KU Center for Research on Learning
2011 SIM Impact Award
LIBERTY MIDDLE SCHOOL
PATRICK HENRY HIGH SCHOOL
HANOVER COUNTY, VIRGINIA
In six years, Liberty Middle School and Patrick Henry High School have crafted a new culture of literacy “connectedness” that forges strong bonds between professional development and instruction, between high school demands and middle school preparation, between student needs and student services.
The two schools in Hanover County, Virginia, were selected to participate in a State Personnel Development Grant in which they adopted the Content Literacy Continuum, developed by the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, as a framework for schoolwide literacy improvement.
“When we started, we just knew we had schoolwide literacy issues. Over the past six years, we’ve made strong gains,” says Donald Latham, principal of Liberty Middle School. “You have art teachers thinking about literacy, computer science teachers thinking about literacy. It’s all of the small contributions that equal a schoolwide effort.”
Jeffrey Crook, principal of Patrick Henry High School, sees evidence of the CLC culture change reflected throughout the school in new attitudes about literacy and new approaches to the daily business of teaching and learning. “All faculty, staff, and students are focused on literacy and the importance of understanding and synthesizing information in the classroom,” he says. “All faculty members realize that the use of integrated Content Enhancement Routines and strategies leads to improved overall student achievement.”
Both schools collect data from multiple sources—walk-throughs, formal observations, state assessment results—to guide instructional decisions. In addition, the desire to improve literacy across the board has brought teachers and in-house professional developers together in a way that allows for collaborative feedback and instructional growth.
Beyond the schools’ individual achievements, the Patrick Henry and Liberty Middle Literacy Leadership Teams work in partnership to develop and support a comprehensive secondary literacy plan. That collaboration, identified by school leaders as one of the most important outgrowths of the initiative, has intensified staff members’ feelings of responsibility for all students’ long-term success. High school staff prepare for the needs of their future students based on conversations with and data shared by the middle school, and middle school staff regularly check on the progress of students who have moved on.
“We ask the high school how they’re doing, what they’re doing, and what we can do to send them better prepared,” says Latham. This year, high school teachers proctored a writing exercise for middle school students, creating a win-win situation in which middle school faculty will use results to determine whether changes are needed to prepare students better for high school and high school faculty will become acquainted with the literacy levels and skills of incoming ninth-graders.
A small—but growing—team of in-house professional developers is integral to the success of the CLC initiative in Hanover County. The team endeavors to ensure clear, strong connections between workshops, instructional goals, data collection, and follow-up coaching in the Hanover County schools.
“It’s that constant follow through and it’s the consistency that makes it so good,” Latham says. “We go through the cycle of data collection and evaluation on a monthly basis with teacher leaders. Having that cadre of expertise added to the leadership team is just invaluable.”
The six years of intense work toward full adoption of CLC has not been without hiccups. “At first, the biggest challenge was getting ‘buy in,’” says Cathy Guillena, special education teacher and lead SIM Professional Developer at the high school. Guillena recalls the initial resistance of her collaborative teacher at Patrick Henry High School, who thought the CLC initiative might be “just the latest craze” destined to disappear in a few years like so many other changes she had seen in more than 20 years of teaching. “She ended up being one of our biggest cheerleaders,” Guillena says.
Administrators led the way toward acceptance by establishing the expectation for teachers to learn about and use Strategic Instruction Model interventions. Teachers identified as leaders among their peers became, like Guillena’s colleague, cheerleaders for the project. Now, use of strategies and routines in classrooms is the norm, and the schools have devised new approaches to reaching students who need extra literacy assistance. Patrick Henry cleared one big hurdle when, after several years of urging, the school board approved a new Learning Strategies course to be taught by the speech-language pathologist to address the most severe learning difficulties of students in content classes.
Since beginning the project, the schools have seen rising scores on the state’s Standards of Learning assessments. Figure 1 shows increases in eighth-grade reading pass rates from the 2004-2005 school year to 2008-2009. Not only do the scores show improvements for eighth-graders as a whole, but they also show significant gains when subgroups (African-American students, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students) are considered separately. Eighth-grade writing pass rates also improved for all groups during the same period.
