Central Middle School (2016)

  1. PLC Story
  2. PLC Practices
  3. Achievement Data
  4. Awards
  5. Resources

Introduction:

        The Edmond School District is the third largest district in the state of Oklahoma and it serves a suburban community that began in the late 1970’s as an extension of the greater Oklahoma City area.  Edmond Public Schools is a growing and dynamic school district.  In the last five years, the district has experienced annual enrollment increases averaging 550 students per year.  The district is the largest full-time employer in the city of Edmond.  In 2011, Edmond was #1 on CNBC's "10 Perfect Suburbs" list. Edmond was listed as one of the "Top 100 Places to Live in 2007" by Relocate America. Edmond was selected the most outstanding community in its class for five years in a row by the State Chamber of Commerce and State Industrial Development Department.

            Upon arrival at Central Middle School, one of five, soon to be six middle schools in the district, you would see a beautiful old school nestled among mature trees with neighborhood sidewalks and tree lined streets.  It is centered within traditional yet sophisticated homes with manicured lawns and front porches.  There is a big, beautiful church across the street that is a safe place for the school in the event of an emergency.  The local YMCA is practically in the back yard of the school and many of the students walk there for the after school care program.  Hafer Park, a landmark in the community with a little league sports organization is within walking distance of the school.  Central Middle School is literally the “Center or Central” landmark within the community.  Over the years, as Edmond continued to grow, the community expanded.  With that growth and expansion comes change.   Those families that could afford to move within that growth of the community did, as they were enchanted with the beautiful new school buildings that were erected.  After all, new things are better, right?  Ultimately, over time, Central Middle School became known as the “less than” school.  The school where those kids that had less than the others attended.  The community perception began to change as the demographics changed.  Central Middle school is now the only building wide Title I school at the secondary level in Edmond Public Schools.  Unfortunately, it has been referred to as “the armpit of Edmond.” 

            In the state of Oklahoma, schools operate within an A-F accountability system.  At the end of each academic year schools receive a letter grade.  Central is a B school.  In 2013, new leadership was brought into Central and the process of continuous school improvement began.  The new school principal developed an instructional team comprised of the school administrators, the school counselors, the school psychologist, the Title I instructional coaches, and the ELL teacher.  Upon reviewing school testing data, the instructional team developed growth/focus areas for the school. These growth areas can be further defined as the school smart goals. For Central we have what we call our site "Plan on a Page" and our site "PD plan", where we align our smartgoals to our professional growth and development (see resources). There is also a voluntary leadership team that reviews all of the instructional team's work, providing for input and feedback. The leadership team will review the site "Plan on a Page" and the site "PD plan" before it is presented during our back to school staff professional development with the faculty and staff.  Then each collaborative team establishes content specific smartgoals that each individual teacher develops into a classroom level "Plan on a Page" that is displayed in the classroom.  In addition, there is a distsrict "Plan on a Page" that is developed annually. Collectively, and ideally, there is streamlined alignment from the classroom level to the building level, all the way to the district level.  This process involves all teachers, including elective teachers. It is identified and established before school begins where our areas of weakness are and where we have opportunity for growth and enhancement, and the elective teachers cross reference academic standards to their course standards, looking for opportunities to provide targeted support and growth. In addition, elective teachers actively participate in our professional development plan, attending the same trainings as core content teachers.  This "process" takes place in reference to Special Education and ELL students as well.  Our Special Education students are all scheduled into grade level course content (Tier 1), our Tiger Time allows for remedial support twice a week (Tier 2), and IF a special education student needs more targeted instruction, they will attend a lab class (Tier 3).(It should be noted that we offer a Tier 3 class for regular education students that we refer to as Focus).    We offer co-taught Tier 1 classes for Math and English at each grade level on each team.  For our ELL students, we offer a newcomer class for those first or second year new to the country students.  We write LIEPs for each student.  The ELL teacher pushes into the classrooms and pulls students out as needed for support.  Each grade level team offers sheltered support.  The special education teachers and the ELL teacher participate in collaborative meetings, content and grade level (team).  While proficiency is our goal for students in each subgroup, we analyze individual student growth through a variety of assessment practices.

