Baxter Elementary (2024)

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

***PROMISING PRACTICES SCHOOL***

Baxter Community School District is a small district with a big vision:  “A nurturing community where we unite to focus on growth and collaboration between staff, families, and community stakeholders.”  The school is the heart of the community, and the district is proudly supported. 

Our journey with the PLC at Work process began in 2018 when a small group of instructional leaders attended the PLC conference in Des Moines. Later that summer our entire elementary staff attended the summer Solution Tree PLC Institutes.  The following year, the secondary staff attended as well. After shared learning of the PLC process, analysis and assessment of our system led to drastic changes in our school day. We increased instructional minutes and added daily intervention time for our students in reading and math. Over the years we have changed and mended that time based on data, our instructional calendar reflects six-week cycles that hinge on core instruction and intervention. 

Collaborative teams were created to help enrich the culture, climate, and instructional practices. Grade-level teams meet daily, with special education, TAG, Title, and intervention teachers looping around to each team. We also have built WINN collaborative teams that meet every 3 weeks, a Building Leadership Team that meets bi-weekly, and a Student Success Team that meets every week. Each Monday our collaborative teams have ninety minutes of collaboration time to work through an agenda and minutes, this time is paced and purposefully planned by monthly PLC calendars to ensure cyclical conversations around student learning. Also, four out of the past five years all elementary teachers have been duty free. The other year teachers had one duty per week. Also, our elementary and HS leaders collaborated to revisit schedules and created a schedule that allowed specials to occur at common times which provided 40 minutes per day of collaborative opportunities. In all, our teachers have 1.5 hours of possible collaboration time built into their contracted time daily. This time allotment helps ensure that teachers have the time to collaborate and shows the schools commitment to the PLC process.Collaborative teams have created norms, goals, common assessments, priority standards, collective commitments, proficiency scales, tracking tools, and countless other resources to help aid the instruction and learning for students. 

In our quest to continually improve, we are currently striving to become a High Reliability School.  The foundational level of this process is developing a safe and collaborative culture.  We realized that we needed to commit more time to our professional learning, and next year our calendar will include seven full-day professional learning dates.  We will dedicate that time to PK-12 collaboration in effectively implementing our instructional framework, delivering a guaranteed and viable curriculum, and analyzing our student systems of support.

As educators, our work is never done, and our system is built on continual improvement with commitment to collaboration. Yearly our team engages in a self-assessment of our MTSS system. This assessment asks our teachers to rate the effectiveness of implementing our MTSS plan in Math, Reading, and SEBMH. It focuses on 5 distinct domains: leadership, infrastructure, assessment and data based decision making, universal tier, and supplemental-intensive tiers. As we score we collect notes, next-steps, and evidence to help support our work. This has been a valuable tool in reflecting on our system, and goal-setting for the future. It should also be noted that our relationship and trust with our AEA has grown immensely, where we consistently partner with them for professional learning, data analysis, and continual growth. 

While many of our staff have attended PLC Institutes, we acknowledge the power of coaching and self-reflection in continuous improvement.  Our elementary principal directed ESSER funds to further training with Solution Tree that included an all-staff professional learning session with the team from Adlai Stevenson High School on “From Good To Great.”  This laid the foundation for our district to refocus on our priorities and align our beliefs and practices in collaboration.  

 The professional learning also included three visits from a Solution Tree coach who delved deeply into unpacking priority standards and aligning assessments with our elementary team.  The elementary teachers have been working diligently in their collaborative teams to examine each assessment for standard alignment, and to use the assessment results to make instructional decisions.  This work has inspired several teams to seek even further learning in both proficiency scales and the impact of social-emotional learning on academics.

 Overall, our district is continuously improving by challenging the idea of working in isolation.  As a small district, we have many singleton teachers or small teams, and sometimes working in isolation seems more convenient.  However, we have learned from the PLC at Work process that isolation is the enemy of improvement.  Also, while we have had common meeting times for many years, the activities we engaged in could probably have been defined as cooperation or coordination rather than true collaboration.  We are on a journey to build trust with our teammates when examining data and to developing innovative ways to improve instruction, intervention, and extension.

