Essex  Elementary School (EES) thrives as a Professional Learning Community and has been committed to this work for over ten years.  EES participated in our first PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES AT WORK training that was offered by:  Champlain Valley Educator Development Center (CVEDC-ESA) in November 2011.  This workshop was attended by administrators and teacher leaders.  This work was based on Richard DuFour’s work with professional learning communities and best practices for enhancing student achievement. Our school teams left this work excited and motivated to work together and improve student learning (a collaborative culture focused on improving student outcomes). 

Following this initial introduction and start to our PLC journey, our team continued to work with (CVEDC-ESA) in early February 2012 and continued through May 2013.  These trainings provided the understanding of a PLC and the responsibilities of a teacher leader. Starting in 2018, our school began working with Solution Tree and engaged in PLC at Work conferences. Our first team attended the PLC at Work conference in Des Moines, Iowa in October of 2018. Teacher leader meetings began at this time and, later in the 2019-2020 school year, the official Guiding Coalition was created. As part of the Essex Westford School District, essential standards were established through our district PLC process. 

The EES Guiding Coalition consists of grade level teacher leaders, learning specialists, guidance counselor and the building principal. This team functions as the school leadership team and operates using the four essential questions of a PLC.  We meet every  week as well as during the summer and are committed to our team norms and collective commitments which can be found at the top of our meeting agenda template. As a Guiding Coalition, we modeled the process of creating our Collective Commitments and our next step is to engage in this process as a whole staff to lay the foundation to revisit our vision.

We have maintained a commitment to the PLC process and our Collaborative Team Approach. This commitment is driven by our teachers and their dedication to the process and our students. As one district employee stated, “It feels authentic here. Teachers have ownership, the time we use in our collaborative teams is valued and sacred.” When principal Ashley Gray joined EES in 2020, she quickly learned that collaborative team time within the PLC process was highly respected and prioritized. This time was, and is, cherished by school teams and is highly effective.

Our school is devoted to sending all teachers to the RTI at Work conference from Solution Tree to gain a deep understanding of why we are doing this work and the impact it will have on student learning and teacher growth.  In January, 2020 a team of teachers and administrators went to RTI at Work in Houston (recap). Then, during the summer of 2020 an additional team attended the RTI at Work Portable Event and used our Guiding Coalition summer work time to debrief the experience and plan for our school year. In February, 2022 a team went to Austin for the RTI at Work Summit and in December of 2022 another team attended the RTI at Work Institute in Pasadena. 

This school year, we are taking time as a whole staff to read “Cultures Built to Last” and are spending 7 separate PD sessions together really dig into our commitment to collective efficacy and responsibility. All staff, in every role, are attending these sessions. This work was kicked off by our team that went to RTI at Work in Austin and we used this slidedeckto begin our work.  We believe that we constantly have to revisit and tighten our collective commitment to this work in order to keep everyone on the same page and involved in the work and celebration. Additionally, following the summit in Pasadena, the guiding coalition compared the RTI at Work Pyramid completed in Houston to those from Pasadena (these pyramids were worked on during the "Putting it All Together” seminar with Mike Mattos) . We compared the essential actions and processes we had in place in 2020 versus what we had in place after 2022.  In 2020 one of our goals was to refine the way in which students were being identified for tier II services. More specifically, what common formative assessments would we use and what specific standards or skills would be targeted during those reteaching opportunities. Our team from Pasadena determined that these actions were no longer “red” on our pyramid and were now actions that we could confidently say we had in place. As mentioned in other sections, our collaborative teams are using their gradebooks as a way to house and track common formative data and we have a tight process in place for tier II and tier III services for our students. Our District is committed to supporting our school in strengthening our PLC at Work and RTI at Work practices to ensure a comprehensive MTSS system is in place to meet the needs of each and every student. We are able to access District resources and coaching from our Superintendent and Director of Learning. This collaboration supports us in reflecting on our progress thus far and establishing future goals. When our team returned from Pasadena, the Guiding Coalition presented new learning to our staff and also began to roll out an update to master schedules. This is aligned with our future goal to maximize student learning. Teachers have begun to color code their schedules to ensure that all students are in the classroom for first instruction and the re-teaching of essential standards (Pride). We will continue this work with the development of next year’s master schedule.  In addition to revisiting the master schedules, the team from Pasadena along with the Guiding Coalition determined that there was a need for the whole faculty to engage in a conversation around  the question, “do we believe that all students can learn at high levels?” We began this discussion in the staff meeting slidedeck linked here. This discussion continues to be critical in everything we do.