Creating a Successful PLC:

        Edmond Public Schools has been a district operating within the PLC processes for years.  However, just like anything else, what you don’t practice minimizes improvement.  In order to re-institute the PLC practices at Central the staff needed to be familiar with a common instructional language.  A professional development plan was rolled out in the 2013-14 school year where at each staff meeting (the staff meets once a month) the teachers learned about the PLC processes.  The next step was to carve out time in the day for teachers to meet collaboratively.  In order to do this we had to get creative with our master scheduling.  We have a seven hour day with six instructional hours and one plan hour.  We were able to create a rotation within our week that built in an additional hour for teachers to collaborate that did not cut into other planning time that already existed in their day.  Basically teachers complained of no time so we found a way to give them more.  The new schedule allowed the teachers to collaborate one hour a week (with a focus on common formative assessments and student data analysis).  By creating this additional time to collaborate, we were able to honor their plan time where they could meet four out of five days for lesson planning (each grade level is divided into two teams and each team meets once a week during plan time, so there is a common grade level plan time). 

            We also purchased Global PD and have utilized the online program to guide us through each step of the PLC process, keeping our focus on the four essential questions.

 

 

 

 

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

       Each teacher team comes together weekly in our PLC/Collaboration room (fondly known as room 103) where they sit together at a conference table with the Title I instructional Facilitator. Global PD is logged into and projected on the Smartboard.  The agenda for each meeting is prepared by the team and is driven weekly by "next steps" from the previous week's meeting.  Each teacher team creates a common formative assessment that covers one content standard at a time, usually what we would consider a "power standard" or an "essential skill".  The frequency with which common formative assessments are given is typically determined by the amount of days the teachers feel appropriate to teach the particular content (pacing).  This could be as litle as five days or as much as three to four weeks.  However, we try to stay cognizant of the "frequency" with which we assess the learning.  I would say a typical CFA calendar would be every other week.  This is to align with our Tier 2 remediation (Tiger Time), which happens for each core content class every other week.  Teacher teams analyze student data together and stoplight proficiency (red-yellow-green) based upon student results.  This process allows the teachers to determine instructional next steps for each student by standard.  In addition, by comparing data together, teachers can identify areas of high proficiency by teacher which opens the door of conversation to best practice through instructional strategies in the classroom.

        In addition to CFAs, teachers use benchmark data, unit/chapter tests, WIDA scores, Gates Maginitie data, OCCT testing data, immediate response data through the use of "responders" with the Smartboard, class work, home work, and any other representation of student learning for feedback.  

  

  

2. Creating systems of intervention to provide students with additional time and support for learning.

        We have a tiered intervention system at Central.  Tier 1 is grade level content. All students, including special education students access Tier 1.  Tier 2 is a 30 minute remediation twice a week where we rotate by content area. Tier 3 is a Focus class or Lab class that is for more intensive interventional support.  We call our Tier 2 Tiger Time. For those students who mastered the content on their CFA, instead of remediation we enrich through purposeful reading time.  After remediation, during Tiger Time, teachers will re-assess students for mastery of the standard.

        In addition to Tiger Time (Tier 2) and Focus (Tier 3) we offer after school tutoring 4 days a week in reading, math, science and social studies.  We also offer Saturday School.  We pay teachers a stipend for tutoring after school and for teaching Saturday School so the students are exposed to highly qualified instruction personalized through Central teachers.

3. Building teacher capacity to work as members of high performing collaborative teams that focus efforts on improved learning for all students.

        At Central we have an instructional team that leads the school through instructional decisions, practices, professional development, and continuous improvement.  The instructional team consists of the three school administrators, the three grade level counselors, the school psychologist, the Title I team, and the ELL teacher.  Through the use of Title I funds we were able to hire an Instructional Facilitator at Central Middle School.  We also have two Instructional Coaches:  one is a reading specialist and one is a math specialist.  The entire instructional team participated in a PLC conference with Solution Tree and half of the instructional team attended the RTI conference with Mike Mattos.  The instructional team then devised a plan to move forward with the PLC processes at Central.

