Over the last few years, Yost Elementary School has been continually focused on improvement and growth.  It really is a mindset that the staff shares.  Students get better when we get better.  When we reflect on our practices, when we share ideas, when we work together for the collective best of all students, students meet their goals.  We have stressed the notion that a teacher is not solely responsible for their classroom of students, but have a collective responsibility to all the students in their team’s grade level.  Teams also understand that our school’s success and the success on state assessments is directly correlated to the efforts of all staff and the student growth garnered each and every year.  Our students’ success is forever expanding on the growth and work that we do together.  Even before the official push for PLC’s at the district level, Yost staff had an understanding and belief in Hattie’s research on collective efficacy.  We pressed upon the idea that if we believe we can make a difference, we will.  We believed in the collective efforts of all staff in order to serve all students.  This mindset shift has led to real growth in student learning and increasing success on state assessments; also, it has led to an improved culture and climate.  

A primary impetus for this dramatic mindset shift was our 2020-21 state assessment data.  When we saw the outcome of our tests, we realized we needed to make a change.  We were on-par with (or below) state averages.  At the end of the year staff meeting, we sat down together and thought “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”  We realized that we needed to make some dramatic shifts in how we work.  This meeting solidified the mindset shifts mentioned above.

The next school year, we made the first big change in how we operate.  We instituted Reading Growth Meetings at Yost.  These meetings were held about every 6-8 weeks.  The intention of the meetings was to account for every student’s reading level and adjust instruction for those students not on track.  For the goals, teaching teams would meet after the beginning of the year testing window for mClass TRC.  After initial levels were determined, goals were set for students' end of the year reading levels.  Along the way, goals were put into place for each student at every Reading Growth Meeting through the year, almost a road map for progress.  During a meeting, if a student isn’t meeting their growth goals at a meeting check-in, then the team formulated a plan to adjust instruction so the student would stay on pace for their goal.  In its infancy, it was a great start to putting our beliefs of collective efficacy, team collaboration, accountability for all students, and a collective commitment into action.  Although this was a great start, it was just the tip of the iceberg of steps made to constantly improve.  

Yost Elementary had the basic foundations and the staff had the right mindset for the upcoming district shift to working with Solution Tree and developing PLC’s across the district.  The same year that Reading Growth Meetings were started, Duneland School Corporation was first visited by Steve Pearce to start us down the road of PLC’s.  The professional development started with Steve visiting the administrative team for a few days to introduce the idea of PLC’s and how to add structures to support the initiative.  Later, Steve met with the administrative team and a Guiding Coalition from every school.  This time was instrumental in laying the groundwork for understanding the process.  Along with these meetings, I read the book It’s About Time, which really provided me with ways to rethink the master schedule and ways to be creative to put in structures to support all learners.  

Yost has made tremendous strides from when we were “PLC Lite,” having conversations about collective commitments, team collaboration, and working for all students, visits from Steve Pearce, and instituting Reading Growth Meetings.  Over the last few years, Yost Elementary has incorporated a common plan time for grade-level teachers, developed a Guaranteed and Viable curriculum, identified priority standards, built structures for collaborative meeting times as well as processes for analysis and reflection of Common Formative Assessments, celebrated our successes on the regular, engaged in recurring cycles of collective inquiry, took action to meet student needs and increase teacher learning, and monitored student growth frequently.  We have pushed for more teacher-team autonomy by moving from assigned team collaborative times to grade-level teams taking ownership of their meetings and determining the schedule for their meetings.  This, in-turn, has fostered a growing ownership of the process and has made the collaborative time more powerful.  We have added more structured times in the master schedule devoted to remediation and enrichment which is driven by the grade-level teams' CFA analysis.  We have had PLC coaching through Solution Tree with Matt Treadway, we have added designated time for math remediation and support, and we have continued to foster the notion that our students get better when we get better.  In all, the growth of the staff is tremendous, and we are seeing the results in our testing data.  Yost has some teaching teams that are on every level “model collaborative teams.”  We also have some that are still growing and getting better together.  

