***PROMISING PRACTICES SCHOOL!***

It was the vision of a new superintendent, Dr. Gearl Loden, who began the systematic approach to Professional Learning Communities (PLC) within the Nixa Public Schools beginning in 2019.  Espy Elementary was one elementary school within the district that would be challenged with the new direction.  It was a new direction in which Espy was not one of the first to fully embed in their everyday work.  A building that was filled with highly effective teachers who believed in the “why fix it if it isn’t broken” mindset.  During the PLC transition grade level teams did start the practice but perhaps without full understanding which resulted in frustration and once again questioning the process.  Teams continued to work in isolation, writing plans centered around topic teaching, the creation of common formative assessments (CFAs) was ongoing without a full understanding of the why behind them.  

Over the last four years, Espy continued to work on the process and had successes and setbacks.  To assist with the understanding we worked within the Strategy Implementation Guide (SIG) to establish exactly what stage the teams were performing.  The four critical questions were placed throughout the building to ensure our secured collaborative teams' meeting times had a clear focus.  Attempts to put the elements into place and the great lengths of time given to the understanding of the process were there, however, the philosophy of the true process and practices to be a model PLC school did not fall into place until a visit from Dr. Luis Cruz.  It was at this point that Espy began to understand the process, more importantly, the “why”  and then the shift was made in regards to being dedicated to the journey.  

The Guiding Coalition (GC) went back to the basics to ensure that the purpose statement, collective commitments, and vision and mission, complimented the expansion of our understanding. 

As a GC team and building team the following were determined:

Guiding Coalition Purpose Statement:

The purpose of Espy’s Guiding Coalition is to foster collaboration, lead in change, and communicate progress ensuring there are high levels of learning for all. 

Collective Commitments: 

I will be a positive, contributing member of my collaborative team.

I will teach the essential learning of our agreed-upon curriculum, unit by unit.

I will monitor each student's learning on an ongoing basis.

I will use evidence of student learning to inform and improve my practice.

I will work with my colleagues to achieve our SMART goals.

I will seek out the most promising practices to support student learning.

I will keep parents informed of the progress of their children. 

Vision:

Espy Elementary will foster a positive environment where all students, teachers, and staff are held to high expectations and are challenged to expand their knowledge and problem-solving skills as a productive member of an ever-changing global society. 

Mission:

Espy Eagles learning, leading, and achieving!

Working in conjunction with the above, the Espy team works from GC agendas, grade-level agendas, and committee agendas within the institution.  The implementation of Friday team leader check-ins has allowed the administrative team along with the instructional coach the time and ability to find solutions to questions as a team.  The entire building is working to find solutions as a unit not as individuals which in return allows for greater understanding during weekly collaborative team meetings.  Grade-level teams are no longer working in isolation and the switch has been made from solely PLC discussions to the work of true collaborative teams.  

The feeling of community and “all” students succeeding is now the work of a collective school group. The switch from teachers working to educate their students is now encompassing all staff, teachers, and subgroups coming together as a common team.  In return, there is a deeper understanding of how the system is working for the greater good.  

To activate the process it was extremely important for Espy to cultivate a positive school culture for not only our students and families but also for our staff and school community as this would be a  significant piece to our PLC journey. The implementation of our school-wide PBIS program and our district Portrait of an Eagle initiative have helped us commit to teaching students the importance of strong character so they can be well-rounded students and citizens. At Espy, we work to help students grow as learners and leaders, and we challenge them to become achievers as they work to set and accomplish goals. In an effort to ensure students are at school each day learning at high levels, we set an attendance SMART goal to help motivate students and improve our school attendance. Through the attendance program, we were able to provide students and families with experience prizes as a way to reward their efforts to make school and learning a priority. In addition to our attendance incentives, we are dedicated to recognizing our students' hard work during our monthly Superstar assemblies and Principal Prize events. While we place a heavy emphasis on learning, we also encourage student involvement and family fun. Our before and after school student clubs and our annual Trunk or Treat, Fun Run, and Art Walk are important to Espy and building morale among our students, families, and staff. Without the staff support in our building, we could not make these events possible and we would not be where we are today. The social committee has played a key role in helping build our staff morale by organizing monthly social events, celebrating life events, and recognizing staff on appreciation days. We value building strong connections and partnerships within and outside of school. Ensuring our staff feel supported and seeking to develop community have been crucial in shaping the culture and climate of our school and PLC journey. 

