Del Norte schools’ models for reform

Some efforts are under way, more to come

Cua Lee, center left, and Alisa Taber, center right, play “Chicken in the Henhouse,” an enrichment activity for doing well on the standards quiz they took earlier that week. Students who didn’t pass had to keep studying the standards. Del Norte Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

For the past several years, a team of seventh- and eighth-grade teachers at Crescent Elk Middle School have had a program to intervene with struggling students and enrich those already doing well.

Each week students learn a math or English language arts standard on which they’re given a short quiz. Those who pass do a fun activity, those who don’t go to remediation.

On this day, the contrast was striking.

In the two remediation classrooms of about 14 students each, they were quietly practicing sentence structure while a teacher oversaw their work.

Meanwhile, other students created a visual story using iPads. Several girls were standing like statues in the hallway to illustrate their superhero tale.

“Want to see what we made?” one girl shouted. It was a story of girls making funny faces.

“Let’s go make a story about three best friends!” she called to her friends, bounding down the hallway.

Outside, a group was playing the game Chicken in the Henhouse, where students in essence acted out real-life sentence structures. Teacher Molly Sherman would call out a theme like “rodeo” or “skydiving,” and two students had to pantomime, somehow linking up like conjoined sentences.

Each year, these teachers have seen more of their students achieving proficiency on state standards tests.

The system was borne of teachers collaborating on how to best reach their students.

In education terms, it’s a Professional Learning Community, something Del Norte County schools are thinking about

developing with all staff at all schools as part of an effort to better educate students.

Looking for a model

With the help of grant funding from local and statewide foundations, a team of educators called the District Educational Leadership Team and Associates (DELTA) has been looking at two innovative educational models that have succeeded elsewhere: Reinventing School Coalition (RISC) and the Professional Learning Community (PLC).

They visited schools in Lindsay Unified School District in central California and Adams County School District 50 in Colorado, which both use an RISC model of performance-based education that allows students to work at their individual level and advance through the curriculum once they’ve demonstrated proficiency.

Del Norte teachers said this method is effective because it gives students control over their education and forces them to take responsibility for mastering the material; otherwise, they don’t move on to the next level with their peers.

Team members saw how the PLC model has raised student test scores in the Sanger Unified School District in central California. Professional learning communities of school staff were formed to identify critical standards and design instructional support by looking at successful  strategies and developing lesson plans as teams.

Top administrators from Sanger have visited Del Norte and spoken with fervor about how the PLC method can transform a school district if it’s accompanied by a rigid expectation that teachers will help every student succeed.

Teachers in Del Norte saw how working together and collaborating allows educators to share ideas and spread effective teaching practices to all classrooms.

Rather than copying any one model, the school district can create its own recipe of the right elements for this community, said Superintendent Don Olson.

“Just selecting PLC or RISC is not going to solve anything,” Olson said. “It’s what we are going to do when we select a model.”

Last year was the discovery phase of the process of reforming Del Norte’s public school system, said Susan Strong, a consultant with the California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities initiative. This year has been about narrowing the focus to develop a model and finding what works for Del Norte.

The plan is to implement changes next fall at the start of the 2012–2013 school year.

Sharing ideas, success

The PLC model brings teachers together to collaborate on how best to teach their students.

According to the PLC website allthingsplc.info, “members work together to clarify exactly what each student must learn, monitor each student’s learning on a timely basis, provide systematic interventions that ensure students receive additional time and support for learning when they struggle, and extend and enrich learning when students have already mastered the intended outcomes.”

At Crescent Elk, the small-scale PLC involves teachers Gayle Hartwick, Sean Smith, Gale West and Molly Sherman.

Each week, all four spend about 15 minutes teaching one standard in English language arts or math, said Hartwick, the language teacher. This standard is reviewed on Wednesday and students are quizzed on that standard.

Those who don’t do well are re-taught the standard and those who succeed get to do an enrichment activity.