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

Yost has been working hard to articulate the priority standards to drive their instruction.  Within their teaching teams, they structure reading and ELA lessons according to the GVC and use CFA and CSA data to make data-informed decisions about teaching strategies as well as student remediation and enrichment.  Yost teachers are utilizing our district-provided math series as the core curriculum.  Within the series, teaching teams have identified Priority Standards aligned with state standards (frequently aligned with “tested items” on state assessments), created CFA’s to monitor progress, and use the chapter assessments as CSA’s (after analysis and identification of Priority Standards).  Similar to English/Language Arts, the data from the CFA’s and CSA’s are used to have discussions about teaching practices and form remediation and enrichment plans.  With the move to honing in on Priority Standards, the upcoming school year (2023-24), the district is moving toward standards-based grading.  This remodeling of the report card, should coordinate our work in the classroom more with an aligned reporting system.  

In addition to teaching teams using GVC data to drive instruction, the district has benchmark data assessments in the beginning, middle, and end of the year through NWEA as well as mClass/Dibels.  This data drives classroom and small group instruction, but it also is the primary data used for placement in Tier III intervention.  Tier III intervention is reserved for students with large achievement gaps or missing skills necessary for success in current or future grades.  Tier II groups are much more flexible.  Tier II groups are identified based on team-developed assessments.  These groups are monitored frequently (based on team-determined CFA/CSA’s) and are flexible based on student need.  Furthermore, student reading levels are frequently monitored through Reading Growth Meetings.  These meetings occur about every 6 to 8 weeks.  The intent is to review the reading level growth of every student at Yost.  After the beginning of the year assessment, student end-of-year goals are established for every student as well as a road map for growth that correspond to the meetings.  At each meeting, we identify students that did not meet their goal for that reading growth meeting and teams put plans together to adjust instruction for that student.  Teams also devise plans to work collaboratively to maximize their efforts and provide as much support for as many students as possible.  In addition to Reading Growth Meetings, Benchmark assessments, team-driven monitoring with regard to GVC priority standards, Yost MTSS team meets weekly to discuss students.  This is on a weekly rotation where a grade-level will meet with the team (reading specialist, instructional coach, general education teacher, special education teacher, counselor, principal, and grade-level team) to discuss students currently in tiers for reading, math, and/or behavior.  Students are monitored and plans are put into place for support.

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

The primary work done at Yost to support intervention and support students has been with scheduling as well as through implementing a Professional Learning Community and collaborative teaching teams at Yost.  To begin, by incorporating the PLC process and teaching teams becoming more collaborative and taking collective responsibility for all students, student intervention and a stronger Tier I base has evolved naturally.  Through the conversations and plans teams put in place, supports for students are developing organically at the team level.  The collaborative time for grade-level teachers is due to an adjustment in the schedule of adding four related arts rotations, so that all grade-level teams (consisting of four teachers in a grade-level team) have a shared planning time.  

Moreso, Yost has developed some systemic structures to support intervention and enrichment.  One alteration to the schedule was the addition of a two-hour reading block.  The block was stretched to two hours so that teachers could provide tier I instruction to all students during the first hour.  The second hour was designated time to meet with students in small groups for on-level reading instruction or remediation, provide enrichment time, or for students getting more intensive support to be pulled and still get support time from their teacher.  This change has provided ample opportunities for more intensive guided reading as well as a designated time for the core ELA instruction.  It allows for all students to get time for core instruction and small group instruction in addition to resource time if they have an IEP or are identified by the intervention team for pull-out services.

Another block of time added to the schedule was a tier III math intervention time.  Through universal screeners, pockets of students were identified as having gaps in their number sense skills.  At Yost, we have incorporated a thirty-minute block at the very start of the day for those students to receive focused and intentional instruction on number sense using the Bridges Math Intervention program.  This time was blocked so that students didn’t miss core instructional time.  The intent of the program is to close the gaps for our students identified through the tier III screener.  

Another short block of time added to the schedule was a fifteen minute remediation and enrichment math time added to the math block.  At that time, teams as well as support staff remediate and enrich students based on the math priority standards previously assessed through our CFA’s.  During collaborative time, teams identify those students that need support and enrichment and utilize the fifteen minute time block to meet all students' needs.  

