Up close and personal

Data review creates an 'aha' moment for suburban teachers

By Joan Richardson

Results, March 2005

Teachers at Blue Valley High School in Stilwell, Kan., remember when they realized their students weren't doing as well as they believed.

The "aha" moment occurred when teachers learned that more than 40% of all students in 1997-98 had received at least one D or F as a final course grade.

Blue Valley is a classic suburban high school of mostly white, mostly high-achieving students with few of the challenges faced by nearby urban schools. In suburban Kansas City, Kan., Blue Valley is one of a handful of similar districts where professionals move because of the reputation of the schools. Students routinely rank in the upper percentiles on national tests and many graduates go on to attend prestigious colleges and universities.

"We had never looked at that before. It was appalling. We were just so shocked. Each one of us might have one or two students but we never knew there were so many," said math department chair Karen Nixon. "That, right there, was enough to convince us that something was broken and needed to be fixed," she said.

Other data that was equally compelling emerged about the same time. This data showed the progress of a cohort of students as they moved through their high school years. Teachers learned that students were learning less than teachers believed they were. "They were actually regressing," said Elizabeth Parks, then the science department chair.

The recognition that "maybe we're not quite as good as we think we are" opened the door for teachers to consider options for improvement, said then-principal Dennis King, who is now the district's executive director of school improvement.

Last year, Blue Valley High School joined NSDC's 12 Under 12 initiative and committed itself to having all of its students perform at the proficient level on the Kansas State Assessment in math and reading by June 2011.

INTRODUCING PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES

King had been reading Rick DuFour's work on professional learning communities at Adlai Stevenson High School in suburban Chicago. He believed some of the ideas could work at Blue Valley. The challenge was how to convince teachers that they needed to change the way they worked and the way they taught

King believed sharing data was the first step. At first, he shared only results on statewide assessments and college entrance tests. Gradually, however, the data went deeper - and often more personal. For example, the results of AP tests were more personal because fewer teachers were directly impacted.

"They were irritated pretty much about having to look at data," King said.

King seized the opportunity created by the data-driven "aha" moments to introduce the concepts behind PLCs without actually using the words themselves or overtly telling teachers about PLCs.

Initially, he encouraged the school's leadership team - comprised primarily of department chairs - to create a school vision. Those leaders reached out to other teachers and created a schoolwide conversation about their vision for the high school.

Stung by the revelations in the data, teachers soon agreed that school is about learning, not about teaching and that they wanted all students to achieve. They said they believed in collaboration. They also agreed that, as painful as it was, they would have to pay more attention to data.

Once teachers had a shared vision, "everything else pretty much fell into place," King said. He began to share DuFour's work with the leadership team. DuFour visited the high school and several Blue Valley teachers visited Stevenson and attended one of DuFour's PLC conferences. Soon, teachers were spreading the ideas they had collected from those experiences.

The leadership team was especially excited about providing time for teachers to meet weekly. Blue Valley teachers devised a schedule that would allow teachers in the four core academic departments to meet for 40 minutes each week by departments.

After a year, teachers wanted more time and the schedule was adjusted to allow all teachers to meet by departments for 55 minutes beginning at 7:30 a.m. each Thursday. "That time is held sacred and everyone knows it," Parks said.

CULTURE CHANGES

Schools make little progress in changing student achievement until teachers change how they work with each other. Nixon and Parks believe that the work on the vision and the resulting PLC meetings were essential in changing teachers' patterns of working at Blue Valley.

The regular PLC meetings have given teachers time to talk with each other about their work. "We used to shout at each other as we walked down the hall, 'Are you in Chapter 4 yet?' We don't do that anymore," Nixon said.

Instead, math teachers work together on common quizzes and common semester exams. If someone gets their chapter test results back and kids overall did not do well on a particular concept, they bring the issue to the next PLC meeting. "We feel very comfortable walking into a meeting now and saying, 'My kids really bombed on this and I don't know what went wrong.' There's a lot of trust now because we know that what is said in there stays in there," she said.

Teachers initially began to suggest interventions that would assist students after students had demonstrated that they needed help. The paired work of confronting the data and talking with each other in PLCs led teachers to design interventions to tackle problems before problems developed. "There was a shift where they became more interested in doing it better in the first place so (students) were successful rather than having to rework something later," Parks said.

To help focus all teachers on the same targets, each PLC group (usually an entire department) also sets one or two SMART goals each year. For example, one of the math department's SMART goals is to reduce the number of zeroes on assignments to less than 1%. After two years of working with that goal, fewer than 3% of math assignments receive zeroes.

So, has Blue Valley's work made a difference?

The number of Ds and Fs have dropped by half in the last six years. Student performance on the ACT has gone up. The percentage of students performing at the lowest levels on the statewide assessments in math and reading has gone down and the percentage of students performing at the highest levels has gone up.

"We've built more capacity to do this work. Now, we just have to persist," King said.