Our staff continues to gain skill and knowledge in utilizing data to support student by student, by target and by skill. 

We will continue to strengthen our system by increasing capacity for data analysis and then pairing that analysis with instructional first tier strategies that will positively impact student learning outcomes . Our district goal is to have all students reading on grade level by the end of grade 3. As a K -2 school, how we support our students in achieving their measurable outcomes to be ready for 3rd grade is a substantial area of focus. 

As a school, we are always looking to the future and are committed to continuous growth. Our goal is to really solidify the practice of teachers learning from each other with a willingness to be vulnerable. This practice is one of the most important pieces of the PLC process. Teachers learning from colleagues whose data shows they “got it right.” Collaborative teams regularly share student work and data sets along with their instructional practices that got them there. As part of this process,  our instructional leadership team will strive to provide coverage to teachers so that they can watch and learn from their colleagues.

As of July 1, 2023 the laws around special education eligibility will look different in the state of Vermont. Act 173 is “an act relating to enhancing the effectiveness, availability and equity of services provided to students who require additional support (Vermont Agency of Education).”  As we prepare for the full implementation of Act 173, our Guiding Coalition completed this checklist to identify the areas we need to work on. One major component of Act 173 is ensuring that all students have access to quality tier I instruction from highly skilled teachers. For those students who are not yet meeting benchmarks or are showing deficits in any of the basic skill areas, classroom teachers will be asked to intervene first in tiers I and II and monitor progress on these skills prior to determining if additional support beyond the classroom is needed.When it comes to tier I instruction teachers are continually reviewing  their data to determine if whole group re-teaching is warranted (less than 80% proficiency) or if the need to re-teach or extend instruction is really something that only applies to a few, which can be done in tier II.  With regard to tier II, teachers are looking closely at their data to identify common trends and misconceptions and then working collaboratively to design and plan tier II opportunities to help students move towards mastery in specific targets and standards. To achieve this, teachers are sharing students across classrooms (and potentially grade levels especially when it comes to tier III services) to ensure that our teaching or reteaching is specific (student by student- target by target) to what individuals need to be successful in our chosen grade level essential standards. Historically our teachers have always collected data and observations on students, however, this new act is streamlining the way in which we collect and look at our data (we are coming to consensus around how often we are collecting data and which progress monitoring tools we will use to measure growth and proficiency for each basic skill area and within each intervention). This new process is also shaping how our intervention team functions and when and how we put students on plans such as ESTs or IEPs.  To better support our system as a whole, we have developed a progress monitoring form which will be consistent across tiers and allow us to better track our students and the myriad of experiences and supports they receive along the way. Teachers and specialists are all filling out the above form so we have documentation of what kinds of instructional practices were tried in the past so that we can make sure that our re-teaching and interventions  are targeted and specific to the individual (not just another variation of the tier I instruction done louder and slower). 

We also engage in regular meetings with team leaders and our district’s Director of  Instructional Impact to look at our continuous improvement as a district. When our district wide teacher leaders engage in this work, we operate as one large collaborative team and always learn from each other. Here is an example of one of our whole group collaborative team meetings this fall. Additionally, Essex Elementary School is part of our district’s leadership team which also is fully committed to the PLC process as it relates to the continuous improvement of all learners. Here is an example of our work around our commitment to a culture of collective responsibility.

Our Collaborative Teams (school based) meet weekly (first grade team example agendas) and are structured around the 4 PLC questions: 

WHAT DO WE WANT ALL STUDENTS TO LEARN? This is our Tier 1 Instruction. Our teams have selected Essential Standards and mapped out unit plans that include preventions to proactively support student success. These grade level teams have also chosen common formative assessments and use the Teaching Assessing Cycle to include frequent check-ins for student understanding.

HOW WILL WE KNOW IF THEY HAVE LEARNED IT?  At the end of each unit teachers  give the Common Formative Assessment and enter their data into the Grade Book (first grade example). Our Gradebook is an enormous body of work that our Guiding Coalition has created to support and track students target by target.   Data Review meetings take place in our Collaborative Teacher Teams and they analyze the data and form groups for PRIDE Learning Cycles (Tier 2 additional learning/reteaching time). During this data analysis teachers also learn from one another which helps identify why students may not have it “yet.” Teachers use  PRIDE Planning Sheets like this: kindergarten math example and Kindergarten literacy example.