“We’ve seen our overall reading scores go up,” says Latham (Figure 2). “Our math scores have gone up. Science is the highest it’s ever been.”
The percentage of special education students at the middle school who spend most of their school day in general education classrooms has increased substantially since 2006, while the percentage of special education students who spend most of the day in other settings has decreased just as dramatically (Figure 3).
High school pass rates for reading and math have increased (see Figure 4). The percentage of students reading below grade level has decreased, and the percentage of students reading above grade level has increased. Strikingly, the percentage of students who graduate with advanced diplomas has risen from below 10 percent to nearing 20 percent (see Figure 5).
Behind the numbers and statistics are powerful student and teacher stories, stories such as teacher Stacy Stanford’s determination to help a student master the content in her Spanish class despite struggling with reading comprehension in English. Stanford designed a multi-intervention approach using the Framing Routine and Paraphrasing Strategy to attack readings for the Spanish class and the Vocabulary LINCing Routine to master new Spanish words. By the end of the year, the student demonstrated great leaps in her comprehension abilities in both Spanish and English.
“Just because she struggled in English didn’t mean she had to struggle in Spanish as well,” says Stanford, who is World Languages department chair and a CLC teacher leader at Patrick Henry High School.
A common twist in the stories emerging from these Hanover County schools is the teacher who needs to see proof in her own classroom before fully embracing CLC and SIM. Janie Brown, physical science teacher at Liberty Middle School, was just such a teacher. For Brown, evidence of success came early when she used the Unit Organizer Routine to introduce her first unit, Map Skills. Brown says she dreaded the Map Skills unit test because her students generally performed poorly—many Cs, with a number of Ds and Fs. The year she used Unit Organizer, though, the results impressed her.
“The majority of my grades were in the B range and a good amount in the A range,” she says, and students attributed their success to the Unit Organizer. “It felt like everything they needed to know was laid out for them with no hidden content.”
Brown is now a SIM Professional Developer and CLC project co-lead in her school. “You see steady gain every year, but more importantly, I see students who come to class with tools and strategies to learn,” she says. “These give them confidence and have allowed them to feel more confident in tackling new and difficult subject matter. True student achievement is creating effective life-long learners, and isn’t that what we are all about?”
The Text Pattern Intervention
Lessons 5 and 6: Locating Connectives and Identifiers in Content-Area Texts
The last two lessons show students how to join phrases using temporal and causal connectives (i.e., conjunctions and transitions) and track previously introduced ideas or concepts. First, students learn how to join clauses together with connectives. Whereas conjunctions join two clauses together within a sentence (in this intervention), transitions introduce new information that relates to previously stated ideas. This intervention assigned specific symbols (e.g., clock or lightning bolt) to each type of connective and to positive (+) and negative (−) relations so that students associated icons with the concepts that they represented (see the Connectives Chart below). In addition, the concepts of presenting (i.e., introducing) and presuming (i.e., tracking) are addressed. Authors introduce main subjects to the reader using introducing identifiers such as a, an, and some, but they use different words—like this, she, and they—to succinctly refer back to concepts.
What Did We Learn?
Educators need to explicitly teach students with language difficulties how to understand passive voice, noun phrases, and connectives. As a Tier II program (in a response to intervention system), the intervention attempts to provide a bridge between intensive strategy instruction and authentic practice comprehending content-area text. The validation study took place in three separate high schools in three different Midwestern states. Data were collected from three experimental classrooms and three comparison classrooms for a total of 49 students (see below).
The Text Pattern intervention was taught in the experimental classes whereas the teachers delivered instruction as planned in the comparison classes. Pretest and posttest results indicated that the students who learned the intervention outperformed the students who received instruction as usual when answering questions about a social studies passage.
Kansas Demonstration to Maintain Independence and Employment
Division of Adult Studies
Striving Readers
Institute for Research on Adolescent Literacy
Technology Rich Classrooms
ALTEC
How participants feel about the program
Reactions to Technology Rich Classrooms have been overwhelmingly positive. Facilitators, teachers, parents, and students love what the program has done to the learning process. Here are some of the comments participants have made about the program:
“I have to make my kids go to recess.”—TRC teacher
“We take CBM tests in the fall, winter, and spring. Usually the students’ scores peak in the winter and decline slightly in the spring. This year, they increased greatly on all three tests in all subject areas tested.”—TRC teacher
“I can’t imagine teaching the way I did 20 years ago. It would be stone-age and completely painful.”
