Our moment of opportunity to change Adairsville Middle School’s culture occurred in June 2018 during the Culture Keepers conference is Atlanta, GA. For many in our group, this was the first exposure to the work of Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas Many, and Mike Mattos. With our Learning by Doing (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016) book in hand, we were able to begin the groundwork for the PLC (Professional Learning Community) culture shift and to create the necessary collective efficacy. This group of leaders would soon become our inaugural System Guiding Coalition necessary for our continual success.   

Once the System Guiding Coalition was established, work on a timeline for BCSS PLC Implementation Guide: Year 1-3 began.  As the district rolled out their plan, our principal established a Guiding Coalition to begin the process at the school level. In Fall of 2018, the school Guiding Coalition working as the voice of Adairsville Middle School and established our mission, vision, and collective commitments. It was important to our team that everything we did moving forward be tied to our Mission:  As a team, we will collaboratively work to ensure that all students grow.  To be able to follow the districts timeline, our Guiding Coalition developed an Adairsville Middle School PLC Implementation guideline. Professional learning led by our Instructional Lead Teacher established expectations for a guaranteed and viable curriculum and the deconstruction of standards using the district template.  We also decided to meet vertically within each department at the end of the 2017-2018 school year to collaboratively prioritize standards. We established essential standards by subject and grade level and developed pacing guides, which was crucial for STEM, based on the essential standards.  

In year two, the school and the district moved forward simultaneously with our timelines. The District Guiding Coalition subcommittees began working towards our BCSS (Bartow County School System) Playbook as a guideline and resource. At the school level, we created a schedule which provided two days a week for collaborative teams to work together, two days a week that collaborative teams had office hours to work with students that were not meeting proficiency, and one day a week collaborative teams had a duty station. We focused our work in our collaborative teams on Questions 1 and 2: What do the students need to know and be able to do? and How will we know when students have learned it? During pre-planning, collaborative teams established norms, SMART Goals, and learning targets for their first unit of study. We used grade level times throughout the year for professional learning and feedback on the process. As collaborative teams began working together, the Instructional Lead Teacher and the Admin team sat in collaboratives to help guide them in the process. We made a goal for each collaborative to develop a common formative assessment based on their first Essential Standard during the 1st nine weeks.  

We also established a Site Intervention Team (SIT) to begin researching interventions so that we could answer question 3: What will we do when student have not learned it? This team reported back to the Guiding Coalition any/all information based on research from schools that had implemented an intervention program, with recommendations on the development of a schoolwide intervention/enrichment time to start in year three (2020-2021.)  This team was also scheduled to attend the Solution Tree RTI (Response to Intervention) Conference in Kentucky in the Spring of 2020; however, it was cancelled due to COVID-19. 

In the Spring of 2020, our Guiding Coalition developed a master schedule to include intervention and extension time to begin in August of the 2020-2021 school year. The Guiding Coalition also worked to develop a strong and accurate Pyramid of Interventions.  The District added the position of Learning Support Specialist to begin in the Fall of 2020. This position was designed to work closely with the Instructional Lead Teacher and to help teachers with Questions 3 and 4: What do we do when students have not learned it? and What will we do when students already know it? The Guiding Coalition, Instructional Lead Teacher and Learning Support Specialist, started the 2020-2021 school year by leading Professional Learning during pre-planning and throughout the year, to strengthen the understanding of what the intervention/extension period would look like and how we would collect the data of students showing proficiency on the Essential Standards. This group was scheduled to attend the Solution Tree Conference in California during the Summer of 2020, in hopes of gaining more knowledge to pass on to the staff during pre-planning; however, this conference was also cancelled due to COVID-19. 

In Fall of 2020, we fully implemented our intervention/extension period that we called Focus Time. Collaborative teams analyzed Common Summative Assessments during collaboration time to identify students who needed Tier II instruction on the Essential Standard. Then they worked collaboratively to split the students into small groups, to develop strategies to reteach and assess the intervention, as well as, to decide which teacher would be best to do the interventions based.  Collaboratives began to transform their mindset from my students to our students. During this time, collaboratives implemented a common grade book and began using common formative assessments and common summative assessments. During this school year, the admin team, the Instructional Lead Teacher, and the Learning Support Specialist monitored collaborative teams for evidence of how they would respond when students had not shown proficiency on the Essential Standards.  

 The District Guiding Coalition and Adairsville Middle School Guiding Coalition work together towards continuous improvement at the district and school level. We have an A Team designation that is given to collaborative teams after a vetting process to prove that they are the best. This is the highest honor a collaborative team can get in the Bartow County School System. We have two teams who will be applying for the honor as we go into the 2021-2022 school year. At the school and district level, we engage in continuous Professional Learning looking at our data and how we can improve. Our collaborative teams continuously work to improve their Essential Standards by using the R.E.A.L Criteria to determine if the standards they have chosen are essential. They are also using data, student feedback, and The Ladder of Complexity to ensure their Common Formative and Summative Assessments are rigorous (Nicole Dimich led a virtual PD on Design in Five during our September TWD.) We also have our Guiding Coalition members lead training and continually work with collaborative teams to ensure that we all have a collective understanding of the Adairsville Middle School Professional Learning Community.  

We have worked together to ensure that all students are proficient on their Essential Standards by providing a guaranteed viable curriculum. Students who have not demonstrated proficiency will be given an opportunity to attend a summer intervention this year (2021) to become proficient. Teachers have worked together with their collaboratives to give every student the opportunity to show proficiency. The commitment to the process is evident in the work the teachers are doing. As we move forward, the Guiding Coalition will attend two different trainings and will lead the faculty at Adairsville Middle in a two-day School Improvement Planning Session during the summer. Led by the Guiding Coalition, decisions will be made about the intervention schedule for the 2021-2022 school year, about monitoring collaboratives, and collecting meaningful data. The Guiding Coalition will also attend a three-day Solution Tree Conference from July 12—14th in Cartersville to strengthen their understanding of the process and to learn more about moving forward with grading. The goal we have for the 2021-2022 school year is to begin the process of aligning our grading practices with proficiency-based grading and developing an implementation timeline for grading.