WHAT WILL WE DO IF THEY DON’T LEARN IT? -  Based on the data collaborative teams collect from their common formative assessments, they create Pride Learning Cycles to provide additional instruction around the essential standards that students need more time with. Additional Instruction and Time/Support (Tier 2) is given to learn Essential SEL and Academic Standards during PRIDE time each day. Teachers use progress monitoring tools during the PRIDE Learning Cycles to track which students “have it” and which students may need additional support and be referred to our Intervention Team (I Team). These decisions are made via collaborative teams’analysis of data at the end of each cycle. Our entire process is outlined on this document (master RTI tracking form)to show all three tiers of instruction and the process embedded into each. 

When a student continues to struggle and their progress monitoring data shows minimal or no progress a referral will be made to the Intervention Team. At our Intervention Team, we use this worksheet to document what we learn about the student referred and what our action steps are.

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

Essex Elementary School implements a guaranteed and viable curriculum that is rooted in our essential standards. Collaborative Teams map out essential standards and learning targets together as well as common formative assessments that will be used to assess students.  Teaching methods, strategies, and tools are shared to ensure high quality instruction for all students.  Universal design for learning is discussed when planning lessons to provide access for all students. 

Collaborative Teams have a predetermined schedule on our early release days to engage in the PLC process that guarantees students access to this curriculum. Data informs our instruction and we offer multiple opportunities for students to, not only have access to grade level concepts and curriculum, but also to differentiated and personalized instruction. We are always deepening teachers' understanding of content so that they can be responsive to the students in front of them regardless of the resources they may have available (ie programs). Again, this document(master RTI tracking form) outlines our RTI process starting with tier one. All students are monitored target by target. We also believe that it is essential to engage non classroom teachers in deep learning so they can support and reinforce concepts in their own fields (i.e. how can physical education teachers or art teachers support students in developing their phonological awareness, what is the relationship between math/writing/reading, or what does writing look like in the non academic setting). See this example for more information. This approach broadens the access that students have to our essential standards. Collaboration is also growing between coaches, specialists, special educators and teachers to provide targeted scaffolds and differentiation for accessibility to conceptual learning.

        Additionally, at Essex Elementary School, we use our Teacher Growth Model to align what we are looking for during learning walks with our learning targets. Teachers get direct feedback about their teaching practices as they relate to learning targets and the four questions of the PLC at Work process.

These strategies and processes are explained in the above section and the best document to reference is our RTI Tracking Forms document. This is a touchstone for our teams to remain rooted in our process to monitor student learning and progress on a timely basis. This record is also used to ensure regular progress monitoring for students receiving intervention from their classroom teachers or learning specialists.

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

It is essential to our school's RTI at Work system that students are guaranteed additional 30 minute blocks of time every school day for both literacy and math. During this time we provide supplemental interventions (reteaching and extensions of Essential Standards). This is another area in our system that ensures all students have access to grade level instruction on essential standards. Collaborative teams meet weekly to look at data and monitor progress of students. Learning cycles are established with data review dates for each grade level and each academic or SEL area.  Learning specialists, instructional coaches, and counselors join the grade level Collaborative Teams to support the data review and plan next steps for students needing more support and those needing extensions. Collaborative teams learn best instructional practices from each other through the data review process and we target specific skills in our intervention groups. Interventions are specific and targeted. Teachers share students so that students are placed in groups that best meets their needs.

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

Our Guiding Coalition has worked with Jack Balderman, a Solution Tree Associate whom Essex Westford School District has contracted to help support our district and our school (Essex Elementary) in  improving student learning for all students. This is the focus of our time as a Guiding Coalition as well as in our collaborative teams. Student data drives this process and we are proud to include SEL data. In 2021, EES began using the same process for academic referrals as we do with SEL. Students are progress monitored using the SEL Essential Standards, target by target, student by student. Our Collaborative Teams value the collaborative time to improve student learning and they have conversations about teaching methods that were successful and methods that were not successful.  Teams understand that if  a large group of students did not meet the goal then the teaching needs to change.  Teams learn from each other on how to best teach the agreed upon Essential Standards.  This creates continuous learning and shared professional development to improve student learning.

It is imperative that all teachers, new and veteran, are contributing members to our  high functioning collaborative teams. New teachers learn about our commitment to the PLC process during their interviews, as part of our new teacher mentoring program, and alongside new colleagues during building based and district-led inservice. Throughout the year our guiding coalition shares important information and learning through their weekly recaps. Our Teacher Growth Model is also oriented around building teacher capacity and building student outcomes. As a school and a district, we are committed to ensuring that all staff have access to PLC at Work and RTI at Work professional development. 