Lastly, Yost has a strong intervention team.  Through the efforts of our reading specialist and math specialist (formerly a reading specialist but has been brave enough to tackle math), we have universal screeners to identify students that have larger gaps.  The team is intentional about finding those students as well as finding specific interventions and supports that would be best to close the achievement gaps.   

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

Incorporating the PLC mindset at Yost has been the impetus for the biggest positive shifts in student learning, student growth, culture and climate of the staff, and staff reflection and growth.  The growth of high-performing teams has been slow and various steps have been taken to foster their development.  The first step was to give teaching teams common collaborative time together.  In previous years, teaching teams of 4 teachers would have an “odd-man out” schedule where three of the four teachers would have a shared plan time and the other teacher’s plan time would be at a different time.   After altering the schedule to four related arts rotations, every grade-level teacher can meet collaboratively.  

Once time was allotted, there have been structures in place to facilitate collaborative meetings.  To begin, teaching teams would meet after school in the library on Mondays and Wednesdays.  Team note pages were developed to foster intentional conversation as well as add accountability to the meetings.  The meeting notes pages have gone through a few alterations through the PLC journey.  In the beginning, feedback to teams about management versus student learning was common, but over the years, that became few and far between.  Teaching teams are talking about student learning and classroom instruction.  Later, a document was developed to track the development, implementation, grading, and student planning of a CFA.  As we progressed, we moved from teaching teams having designated meeting times to teaching teams developing autonomy of their meeting times.  With this change, the meeting documentation changed some, but teams took more ownership of their meetings and the process continued to blossom.  

Currently, Yost has two teaching teams that are easily considered “model collaborative teams.”  We have three other teaching teams that run the gamut from “almost there” to “need some work.”  The beauty of this process is that similar to the teams that “need work” the model collaborative teams are all continually working to keep getting better.

Ultimately, the shared staff beliefs in collective commitments to all students, team efficacy where they truly believe we will get all students to learn, and the vulnerability and trust developed to have real conversations about instruction and student learning have drastically improved the overall school as well as student growth and learning.

Achievement Data Files

• yost-data-for-model-plc-submission.xlsx

Additional Achievement Data

Tab 1, “NWEA Data”:  This data set is a K-4 portrait of how grade-levels have illustrated increased growth from the beginning-of-year testing window compared to that of the end-of-year window.  It showcases NWEA Conditional Growth as averages (the three-year average BEFORE implementation of the PLC process and a three-year average AFTER the implementation of Reading Growth Meetings and PLCs).  With NWEA Conditional Growth, a score of 0.0 is statistical average and numbers trending positively show enhanced growth.  

• At Yost, the last three years of data when implementing the PLC process is better than the previous three years of data in every grade level.  The PLC process is leading to better student growth.

• The most recent school year 2022-23 is better than the averages from recent data sets in all five grade levels.  This year is one of the best we’ve had in all five grade levels.

• There are five other elementary schools within the Duneland School Corporation (DSC).  When compared to the other DSC elementary schools, we have better growth in the last three years than the other elementary schools.  Our collaborative time and adjustments we’ve been making are showing progress.

Tab 2, “ILEARN”:  This data set is from the pass rates on our state assessment, ILEARN (only 3rd and 4th graders take this assessment).  This data shows Yost student growth in the last three years and slow, but growing, separation from the state averages.

Tab 3, “IREAD”: This data set is from another state assessment taken in third grade, IREAD.  The data shows growth in our recent data versus the previous two school years.

Tab 4, “mClass TRC”: This data set is from our district-wide universal screener/diagnostic tool of reading skills and proficiency.  Similar to Tab 1, this is a K-4 data set.  TRC, Text Reading and Comprehension, scores indicate accuracy and comprehension of a text.  The data set indicates the percentage of students that are determined to be “on grade level” on the end of year assessment. 

• This past year, four out of five grade levels were above the district average as opposed to only one grade level three years ago. 

No specific recognition with regard to the PLC process.

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