 

 

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

Our work has been guided by the book PLCs at Work and High Reliability Schools (Hoegh, 2020), which describes six action steps for achieving a guaranteed and viable curriculum.  The first step is identifying priority standards at each grade level and content area, which has been an ongoing process for our teams each year.  We have shared drives and spreadsheets that indicate the priority standards so we can identify gaps and overlaps.  Part of our professional learning during the last days of each school year as well as the beginning of the year days includes vertical articulation.  More recently, we have begun the process of unpacking the priority standards to determine the knowledge and skills that are required as well as the time that is needed to teach them, which are the second and third action steps in Hoegh’s model.  The fourth and fifth steps are developing protocols for ensuring the quality of assessments and for analyzing the data from those assessments.  This is where the support from our Solution Tree coach helped tremendously in focusing the work of our collaborative teams.  The sixth step in the process is ensuring that appropriate programming is in place to help all students achieve at optimum levels.  This is an ongoing journey for us as we analyze the third and fourth PLC questions.  We are currently examining additional resources to support our literacy interventions, and our TAG teacher has provided professional learning to our staff so we can more appropriately address extension needs in our classrooms. We also have common resource materials in Math, ELA, and Science to help ensure that students receive GVC regardless of the teacher they may have. These classroom teachers collaborate regularly to plan for instructional changes involving scope and sequence, as well as matching standards, instruction, and assessments. 

Throughout the last five years, the elementary has implemented a curricular cycle, which measures instruction in increments of six weeks. These “cycles” include mandatory creation of common formative assessments at least weekly and a common benchmark assessment that assesses the learning over a six week period of time. These assessments then help drive our WINN (intervention) time and how we respond in all tiers of instruction. We also utilize statewide screeners (FAST) and progress monitoring tools to help identify students and then perform diagnostic assessment on an as-needed basis. 

Each teacher utilizes a tracking sheet to help analyze and interpret the level of understanding students have in each standard and specifically each learning target. These trackers help monitor student learning while also helping inform instruction, plan for interventions, and build collective teacher efficacy among staff. Teachers incorporate best practice strategies within their classroom that lend progress towards student learning, but we have multiple forms of assessment and data to monitor our students' learning.

Each screening period brings a “Data Day” where all members of the WINN team meet for an hour to discuss all the data collection pertaining to individual grade-levels. These conversations examine the universal tier, intervention tools and analysis, and help set goals for the future. Also built into the instructional calendar are opportunities to share classroom data school-wide. This helps build collective efficacy and ensure vertical alignment of standards, while inviting questions for instructional improvement.

 

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

Our WINN was created to intervene and extend students in every grade level. Students have a daily block of 30 minutes that is designated for enrichment and intervention. At this time students trade classrooms and are broken into small groups with up to 6 different people leading groups. We initially termed this as an “all hands on deck” approach. These groups are assessed weekly to measure acquisitions. Progress monitoring data is collected and shared every 3 weeks via collaboration between the instructional coach and teachers.   These collaborative conversations will tell us whether the intervention or extension is having an impact and if adjustments need to be made. 

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

Our teams meet daily with an agenda and monthly PLC collaborative goals. These conversations are cyclical and are purposefully planned to ensure conversation will lead to student learning. Our Solution Tree coaches provided some resources and professional learning on the work of collaborative teams.  We were able to compare our practices with the elements on the rubrics to determine our areas of strength and improvement.  Our coaches stressed the importance of developing norms and creating SMART goals as foundational for high performance, but that was not something that had been done in our district with fidelity or consistency systemically.  Consequently, our collaboration meetings sometimes got off track or focused on only one or two of the PLC questions.  Also, without norms, sometimes discussions about data were unproductive.  Now, revisiting the norms and goals at the top of each meeting serves as a reminder of the purpose of each meeting.

During one of our beginning of the year professional learning days, we outlined specific behaviors that were productive and expected during collaboration, including the three big ideas of a PLC - focus on learning, cultivate an interdependent and collaborative culture, and focus on results.  This allowed us to greatly reduce the amount of time that had been previously spent on conversations that were not related to these areas (i.e. logistics for special events happening during the week).  As a result, our teams have a much clearer understanding of the PLC process.  We took the Level 1 HRS survey at the beginning and the end of the 2022-2023 school year.  Our scores on leading indicator 1.4 (“Teacher teams and collaborative groups regularly interact to address common issues regarding curriculum, assessment, instruction, and the achievement of all students”) rose from 48.76% teachers responding either “agree” or “strongly agree” in the fall to 85.1% responding “agree” or “strongly agree” in the spring.

 

We have been twice designated as a “commendable” school district through the Iowa Department of Education’s School Performance Profiles.  However, this was not always the case.  Recently, we were comprehensively designated and had to work diligently to regain our commendable status.  In doing so, the work was recognized by the state.  Representatives from the ESSA Team visited our school to interview staff about our work and the shifts we underwent in order to increase the effectiveness of our practice.  In 2023, we have once again been designated as “commendable.”

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