Brown Elementary (2023)

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

Our journey of formally implementing the PLC Process began in 2018. At Brown Elementary, we have a shared understanding and commitment to the PLC at Work Process the following four ways: we created a vision and mission as a whole staff, created "What an excellent teacher looks like" checklist that turned into Collective Commitments that we call H.O.P.E for our staff, students and collaborative team meetings. We utilize quarterly SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Research-Based, Timely) CFA goals that define the 4 Critical Questions based on our Essential Standards. We discuss as a whole staff to vertically align throughout the school year as well as participate in whole staff professional development that is aligned to our instructional needs to ensure we are continuously improving as a collaborate team focusing on what is best for our students.

Our staff collaborated to create a vision/mission statement that we all believed in, endorsed, and committed to. Our staff participated in a training on Social & Emotional Learning that was given to us by our district. During this training, we all received and read an article, “Got Grit”. The collegial conversation that happened throughout our staff around this article assisted us in creating our vision, “We are committed to learning through perseverance!” This vision is posted and utilized throughout our school. Students are rewarded for perseverance and grit on Friday announcements each week. During monthly staff meetings, our staff present “Got Grit” awards to each other for demonstrating the qualities we all believe in. This common vision and mission and H.O.P.E. Collective Commitments continue to be the foundation and drive our work daily with students and ourselves. Our Collective Commitments became the acronym: H.O.P.E., which stands for:

  • High, Clear Expectations
  • Organized Implementation
  • Positive Community
  • Engagement

All staff recognized that these items should be present and seen throughout our collaborative meetings and our classrooms daily. Each school year we collaborate to review, revise, edit, and improve our collective commitments as needed to meet the current needs of our students and staff. Through this collaborative and reflective process, we ensure that our H.O.P.E. Collective Commitments are continuously improved to promote high levels of learning, while supporting the belief that all students can learn. New staff are informed of and pledge to our commitments that we created as a collaborate team of educators learning together. (See attached artifacts) 

As collaborative teams, we continuously build understanding and commitment to the PLC at Work process. We meet to discuss, improve and modify CFA’s/Quarterly SMART goals/SLO goals, based on our Essential Standards and the NVACS (Nevada Academic Content Standards). The SMART goals contain the 4 Critical Questions that teachers ask themselves when collaborating and focusing on student learning. Each grade level creates SMART goal common formative assessments that align with their Essential Standards for ELA, Math, Science, and Behavior SMART goals. (The NVACS include and embed Common Core State Standards.) Grade level teams utilize CFA’s, quick-checks and quarterly SMART goals to make data-based decisions on instruction and student intervention needs throughout the school year. We have a leadership team and an MTSS/RTI team that meet to focus on student learning and growth to provide support and next steps based on student data. The 21/22 year, we created a Data Plan that contains our SMART goals, Essential Standards, Curriculum Plans all in one digital location school wide. This provides specific data and information for all staff to ensure that we are vertically aligned and able to collaborate with all staff for all students at any time. See artifacts. 

Utilizing our school-wide SPP – School Performance Plan, SBAC data, a Plan, Do, Study, Act reflection format for staff regarding the previous school year, climate surveys, ELL data, SMART goal data helps create professional development to ensure that as a staff we are learning and growing.  Our 21-22 data demonstrated that we needed to incorporate Science and Behavior quarterly SMART/CFA goals by grade level to ensure we are growing in those areas along with ELA and Math. Our data demonstrates the collaborative work increased both our Social & Emotional Learning and Science data for the 22-23 school year.

Our collaborative team efforts of creating a common vision, mission, H.O.P.E. collective commitments, grade level SMART/CFA goals, vertically aligned digital Data Plan, and continuous PD based on our data continues to provide us a common understanding and commitment to the PLC at Work process. Our PLC Process will continue to endure all the challenges that occur to support high-quality instruction and learning for all our students.

