The journey for Benignus Elementary to become a model Professional Learning Community (PLC) began in 2008 with the introduction of the book Learning by Doing. The first year of implementation was met with mixed emotions from the staff because they felt it was one more trend in education. Initially, the staff did not truly see how the practice was essential in building a powerful, collaborative culture that would become the foundation of all our work. The campus culture was and still is built on trust, team work and establishing student-centered decision-making processes.
The process of becoming a learning organization was on its way when grade-level teams began creating meaningful professional goals for themselves and setting high expectations for our students. Our campus gained an understanding of how to create S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused, and Time bound) goals, design engaging instruction, evaluate data, and monitor progress to ensure student growth. Administration set out to provide teams with the time and support in restructuring the master schedule to allow for grade levels to have consistent blocks of time together. Each grade level has 270 minutes of planning per week (not including before or after school time). We found it was important to include one block of the planning time to be an uninterrupted 90 minutes. We accomplished this by creating double specials with the assistance of our P.E., art, and music departments.
The teachers recognized that there was a need to have a structured agenda in place before each meeting. It became apparent that team norms needed to be established and honored to understand what did “not” have a place during that time. The focus became evident that in order to maintain our collaborative learning culture and stay focused on student achievement, it was essential to keep DuFour’s four essential PLC questions (What do we expect students to know and be able to do? How will we know if they have learned it? What will we do if they don’t? How will we respond when some students already know it?) at the forefront.
Each year our collaborative teams have continued to refine our work to ensure that every student succeeds. Our collaborative planning team meetings have resulted in improved sharing of strategies, increased professional support for teachers, and an improvement in standards driven instruction. Our PLCs have resulted in a focused research based intervention strategies targeted to fill the gaps in student learning, thus improving overall achievement in curriculum areas. We have been able to create sustainable intervention models and track the growth of all students. Peer observations have resulted in improved practice throughout our school. The collaborative discussions and sharing during PLC has lead teachers to analyze their own practice and to share data that supports the effectiveness of best practices in lesson design and delivery.
Use the area below to make a bar graph that displays your progress.
Major Grade Tracking: Major grades account for ½ your grade. Color grade boxes 80 and above green, 70-80 yellow and below 70 red. Mark R for scores requiring a re-test.
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Every 9 weeks, all grade-levels (K-5) participate in district-created benchmarks and CCA's (Campus Common Assessments) are generally used at the end of each unit. CCA's are created by each grade-level subject area and the questions are based off our Essential Standards. Teachers scan their results into Eduphoria and our content specialists disaggregate the data and help teachers identify gaps, trends and celebrations. We hold monthly S.L.A.M.S. to dissect our data as a grade-level cohort. The 2017-2018 school year was the first year we tracked each major assessment in Eduphoria. We are hopeful that this will allow us to create comparable data conversations for the 2018-2019 school year.
The 2017-2018 school year was devoted to restructuring our RTI processes for academics and behavior. We introduced staff members to the tiers of RTI/BRTI and gathered feedback on our previous systems (SOS) strengths and weaknesses. We gathered baseline data to identify students going into the year. We used STAAR data, MAP and teacher input to place students in their RTI tiers. Teachers monitored students throughout the RTI tiers, conducted meetings with parents and created interventions for students. The process has so far been successful. We have streamlined the identification process, have comprehensive interventions and are continually differentiating instruction throughout the tiers of RTI.
Prior to the state testing time, PLC's used common assessments and benchmarks to identify intervention groups in ELA and Math based on learning standards and need. The evidence used to determine if the needs of each student were met were TEKs based quizzes and teacher observation. These small groups were flexible and fluid. Four weeks prior to STAAR, 3rd, 4th and 5th grade teams had flexed small group targeted instruction for an hour two days a week. We planned our flex by shutting down the entire grade-level for an hour to ensure that students did not miss any content area curriculum. Flexing consisted of reinforcing TEKS with enrichments and supporting low performing teks with reteaching and differentiated curriculum. Everyone on campus jumped on board to ensure student success including reading and math specialists, specials teachers, assistant principals, and certified subs.
Students were able to flex through different groups based on their mastery of the particular TEK being focused on during the flex-time instruction. Small assessments would occur throughout the flex time to determine mastery. This simple process ensured the success of each student because we were meeting them at their mastery level.
Benignus high performing collaborative teams are comprised of ELA/History teachers, Math/Science teachers, an ELA and Math/Science specialist, the media specialist and campus principal/assistant principals. We meet weekly at 1:50 pm for a total of 90 min. Teams initially meet for 45 min. with the specialists to discuss lesson planning, student data, interventions and flex schedule as well as enrichments to push GT and higher performing students to the next level of academic success. The next 45 min are spent together as a grade-level to collaborate with one another about regular school business. Principals and the media specialist are in attendance to answer any questions about anything from grading guidelines to recess rules that need clarification. The media specialist collaborates with teachers to support their content level instruction by supplying online resources as well as books to teachers.
Grade-level teams have a built in, once a month, Student Learning Analysis Meeting. All teachers, administrators, SPED personnel, specialists and anyone with a direct investment in student learning would attend. Our collaborative group had a simple purpose; to reflect, diagnose and intervene. We examined common assessment data as subject/grade level teams. First, we looked at the overall performance of all students per teacher and split by demographic. Initially, we noticed that we were not teaching up to specific groups of our demographic and teachers brainstormed ways to immediately address the noticeable demographic gaps. As we moved toward a better understanding of data, we were able to dig deeper to confront student weaknesses by specifically targeting student performance by TEK. Compared to prior year benchmark scores, we have made generous gains in student growth and performance due to our imbedded data meetings within the PLC process. Teachers are more aware of the language of their TEKS which has increased the value of planning time and has deepened the discussions about tailoring instruction to meet the needs of each individual student.
Benignus Elementary has continuously performed above the set standards and surpassed the district and state scores. The STAAR percent at level II satisfactory standard or above for all grades are 90%, 90%, and 88% for the years 2015, 2016, and 2017 respectively. The State and district percentages are 77% and 83% for 2015 and 75% and 81% for 2016. There was a decrease of two percentage points from 2015 to 2016 for the state and district while Benignus was able to maintain its overall scores. There is a drop of two points in the school’s percentage in 2017. This is primarily due to a change in testing policy affecting the school’s special education population.
In the STAAR Reading we can see progressive improvement by tracking the reading scores from the last three years. While Benignus’ reading scores did not suffer major drops due to testing changes the District and the State show significant drops in the STAAR Reading testing scores. If we track the third grade testing scores in 2015, then look at fourth grade in 2016, and fifth grade in 2017 we can see that there is growth in the reading scores of that cohort of students. Looking at the same cohort and following them for the state and district we can see that the test scores show the opposite trend.
It is evident that the organization’s team works hard in closing the achievement gap of at risk populations and minority groups. This is evident by the test results of these populations consistently surpassing both state and district scores over the last three years.
Benignus Elementary: Let’s Have a Ball!
Sponsor: Satterfield & Pontikes Construction, Inc.
Benignus Elementary, "love to listen, listen to Learn!"