Achievement Data Files

• data--k-data-math-and-ela.pdf
• data--1-and-2-ela-data-9866.pdf
• data--1-and-2-ela-data.pdf
• data--1-math-data.pdf
• data---cohort-data.pdf
• data--1-math-data-9451.pdf

Additional Achievement Data

K ELA and Math

Below is an example of how a systematic and explicit approach to instruction (across tiers) coupled with a tight PLC process (guaranteed and viable curriculum, carefully selected CFAs and timely data reviews) has shaped the way we teach and how we address the four questions of a PLC. Over the course of the last few years we have refined our CFAs and our instructional practices  to grow our students as readers and mathematicians and decrease the number of students who are  “emerging” or not yet meeting the standard. In the 2020-2021 school year 11.5% of students were considered emerging in R.F.K.2.D and 11.5% were considered approaching proficiency. However, by 2021-2022 school year the percentage of students considered emerging in R.F.K.2.D dropped significantly to just 1.8% of students. That same year we had 9.9% of students considered “emerging” in K.C.C.5 and 12.3% considered approaching proficiency. In 2021-2022 the number of students emerging or not yet meeting was 10.3% while the number of students approaching proficiency dropped to 9.3%-- 3% less than the year before.

 While our number of students meeting the standard only had a slight increase, the celebration is in the number of students who moved from emerging to approaching. Through our collaborative team meetings and through the use of common formative protocols we have been able to dive deeply into the question, what will we do when students have not learned it(yet)? We approached this question by using our collaborative team time to determine how many students were meeting or not yet meeting the standards. From there we looked more closely at percentages to determine if reteaching was warranted at tier I or if the bulk of our reteaching was really falling into tier II. We then generated a list of instructional practices and strategies that could be used to reteach these concepts to our students who had not yet reached mastery of the standard, determined a length of time for the intervention/reteaching to occur and then identified a way in which to measure progress and the effectiveness of our instruction. Each year we have kept those practices that yield the best results and have looked closely at our assessments to ensure they measure our intended learning outcomes, making any tweaks if necessary.  

Grade 1 and 2 ELA

In choosing our essential standards we thought deeply about the criteria of a power standard (rigor, leverage, and endurance). We talked about what rigor, leverage and endurance meant for our current grade levels and the grade levels beyond our own. We decided that many of our standards (ones that are not finite or constrained) should be vertically aligned to ensure that students get the deep exposure, and practice necessary to be career and college ready by the time they leave our schools.  Many of these standards are similar to one another, so our work has been around unpacking each standard to determine the exact learning outcomes we expect at each grade level and looking at the subtle nuances between the different grade level expectations.  This kind of deep dive into the standards has informed all aspects of our work including the  kind of CFAs we use and has helped to define the expectations we have for our students.  It has led to rich conversations about instructional practices both whole group and small group for those who need re-teaching,  intervention or extension.  This approach and tight process has not only had a positive influence in individual grade levels, but has also carried over into subsequent grade levels as well. 

Over the course of the last few years we have not only tweaked our CFAs but we have worked to define our scoring categories (example: Scoring and Calibrating) based on the kinds of responses we have received from students.  In the example provided, we  looked for trends in students' work and generated some possible responses to help us calibrate our scoring. We then used the data (specific student responses)  to talk about our instruction--sharing instructional ideas and best practices and identifying students who needed more and then thinking about what that next level might look like. The  graphs below/attached are examples of how targeted and purposeful conversations around prerequisites, criteria for mastery,  and student misconceptions and errors have positively impacted instruction in a grade level and have allowed for greater success and carry-over into the next grade.

COHORT DATA OVER TWO YEARS

First Grade Data from 2020-2021

Second Grade Data from 2021-2022 (same cohort as above)

Additional Data that Supports Growth

Second Grade Data 2020-2021

During the 2020-2021 school year 90.1% of  first grade students were proficient in identifying the main topic of a short informational text (R.I.1.2), while just 81% of those students were deemed proficient in identifying the key details to support the main topic. During the 2021-2022 school year that same cohort of students (now second graders) were assessed on the second grade equivalent of that standard (R.I.2.2) and 95% were proficient in identifying the main idea and 89.4% were proficient in identifying the key details of the text. This growth speaks to the work we have done as a district around vertical alignment and to the work we have done within grade level teams around our instructional practices and the ways in which we look at our data and think about student by student, target by target. Choosing to vertically align our standards not only provides coherence amongst grades but also allows for a cumulative learning experience which inherently deepens understanding. 