 

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

Our staff continues to update and implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum. Our grade levels utilize NVACS to refine and update their curriculum plans each year by updating our Essential Standards for ELA, Math, Science, and Behavior and then utilizing and studying the SMART Goals/Common Assessments that align to those Essential Standards on a weekly basis. Grade level teams analyze student data to ensure students are mastering the standards and ensure that team members are aligning their teaching and assessing consistently. During the 22-23 school year, as we continued to refine and update our curriculum plans, Essential Standards, and SMART goals, we met as a whole staff at the end of each quarter to collaborate as an entire school-wide team to vertically align our Smart Goals and ensure that each grade level curriculum plan align with NVACS and does not overlap the grade level below or above them. Staff also wanted to ensure that concepts and standards flow and make sense, in the order that the standards were placed in the plan, and based on what the grade levels below and above are focusing on. The vital piece that came out of this collaborative work was the reflections on how the students were scoring on our essential standards.

Our collaborative teams meet weekly for a minimum of 1.45 hours. Many teams collaborate outside contract hours additionally each week to focus on the 4 Critical Questions to plan by creating Smart Goals/Common Assessments based on their Essential Standards. The teachers focus on Questions 3 & 4 as they determine what interventions are needed if the students didn’t learn the content and what they will do if the students did learn the content. During this collaboration time, teachers update their curriculum plan, Essential Standards, and SLO/ SMART goals, as needed, while ensuring all instruction aligns to the NVACS and students are prepared and ready to go to the next grade level focusing on ensuring that every student is meeting the Essential Standards of the grade level.

The strategies utilized to monitor student learning on a timely basis are: Smart Goals/Common Formative Assessments, district expected Student Learning Objectives (SLO’s), District Common Formative Assessments, Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) three times a year and Aims Web to monitor all students in interventions to decide next steps in the MTSS (RTI) Tier system. Our MTSS team meets weekly and one grade level per week joins our MTSS team to discuss all students classified as Tier 3 to monitor progress and to discuss next steps. Our grade level teams discuss all students including students with special education plans and Tier 2 supports weekly to ensure learning is happening and the correct acceleration is taking place. The staff at Brown hold the belief that ALL students can learn, however we understand that individual students may learn at different times or in different ways. With this understanding, we are committed to correctly implementing the MTSS process to address unique learning needs of all students.

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

At Brown Elementary, we have created and implemented systems that continuously improve our instruction. We created a master schedule (see attached) that has core instructional blocks and intervention blocks for all grade levels. Our core instructional time is sacred; all students participate in core, Tier 1 grade level instruction. Students do not miss core, Tier 1 grade level instruction. During the intervention times, students have specifically designed interventions aligned to their individual needs. We utilize our MTSS (RTI) System/Team to help continue to provide support throughout all our grade levels. Our MTSS team meets weekly to discuss students whose data supports the need of more tiered support/interventions. Each grade level meets with our MTSS team every 6 weeks focusing on our students who receive Tier 3 supports. Student data brought to the meeting demonstrates what interventions the student has been receiving, our MTSS team collaborates and helps provide support to create the next steps for each individual student. Our grade level teams meet and discuss all of their students and specifically the students receiving Tier 2 supports and interventions weekly. We utilize our common formative assessments, SMART goals, informal observations, attendance, MAP/AimsWeb/SBAC data if applies to monitor student growth. We utilize ELA intervention programs that our district has provided for interventions for both our Tier 2 and Tier 3 levels of support. The ELA programs we utilize are LLI (Literacy Leveled Intervention), Heggerty, and Phonics First. The math resources we utilize are focusing on our Essential Standards by grade level and DreamBox. Utilizing district provided funds, retired/non-full time certified teachers provide additional small group instruction/interventions based on grade level/student need. Based on our data for 22-23, our staff decided to continue to implement for the 23-24 school year:

  • Ensure that our special education staff continues to collaborate and correlate instruction within the general education teachers, time is built into schedule to co-plan. 
  • Continue having one grade level meet weekly with our MTSS team to ensure students are discussed every 6 weeks to monitor learning and growth.