        The Instructional Facilitator is responsible for unfolding the steps to collaboration within each content area PLC.  We first had to identify the essential standards or target skills.  In order to do this, we paid for substitute teachers and pulled in each department by vertical team.  Once we were able to identify the essential skills, we were able to glance at the year and plan our pacing from the end of the year backwards, being careful to put a particular emphasis on when we teach particular concepts.  Once we were able to do our “year at a glance” we broke our pacing down incrementally by focusing on each semester, and then each quarter.  Our next step was to create a rough framework to work within in reference to our common formative assessments.  We decided to use a “10 day cycle” meaning that every two weeks we would give a CFA.  Starting with this framework gave us a purposeful plan for increasing the frequency of our assessments.  During our collaboration time we were lesson planning for two weeks at a time, culminating those two weeks with a CFA.  We tried to stay ahead of our pacing by two weeks.  After giving a CFA the content area PLC would analyze the data and determine next steps.

        The instructional team determined as we re-instituted the processes of PLCs that is was necessary to have a meeting space so we established a room where each group would come to meet each week.  The room has a conference table, a smartboard, and shelves of resources. We used flexible master scheduling to carve out protected meeting time each week.  

 

Additional Achievement Data

  2011-2012 (Regular ed)       2011-2012 (All)    
                     
6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Central Math 79% 29% 74% 22%   Math        
Reading 81% 10% 73% 10%   Reading        
                     
7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 81% 29% 73% 20%   Math        
Reading  92% 30% 79% 21%   Reading         
Social Studies 98% 50% 89% 29%   Social Studies        
                     
8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 78% 29% 71% 28%   Math        
Algebra I 98% 72% 84% 37%   Algebra I        
Reading 88% 18% 83% 20%   Reading        
Science 92% 23% 90% 19%   Science        
Social Studies 89% 31% 77% 18%   Social Studies        
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
  2012-2013         2012-2013    
                     
6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 90 36 77% 25%   Math 86% 33% 68% 19
Reading 99 16 72% 12%   Reading 63% 10% 62% 10%
                     
7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 82 23 74% 19%   Math 77% 18% 66% 17%
Reading  85% 14% 77% 12%   Reading  79% 9% 68% 11%
Social Studies Field Test Field Test   Social Studies Field  Test Field Test
                     
8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 80% 32% 72% 32%   Math 73% 28% 65% 28%
Algebra I 100% 72% 86% 33%   Algebra I 100% 72% 78% 28%
Reading 90% 23% 82% 16%   Reading 83% 17% 75% 12%
Science 72% 27% 58% 16%   Science 65% 22% 52% 11%
Social Studies Field Test Field Test   Social Studies Field Test Field Test
                     
  2013-2014         2013-2014    
                     
6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 79 28 76% 23%   Math 71 28 67% 19%
Reading 78 16 75% 14%   Reading 67 23 65% 12%
                     
7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 90 31 74% 22%   Math 80 29% 64% 18%
Reading  92 32 81% 20%   Reading  85 30% 71% 17%
Social Studies Field Test Field Test   Social Studies Field  Test Field Test
                     
8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 72 23 63% 21%   Math 58 20 53% 17%
Algebra I 100 88 82% 34%   Algebra I 100 88 75% 30%
Reading 86 18 82% 16%   Reading 73 14 72% 13%
Science 68 28 59% 18%   Science 58 20 49% 14%
Social Studies 82 67 74% 45%   Social Studies 71 46 65% 38%
                     
  2014-2015         2014-2015    
                     
6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   6th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 89% 11%       Math 82% 33% 67% 19%
Reading 88% 12%       Reading 78% 6% 63% 4%
                     
7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   7th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
Math 84% 16%       Math 76% 31% 66% 19%
Reading  90% 29%       Reading  82% 24% 72% 16%
Geography 89% 68%       Geography 82% 59% 63% 35%
                     
8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced   8th Grade % Passing % Advanced State Passing State Advanced
8th Math 85% 15%       8th Math 77% 23% 53% 11%
Algebra I 100% 98%       Algebra I 100% 98% 76% 28%
Reading 94% 6%       Reading 87% 13% 75% 16%
Science 77% 23%       Science 67% 33% 52% 17%
US History 85% 15%       US History 79% 58% 62% 32%
  • Principal, Dana Renner, recognized as Oklahoma's Middle School Principal of the Year 2015-2016.
  • Beth Stukey, Edmond District Teacher of the Year Finalist, 2015-2016 (winner yet to be determined).
  • Elayna Killacky, Edmond District Teacher of the Year, 2012-2013
  • Central is a National Blue Ribbon recognized school

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