In addition, this data also shows how our work strengthened our first instruction, which can be seen in the increase in the number of students proficient in R.I.2.2 between 2020-2021 and 2021-2022.  More students were also deemed proficient in second grade in 2021-2022 than in previous years.  In the 2021-2022 school year 93%  of second graders were proficient in providing key details to support the main idea of an informational text. In the 2020-2021 school year only 64.4% of students were proficient in this skill-- this is almost a 30% increase in just one year!

1 Math Data

 

Back during the pandemic we discovered that one of our weakest areas in mathematics, both at the district level and in the primary grades, was in the operations domain. In an effort to address this area of weakness in our instruction and as a way to move closer to achieving our Continuous Improvement Plan goal (all students will have basic math fluency by the end of grade 3) we examined our instructional practices and where we were placing emphasis in mathematics instruction, especially in the primary grades. We discovered that domain weakness in 10A6 2OA6 was having a direct impact on grades 3+. 

 

One of our first steps to tackling this issue was to  connect our essential standards to prerequisite standards as a way to  highlight the relationship between standards and targets across grade levels. As we unpacked our essential standards and saw the prerequisites required in each grade level, we noted the connection between operations and algebraic thinking domain. This then led to discussion that these standards are foundational expectations or building blocks within the progression of additive and then multiplicative reasoning required to succeed in the intermediate grades. Collaborative teams spent time looking at prerequisites necessary to build the foundational understanding of grade level essential standards. We tried to hone into this domain in our tier I instruction--- discussing as educators how our students are going to deeply learn a standard (beyond memorization). Talked about which strategies to post in our classrooms, eliminated strategies that may have led to misconceptions or ones that were confusing for students while promoting those that are proven to be effective. 

 

The data above shows how focusing on instructional practices , common mathematics vocabulary, highlighting strategies district wide, modifying assessments to measure one learning target at a time, while also crafting summative assessments that integrate multiple essential standards across time has helped to move more students towards proficiency. 

School Student Achievement Data (Cohorts over Time)

The data below shows student achievement data using assessments from our  former district assessment plan. On this assessment students are asked to read a text aloud and answer comprehension questions. To be proficient students must read with high accuracy and demonstrate deep comprehension of a text. This type of an assessment is  the culmination of so many of our essential standards and different domains in reading (foundational skills and literature and informational). In order to meet the benchmark of this assessment students must orchestrate multiple areas and pathways of reading. You can see how our work in collaborative teams, our focus on tiers of instruction (defining what they are and identifying who is in need of what and for how long), our use of assessments and data (both formative and summative), etc. has really benefited our students.Each grade level (and even each time of the year) has a different benchmark that students must hit to be considered proficient or meeting the expectation. We can see how our instruction( across tiers) and our work with essential standards and learning targets has allowed more and more students to be successful and meet this ever moving target.

 

 

EES was named by the Vermont Agency of Education as exceeding the standard in high quality staffing and safe and healthy schools.

EES 2nd grade teacher, Anna Meehan, was awarded the Outstanding Educator Award in 2022.

Files

• intervention-team-artifacts.pdf
• k-letter-id-r-f-k-1d-cfa.pdf
• rl-2-retelling-rubric_prompts-for-cfa-k-5.pdf
• k-5-math-ewsd-essential-standard--lt.pdf
• _2022-2023-k-ela-essential-standards--one-pager.pdf
• math-k-pride-planning-21_22-example-1.xlsx
• master-schedule-ees-2022-23-final-draft.pdf
• master-rti-tracking-forms-1.pdf
• copy-of-intervention-team-worksheet.pdf
• 2022-2023-ees-wednesday-plc-schedule.pdf
• cultures-built-to-last.pdf
• 2022-2023-2-ela-essential-standards--one-pager.pdf
• 1st-grade-master-gradebook-2223-xlsx--1st-grade-sel.pdf
• 2022-2023-1-ela-essential-standards--one-pager.pdf
• 1st-grade-master-gradebook-2223-1.xlsx
• first-grade-collaborative-team-agendas-2122.pdf
• _plc-teacher-leader-job-description-ees.pdf
• r-f-k-3-blending-and-segmenting-cfa.pdf
• rl-2-progressions-k-5.pdf
• our-commitment-to-a-culture-of-collective-responsibility-through-plc-and-rti_mtss.pdf