Moving forward in the PLC process, Espy is dedicated to ensuring our academic alignment is credible.  The district's essential standards and learning targets along with unit planning will follow the scope and sequence, allowing the creation of a results-oriented, guaranteed, and viable curriculum.  If you are employed by our school we will require a dedication to working with research-based instructional strategies that focus on continuous improvement.

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

At Espy Elementary, collaborative teacher teams meet multiple times a week to ensure high levels of learning for all students who enter our building through our guaranteed and viable curriculum. It was important to us that we used a backward design process to achieve that goal. To support that work we use the PLC flow chart and intentionally defined meeting purposes. We found intentionally defining and organizing a plan for the work allowed us to stay focused on the work instead of drifting into PLC Lite practices. 

Starting with question one, what do we want all students to learn, we start our work with the district-provided units and pacing. This allows us to start addressing the district's essential and state priority standards in a sequence that allows students time to learn the skills that have been selected as the most important. Previously this would have provided us with enough clarity to move on in the process but through our gained knowledge we found the power of breaking those standards down into clear learning targets. These smaller, more manageable chunks of defined learning goals let us plan purposeful learning experiences. Once all team members have gained clarity on what we want all students to know we are able to move on to question two.

Knowing what students have learned starts with collaborative teams developing CFAs and rubrics aligned to the learning targets for the unit. Each CFA is created with consideration to the intended rigor expected from the standard as well as the best question type for students to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts being taught. At this point, teachers have all the pieces needed to begin developing their common pacing for the unit. By looking at our calendar each learning target is thoughtfully placed on each day as well as each date for a CFA is set. While each teacher maintains autonomy to lean into their craft when developing how they want to teach the learning targets within their room, the commonality of when the targets are being taught or when CFAs are given supports our ability to discuss best teaching practices during a data meeting promptly after a CFA has been given. These data meetings directly impact our ability to support student learning through questions three and four. 

Timeliness is key to using our data from CFAs. Data that is left sitting too long misses the opportunities to improve learning for all. When teams are planning a date for giving a CFA, teams also plan for their data day. All teammates enter their students' CFA data into a grade-level data recording sheet prior to their data meeting. This shift from looking at “my student data” to “our student data” was a pivotal point in our PLC journey.  Looking at the grade level as a whole allows us to share our students when we reteach during RtI, better identify trends in teaching practices that are most effective, and ensure that all staff in the building are able to see how to support our learners. When the data shows us that small numbers of students need additional time to learn, they receive that through intentionally planned RtI groups but when the data shows large numbers of students did not learn, then additional time is planned for reteaching. Timely data conversations allow teams to make the choices needed when pacing and planning for extended time for learning.

In addition to looking at numerical data trends during a data meeting, teams also have discussions to further ensure that teachers and students have clarity on the expected learning when evaluating student work. Teacher teams may bring a question to the team when they are unclear on grading a question, especially open-ended and constructed responses. For one team this discussion solidified the need for common rubrics to be created ahead of time and for another team, it brought in the practice of taking their assessments themselves before the students to ensure everyone had clarity on final expectations. Teachers may also bring multiple copies of a piece of student work which all team members will grade and share out as a team to calibrate grading practices. This practice allowed a team to gain a deeper understanding of the standards but also allowed for questions to be discussed that may never have been addressed otherwise. Both practices bring more clarity to teachers. This clarity is used in the moment for reteaching but is also noted in pacing and planning documents. We are always in a state of growth as we learn more every time we work together. This is a continuous process of improvement and not a single defined end point of perfection.

Another big shift in practice that has supported improved learning for all is being sure that the grading of CFAs is done by learning targets and not as a single whole task. A question may be graded through two different lenses, such as a math word problem may be looked at once for mathematical accuracy and then again to see if a student understands how to tackle the process of a word problem. We understand that a student may be successful at one thing and not the other and therefore not all students who missed that problem will need the same thing when reteaching. Our interventions or additional supports are very targeted. 

 

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

All students can learn at grade-level or higher which is why our schedule ensures that all students are present in the classroom for tier 1 instruction. This is our best plan to ensure all students learn the guaranteed and viable curriculum but we know this isn’t going to be enough for some students. This is where additional support for learning comes into play.

