McMahon says of SIM. "It really meets the needs across a broad spectrum of kids. It's giving the opportunity for teachers to reclaim their professionalism."
Those two themes--improving students' learning experiences and strengthening teachers' expertise and skills--reverberate through teachers' comments about SIM.
For Carla Greathouse, who teaches Fusion Reading(TM) and social studies at Chipman Middle School, the decision to embrace SIM was obvious.
"When you're working with struggling learners, you're constantly looking for ways to improve instruction and ways to improve engagement of students," says Carla. SIM filled a void for her work with struggling students performing two or more years below grade level.
Through SIM, district staff now have a common instructional language and a foundation upon which collaboration can thrive.
"That really gives kids a sense of stability," says Sylvia Kahn, the district's SIM coordinator. "When they walk into their science class, they know what to expect. They see that there's a pattern."
Sylvia says her hope is that as SIM continues to expand over the next four years, improved instructional practices will help increase the academic achievement of lower-performing students while giving high-performing students a solid set of skills to allow them to be very competitive in their postsecondary education endeavors.
Anecdotal reports of first-year progress hint at what the district could achieve. Kim Kelley, literacy coach and English language arts teacher at Island High School, has found that SIM interventions put a new spin on student learning, even though the books she uses in class have remained the same for years.
"Using Content Enhancement along with it has really increased the level of understanding that they have of what the books are about and what the deeper issues within the literature are," Kim says.
French teacher Mike Meyers at Encinal High School uses the Framing Routine as a meaningful way of checking that his students understand passages they read in French. SIM tools let fellow Encinal teacher Brian Rodriguez organize history lessons as stories, rather than masses of information to be memorized.
"It's allowed me to use a thematic approach in teaching and to make more difficult subjects--whether it be democracy or capitalism or communism--much more clear to my students," he says.
Throughout the district, administrators at all levels have developed what SIM Professional Developer Jean Piazza calls "informed support" for SIM: They attend SIM workshops, they model the use of SIM tools in staff meetings, they partner with teachers, and they provide true instructional leadership, not management.
"For myself, it feels pretty important that I'm able to do some modeling and some kind of wrestling it to the ground with people," says Alysse Castro, principal at Island High School. "The thing about SIM that is really powerful to me is that it's thinking work."
The enthusiasm of teachers and principals--along with stories of students pleading with teachers who are not yet involved in the SIM effort to get involved soon--are music to Superintendent Ardella Dailey's ears. She and other district-level administrators have committed to a five-year plan to build teacher capacity in SIM. In doing so, they have prioritized spending to support SIM, sometimes at the expense of other programs.
The return they expect on their investment is a future in which high schools no longer need to offer literacy support classes and in which all students experience success in their courses.
"It's bringing chills up and down my arms," says Assistant Superintendent Debbie Wong. "It's exciting. We need this energy. We need this excitement."
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