Teachers are giving students time to learn from their mistakes and understand the standard before moving on to next one.

It also builds in motivation to succeed.

The result is, “a lot of kids go up” and score higher on the second test, Hartwick said.

When students do move up, they get a reward. And a healthy competition has developed between the classes.

This method of intervention and enrichment is paying off, students’ test scores have improved each of the last three years it’s been in place. And not just in English language and math, but also in science and social studies, Hartwick.

Hartwick likes both the PLC and RISC models and sees how elements of both could work in Del Norte.

Teachers need to collaborate, she said.

“You come up with great ideas,” she said. “You can share ideas. Teamwork is huge.”

Learning at their level

Implementing RISC would mean a huge change. Traditional grade levels would be eliminated. Students would be assessed and grouped into levels in each subject based on skills. They would only move up a level once they demonstrated that they knew the material.

Students could be in one level in English language arts and another in math.

According to the Reinventing Schools Coalition website, reinventingschools.org, “the RISC approach to schooling is a revolutionary approach to education that represents a dramatic shift in the educational process.”

The RISC model gives students “true ownership of their learning,” according to the website.

Since students are grouped by proficiency, not age, instructors teach more to a class of uniform ability.

This model forces kids to take responsibility for their education. Kids track their progress and know what standards they’re expected to learn and how they can demonstrate they have mastered that concept. They don’t just take a test, they have a choice on different ways to show their proficiency with a model they built or a book report or portfolio.

What Elizabeth Calleja, a teacher at Margaret Keating Elementary School, discovered visiting Adams County School District 50’s schools in Colorado was that students there really like school.

They know exactly what they’re expected to learn and how to prove to their teacher they have mastered a skill, Calleja said, and this makes them more motivated to come to school.

Because students have to demonstrate proficiency of a subject, it’s clear by the time they graduate what they know how to do, she said.

“When they graduate, you know they can do x, y, z exactly,” Calleja said.

A group of local elementary principials and teachers has latched onto the RISC model and want to implement it next school year.

They know that it’s a huge task, though.

To ease into this radical transformation, they suggest starting with the younger grades and expanding so the kids are used to the new system. Parents would also have to be educated so they understand how their children are placed into levels and how they move up, they said.

Working in teams

A focus group of about 12 DELTA members developed an outline of a model dubbed the Del Norte Engaged Learning Model.

The first phase of this model to be implemented next fall at the start of the 2012–2013 school year would focus on creating PLCs utilizing data coaches the district recently received funding to hire.

Each team would work collaboratively to refine benchmarks to assess student achievement and determine how to intervene with struggling students.

Staff would receive professional development focused on how to better engage students. This would require collaboration time for teachers to explore engaged instruction models.

They agreed that students should have to demonstrate proficiency before moving up a grade and that students take responsibility for their learning by tracking their progress.

To do this, the district has to help parents understand expectations of their child and what exactly they’re learning in school, they said.

What will change look like?

There are a lot of questions about how PLCs would look in Del Norte. Would each school form its own PLC or would they be grouped by grade levels encompassing schools in the district? In addition, when would members of PLC have time to collaborate?

DELTA has a framework of a model. Over the next month, the group will work to refine each of its features and provide more specifics of what will be implemented next fall and in the school years to come.

At a recent DELTA meeting, concerns were raised about whether the focus of reform should be “data-driven” (test scores) or “kid-driven” (personal needs).

Some members said they want to go “all in” and that the current framework for change would be just be putting “a toe in the water.”

Others are afraid that, like in years past, the district will implement something new and then grant funding goes away or there’s a problem, and the whole effort goes away.

The district needs to be able to sustain what it starts, they agreed. Once PLCs are created, there needs to be adequate time to collaborate and explore new teaching methods.

These are questions DELTA members are trying to address. The school district will seek grant funding to work on implementing a new system of education in Del Norte.

The plan is for all of this to happen rapidly over the next nine months.

Reach Kelley Atherton at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it