Time for intervention and extension is a daily expectation for all students at Espy. To ensure this is protected and guaranteed we intentionally built a master schedule with RtI built in. The addition of a FEMA gym in the spring of 2023 was a game changer for options in our master schedule. Prior to the addition, our gym was also our cafeteria. This meant that all enrichment classes had to stop for a few hours in the middle of our day to allow students to eat lunch. Now that this schedule restraint has been removed, we can run enrichment classes throughout the day. While this might seem small to some, it was huge to us. We now have an RtI block for two grade levels in the morning and three grade levels in the afternoon. These two times are blocked so that as many staff members are available as possible to push in and support during RtI time. This practice has proven to be successful for us. We utilized our enrichment teachers to provide a quick one-on-one letter and sound interventions with a group of kindergarten students. We saw significant improvement in just a few weeks. 

While CFAs give us the best in-the-moment information to drive instructional decisions, we also look at other data pieces. We maintain a digital data wall where we can identify trends through assessments given district-wide from Evaluate as well as reflect on the data gleaned from iReady. Both of these assessments provide us a snapshot of whether our instructional choices, CFAs, and reteaching are effective. 

Tutoring is an additional support for student learning. Many of the teachers at Espy also take on before or after-school tutoring. Skills covered in tutoring are selected from data gathered from CFAs and other assessment points. One specific tutoring group holds slots for students identified through our MTSS process. This additional time allows for students to be supported through tier 2 and tier 3 supports which can be tricky to schedule but is very valuable.

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

Each staff member at Espy is a part of a collaborative team. In fact, several are members of more than one team. Grade-level teams have protected time to meet and collaborate on a regular basis every week. They embrace the idea that these are all our students, not just my students. To ensure all stakeholders are informed, grade-level plans with key instructional pieces are often shared with other staff in the building. Many stakeholders work across many grade levels and can not be in all of the meetings. This sharing practice ensures that all people can be informed and collaborate. While grade-level teams are often the first team that jumps to mind when thinking of collaborative teams, we also have a Care Team to support Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), a Guiding Coalition, a Tutoring Team, a Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) team, and a Social Committee.  Each collaborative team maintains an agenda, creates norms and roles, and utilizes protocols when they meet. Focus on these items ensures that each meeting stays focused on our students and their learning.

Teachers also seek out opportunities to grow and learn from each other. Teachers are able to observe each other and improve their teaching practices through teaching studies.  Monday mornings are a late start time where we can grow as a staff. We are able to learn from our specialized staff members such as English language staff, reading teachers, district-level specialists, and special education departments. We also have time to work in vertical teams to ensure that learning aligns from grade to grade. This is one of our most impactful learning experiences. 

Every team has a member take on the role of the team leader. This person is pivotal in supporting the work of their team. It is important to us that they understand that they are not the only one who does the work of the team but instead, they are a facilitator of the work. It is important to us to grow and support this person. Every Friday, the administration, instructional coach, and team lead meet to reflect on and discuss the work of the team and problem-solve any roadblocks that have come up or that are anticipated. Oftentimes, teachers struggle to find time to read an entire book for their professional learning but this time allows for intentionally curated resources from Solution Tree to be provided to them in a time frame that is relevant to their needs. 

Achievement Data Files

• school-student-achievement-data--espy.xlsx

Additional Achievement Data

• Students at Espy consistently outperform their peers across the state on the statewide assessment, Missouri Assessment Program (MAP).

• Data comparisons of Espy Evaluate data to the district averages indicate students are performing in line with their district peers. 

• Our state assessment data indicated we are making continual growth in both content areas in third grade, supporting our current practices as a PLC. We will continue to reflect and adjust to continue making positive growth each year.

• Our state assessment data indicated some fluctuations in our fourth-grade results. Upon reflection, we concluded that the class sizes were too large for teachers to be able to provide the target support that each child needed. We were able to add an additional section. With this addition, the conversation of departmentalizing instruction was considered and the determination was made to shift to self-contained classrooms. This led the team to become more focused on instructional practices through their collaborative team meetings.  The team is learning to become laser-focused to ensure all students learn at high levels even through grade level changes.  

• Teacher Recipient of the Cathy Whitworth Service to Education Award 

• Teacher of the Year Finalist for the District

• Five people were recognized as Super Star Staff by the district

• Learning featured in QuickNews digital publications

• Recipient of numerous grants

• US News and World Report ranked Espy as being in the top 2% of elementary schools in the state of Missouri

• Teacher Recipient of Golden Apple Award from Ozarks First

Files

• plc-at-espy.pdf
• mission-vision-collective-commitments-3192.docx