Focus

This past school year, our Building Leadership Team, as a book study, read Finding Your Leadership Focus by Doug Reeves (@DouglasReeves of @LeadAndLearn). A real short and simple synopsis of this book is that schools try to do too many things. And when schools try do a lot of things, they usually end up doing them no better than adequately. Schools need to "weed their gardens." They need to eliminate some of the things that they are trying to do, but not doing with fidelity due to a lack of time and resources. Schools should focus on no more than six areas to really implement well.

After on-going discussions throughout the year, last month, I created a Google Form to see what common areas needed to have our focus at Riverside Elementary School. Of all the responses, there were four that rose to the top:

1. Flex teams/Flex time, which is what we call our Response to Intervention (RtI) block of time. This is something that I've talked about in two previous blog posts ('Things that I am proud of and are worth celebrating' and 'Flex'). After hearing RtI guru, Mike Mattos (@mikemattos65) of Solution Tree (@SolutionTree), in Cedar Rapids at an event put-on by the Grant Wood Area Education Agency (@GrantWoodAEA) this past September for two days, we created this Flex system that we implemented while hitting the ground running. Overall, it seems to be beneficial. However, there is a desire to focus on how to improve the initial system that we have put in place.
2. Student data binders - To some degree we have used student data binders for at least a couple of years now. However, they are still more of a teacher resource and they have yet to really become a tool that students are using to monitor their own learning. This is our task - to increase our students' ownership of their own learning. We think that we can help ourselves in this area based off of some ideas that we have for how to use our student data binders more effectively.
3. Data meetings - Again, this is something that we already do. School staff is having regularly scheduled meetings where we are spending time talking about what is working well with our instruction for students and what needs improving. The system is in place, but how can we enhance our system so that we are maximizing the impact that this can have on student learning?
4. Data walls - These have started to pop-up in various classrooms, the data room that we've created as a place for teachers to meet and center our discussions around data, and in the front entryway of our school. We want to be transparent with our data (the good, and even the not so good). There are two mains reasons that we see this as beneficial - 1) when it is visible for students, it helps increase their ownership of their learning, and 2) for school staff it is about our accountability and our sense of urgency in regards to student learning.

We'll keep you posted as we focus our improvements on these areas, next year, in an effort to enhance student learning at Riverside Elementary School. 

Things that I am proud of and are worth celebrating

The March/April 2014 issue of Principal magazine highlights three practices for schools to implement in-order to overcome difficulties - 

1. Compile electronic data binders for each classroom that are updated on an ongoing basis with new scores. These can help principals keep track of their students’ and teachers’ progress.
2. Give students their own data binders to track their own achievement data. This gives students greater autonomy and a sense of accomplishment.
3. Create a "data room" for teachers to help them visualize and better track key measures of student success.

This was especially exciting to me because all three of these things were implemented this year, at Riverside Elementary School. Now I'm not naive enough to think that we have mastered any of these three, but we have created the framework and we are committed to improvement. Nonetheless, these are three accomplishments that I'm proud of and that I think are worth celebrating from this school year.

Recently, I asked that question, "What are three things that you are proud of/worth celebrating from this school year?" at the end of a staff meeting, via a Google Form. As you can tell from the following responses (below), a lot of our teachers are very proud of our flex. (Flex is our systematic Response to Intervention (RtI) block of time. I posted about our Flex implementation on this blog on October 28, 2013.) This is relevant because our "data room" and our electronic data are both tools that we use to help us monitor our implementation of flex.

• Starting flex teams and experiencing success with the flex teams.
• I think my students made tremendous growth in reading - whether it was fluency, accuracy, retell, or just an increased interest in reading. I feel like that was a result of our flex team work, our classroom work, and also in making good connections with my students and showing an interest in not only how they were reading, but what they were reading as well.
• Flex groups and data teams affected student growth tremendously with open and honest conversations about what the data showed and what students needed.
• The implementation of our flex teams. This has been very beneficial for the students. It has also helped bring our culture to an "our student" focus.
• I am excited about our flex groups. It was a learning process, and I think next year will be even better!
• I feel like we really came together as a staff this year. The whole staff seemed willing to do whatever they could for every single student in the building. I also think people were more willing to try new things and keep an open mind. It really felt like I was working on a team.
• Flex Groups - Not only did my students enjoy working with multiple teachers, I enjoyed having the chance to collaborate with others to improve student learning.
• I feel like flex teams have really helped us focus on what our students need and provide that to them.
• All staff working together and being willing to try new things. We implemented many new things this year such as flex teams, safety procedures, a new lunch schedule, etc.
• The kids are taking more responsibility in their learning. 

That last bullet is an area that we really want to commit to as being an area of focus for next year. One of the ways that we are planning to do this is through some enhancements that we are planning to make to our student data binders. We've used student data binders in the past, but it is a definite area for us to upgrade in-order to support students' learning at Riverside Elementary School.