 

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

As a staff, our high-performing, collaborative teams focus their efforts on improved student learning on a regular basis. We have a solid foundation of a common vision and mission, H.O.P.E. Collective Commitments, and Staff Norms, which are visited yearly. We hired an additional 16 staff members for the 22-23 school year, we utilized our additional PD time to review our H.O.P.E. commitments to ensure all staff members committed to learning through perseverance and aligning their work with our H.O.P.E. collective commitments to focus on student learning and growth. Our grade level teams have Norms that are created and reviewed at each team meeting. Our leadership team representative creates the team agenda and includes SLO/Smart goal data based on Essential Standards, Common Formative Assessments, grade level norms, and yearly goals. We continue to build teacher capacity by discussing the 4 critical questions weekly in the team meetings. Our teams discuss common assessments (SMART goals) focusing on the critical questions to ensure we are discussing and collaborating to decide what we want our students to learn based on our Essential Standards. Utilizing this student data to not only drive our instruction, but also help solidify what type of supports and/or interventions students may need. Throughout the 22-23 school year, both our Leadership Team and MTSS Teams (both require a grade level teacher representative) correlate all information/decisions/next steps to their grade level teams during collaborative work time. Implementing new quarterly SMART goals for Science and Behavior this 22-23 school year based on last year’s data was our focus. This led to all professional development being aligned. Additionally, staff wanted to do a book study to help us focus on social emotional learning for themselves and our students. Our Science SBAC and our SEL Climate demonstrated high growth which proved that our collaborative efforts were effective. (See data spreadsheets and 22-23 Survival Sidekick in attachments.)

Achievement Data Files

Additional Achievement Data

22-23 Highlights:

Behavior/SEL:

  • Based on our student climate survey, we improved in the following areas:
    • Self-Awareness of Emotion increased from 62% to 71%
    • Self-Management of Goals increased from 54% to 66%
    • Self-Awareness of Self Concept increased from 68% to 91%

5th Grade Science Smarter Balance (SBAC) State Assessment:

  • Students scoring At or Above Standard increased from 13% to 36%

ACCESS (ELL) State Assessment:

  • Students exiting out of ELL services:
    • 22/23: 7 exited out of 35 students - 20%
    • 21/22: 13 exited out of 37 students - 35%
    • 20/21: 10 exited out of 33 students - 30%
    • Percentage of students growing on a trajectory that predicts within 5 years they will earn a scaled composite score that is associated with exiting the EL designation:
      • We scored 43% compared to similar schools scoring 37% and district scoring 35%.
    • Overall Performance – Average Score by ACCESS Domain
      • We are continuing to improve:
        • Overall: 316 up 7 points from last year, and 23 points higher than district average.

MATH Smarter Balance (SBAC) State Assessment:

  • Overall Mathematics went from 56% to 57% meeting At standard or Above. (Levels 3 & 4)
  • 10% more students with an IEP met standards or above Levels 3 & 4. 35% compared to 25% last year.
  • Our FRL students increased 3% scoring Level 3 or 4 At standard or Above than last year.  
  • 4thgrade students:
    • with an IEP had a 19% increase in students who met or above standard.
    • Classified FRL had a 15% increase in students who met or above standard.
    • 5thgrade students:
      • with an IEP had a 20% increase in students who met or above standard.
      • Classified FRL had a 13% increase in students who met or above standard.   

ELA Smarter Balance (SBAC) State Assessment:

  • Students with an IEP scoring at or above standard increased 3% from 22% last year to 25% this year.
  • Reduced the amount of students with an IEP that scored a Level 1 from 63% last year to only 56% this year; 7% increase in students with an IEP closer to meeting grade level standards.
  • 3rd grade students with an IEP had a 10% increase of students who met or were above standards.

Promising Practices School 2022

National Model PLC School 2019, 2020, 2021

Jan 20/21: District email regarding how our Kinder students utilizing DreamBox: Of the 50% of children using DreamBox, most (and almost all) are on track. "Just wanted to say nice job to your teachers who are integrating this as a tool. It shows their hard work of getting students ready for 1st grade."

Fall 19/20 Washoe County School District Award: Inspiring Elevation Gains in Student Achievement: Sustained High Growth Across Subjects

NSPF 5 Star School for the previous 3 years (We went up 6 points the 18/19 school year, 90 out of 100.) No rating for 19/20, 20/21, 21/22 due to Covid.

Nominated for School of the Year, 18-19

Our Student Council was nominated for Student Group of the Year, 18-19 

Our Student Council was also recognized by the Reno Aces Fundraising Program & Greater Nevada Credit Union for raising funds for the past 3 years. They placed 2nd and 3rd highest fundraising in the community. 

We were voted by the school board to stay off the Multi-Track Year Round Calendar for both 17-18, 18-19 school years due to the highly organized and efficient way our very over-crowded school was operating.

 

Top