—TRC teacher
“TRC leveled the playing field for students, especially English Language Learners and students who typically struggle with learning.”—TRC teacher
“We don’t use technology for technology’s sake. We use it because it engages students and helps us to saturate our day with meaningful experiences.”—TRC teacher
“Our daughter has struggled as a traditional student. But with this kind of program, she has just blossomed.”—TRC parent
“We could not get our son excited about going to school. He would drag his feet out the door every day. And last night it was 7:30 or 8:00, I finally had to come pick him up.”
—TRC parent
“Our son doesn’t enjoy reading; he doesn’t enjoy writing. But if you give him that technology and let him shine a little bit, and now he’s a kid who’s showing leadership skills that we haven’t seen before.”
—TRC parent
“I had a really hard time in school. I didn’t want to do any of this stuff, but I knew I had to. But now it’s really awesome. Every day I wake up and go ‘Yay! I get to work with Mrs. Herron in math,’ and math was my least favorite subject.”
—TRC student
Teacher Quality
Kansas Coaching Project
Notable achievements
Though more than a year of grant funding remains for the Teacher Quality project, researchers already have identified several successful outcomes:
- The introduction of video to record and analyze coaching interactions has revolutionized our approach to research. “I think using video is likely going to be something we use in other forms of research here at the Center,” Knight says.
- Not only has the Teacher Quality research team learned about effective coaching, they also have expanded their repertoire of research methods. Co-principal investigator Tom Skrtic, a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Kansas, is a leader in the field of qualitative research and naturalistic inquiry. Methodologist Barbara Bradley, assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching at KU, is co-author of one of the landmark books on design study. Both have shared their expertise with other members of the project team.
- Despite serious financial difficulties, the Beaverton, Ore., school district renewed its commitment to this project and to instructional coaching. “It’s a testament to the power of coaching that they’re going to keep it even though they’re really struggling financially in the district,” Knight says.
- The team has partnered with Dr. Henry Levin of Columbia University, a leading expert in the field, to analyze the cost-effectiveness of the coaching model.
Soaring to New Heights
Division of Adult Studies
December, 2009
True collaboration.The Soaring to New Heights project has brought together five entities in a rare collaborative effort to achieve a common goal: the Center for Research on Learning, Wichita Public Schools, Kansas Rehabilitation Services, Kansas Health Policy Authority, and Kansas Youth Empowerment Agency.
“People cooperate. Agencies cooperate,” Johnson says. “But to collaborate means you’re giving up some stuff for the good of the whole. People are doing that. They’re willing to explore new ways of trying to meet needs.”
Future of the project
Soaring to New Heights staff have found that many juniors are not quite ready to think about post-graduation issues. As a result, the project has developed preliminary plans for a follow-up course for seniors that will focus on concrete steps, such as completing financial aid applications.
At the same time, staff and partners believe they are building a program that could expand beyond Wichita.
“It we can continue to make the kinds of impact that we’re making in the lives of these kids, KRS really sees the potential for this to be rolled out across Kansas,” Johnson says.
Conclusion
Early indications are that Soaring to New Heights is successful in its goal to help students with disabilities prepare for life after high school. But for Johnson, the success of this project is less important than finding the right way to help students with disabilities achieve beyond their limited expectations.
“It’s less about the success of a particular course, to me,” he says. “It’s more about finding ways to give kids a sense of their own competency and give them opportunities, real opportunities, to pursue. It’s too grandiose to say pursue their dreams, but pursue something concrete that helps them believe in themselves.”
* The ARC Self-Determination Scale was developed by Dr. Michael Wehmeyer of the University of Kansas and his colleagues. AIR Self-Determination Assessments were developed by American Institutes for Research (AIR), in collaboration with Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City.
GOALS
Examine the effects of Sound Effects on adolescent reading and study skills.
PROJECT STAFF
Carrie Mark, KUCRL doctoral fellow
Donald D. Deshler, KUCRL director
RESEARCH DESIGN
Study 1
Single-Case Design
Study 2
Group Design—Random Assignment
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