Annandale High School (2024)

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

Who We Are 
Annandale High School, with over 2,200 students, is located in the 11th largest school district in the nation and represents every kind of learner. Our students come from 66 different countries and speak 59 different languages. Eighty-one percent of our students speak a language other than English at home, 31% receive English-learner services, 71% of our students qualify for free-or-reduced lunch, 16% of our students have been identified for special education services, and 32% are enrolled in at least one honors-level course.

Collective Vision 
In 2021, as we returned to school post pandemic, our staff of 250 came together to develop our vision. We collaborated to determine our identity, what we valued most, and what we believed our students’ future could be. We also gathered community and student feedback.This process revealed that we all were aligned in our beliefs, especially about the power of our diversity. We anchor our work every day in our vision: Annandale High School is a community that finds strength in diversity, fosters belonging, and inspires lifelong learning.

Shared Mission 
Inspired by the work of Pedro Noguera, we asked ourselves if we were a good school for all students or only for students who had already demonstrated success. Our shared mission of ensuring our school is a great school for all students drives our work. To achieve this mission, we developed common language around high quality instruction and strong collaboration.  Instructional leaders designed professional development where our faculty unpacked these practices, discussed specific ways they would be embedded into our lessons, and learned from each other. These practices became a part of our lesson planning template teams use to guide our planning. This document has become a powerful tool to align the way we think and talk about instruction.To align further around instruction, we conducted Instructional Rounds which gave 2/3 of staff opportunities to visit over 60 classrooms and identify ways instruction needed to improve. We also began a system of walkthroughs that ensures every teacher is observed and gets targeted feedback multiple times a year. We built strong systems and structures to support students' Tier 1, 2 & 3 academic, behavior, and wellness needs. As we refined our systems, we began to see our teams take collective responsibility for every student.

Shared commitment to the PLC at Work 
As a professional learning community, we value collaboration and understand that it is critical to our students’ success. While our instructional focus has given us common language for our instructional planning and practice, we also determined that in order to become a good school for all students, we needed to articulate, unpack, and hold each other accountable to shared commitments that guide how and why we collaborate: Our Annandale Mindset Commitments.

Our Annandale Mindset Commitments place students and our work as a professional learning community at the center (see Resources for example). We share these commitments with all prospective candidates, seek these mindsets in our hiring, and infuse them into our professional development and daily interactions. They are reflected in the working agreements collaborative teams develop to norm how we will work together (see Resources for example) and anchor how we collaborate through the four critical questions.

We also committed to designing our school’s systems and structures around the principles of a professional learning community. We use school-wide professional development for collaborative teams to reflect and continually refine, deepen, and improve our work around the four critical questions. Our Collaborative Team (CT) Leads also meet monthly to discuss and share ideas about how to support their teams in refining their work around the collaborative team cycle. Topics of our school-wide professional development and our CT Lead Cohort include protocols teams can use to unpack and prioritize standards and skills, ways to develop a variety of common assessments, how to plan instruction to meet our diverse students’ needs, and protocols to collectively use formative data to inform our practice and target individual students’ needs. 

Finally, to ensure we remain focused on our goal of being a good school for all students, we have made discussing student data central to our work. We design our yearly school improvement plan (SIP) to target closing achievement gaps, start each year sharing state assessment scores with our whole staff, meet regularly as a leadership team to discuss progress monitoring data and how we can support next steps, and support teams’ capacity to regularly examine and use a variety of data to impact planning and instruction.

A Culture of Continuous Improvement 
Annandale’s teams are the heart of our PLC and have the greatest impact on student learning. Each team, made up of like-content teachers as well as ESOL and Special Education teachers, also has an instructional coach and an assistant principal, who attend meetings to provide perspective and support. Teams meet between two and three times every week during common planning time guaranteed by our master schedule.

To ensure we remain focused on our mission, each team develops a common SMART goal targeted toward increasing student achievement. Agendas, developed collaboratively within teams, reflect a focus on the four critical questions, and our outcomes reflect our belief that we have collective ownership over our students’ learning and that collaborative problem solving is at our core (see Resources for example).

One of the biggest and most impactful shifts our teams have made is prioritizing how much time we spend examining evidence of student learning. Teams use data dialogues every two to three weeks to facilitate this work and focus on determining how we will reteach and provide extension within the regular class period as well as during our every-other-day intervention period.

As a next step, to support teams’ growth, our school-wide professional development will focus on facilitating teams’ reflections on how they are moving around the collaborative team cycle and using the four critical questions to guide their work. This learning has also built team members’ capacity to determine which parts of the collaborative team cycle they will continue to refine in order to positively impact student learning (see Resources for an example).

Annandale High School, with our size and demographics, has every reason not to be a successful school. But, as a result of our laser-like focus on our priorities of relationships & support, high quality instruction, and strong collaboration in order to support students post pandemic, Annandale High School students outperformed our pre-pandemic results and outperformed state results across nearly every subgroup in Reading and in Math in the 2022-23 school year. And we continue to improve. This year, for example, our collaborative teams have made tremendous instructional shifts with a specific focus on providing Tier 2 support within Tier 1 instruction by regularly providing targeted small group instruction in order to better meet students' needs. Team members are regularly bringing evidence of student learning to collaborative team meetings so teams can examine together what students know and decide what students need next. We anticipate this more targeted support will have a big impact on students' learning toward grade-level standards and are excited to see this impact.

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

  1. Monitoring Student Learning on a Timely Basis 
    Annandale’s collaborative teams meet twice every week for an hour each meeting using agendas that are built collaboratively to reflect a focus on planning for and meeting all students’ needs. Our collaborative teams (CTs) are made up of collaborative team leads, content teachers, ESOL and Special Education teachers, and instructional coaches and assistant principals dedicated to supporting specific departments. At Annandale, we believe high quality Tier 1 instruction ensures students spend the majority of class time working on high-level academic tasks that have them analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating, rather than simply identifying or recalling. Teachers check for understanding frequently and use formative data to target students’ learning needs by reteaching, supplementing, and providing extensions during the regular class period. Our CT meeting agendas reflect our focus on the four critical questions and how they translate into teams’ collaborative planning and instructional implementation. 

Creating and Implementing a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum 

What do we want students to learn and be able to do?
When our collaborative content teams work through Question 1, we use team-developed structures to unpack and prioritize standards and skills. This process, which usually takes three to four meetings a few weeks prior to the start of a new unit, requires that team members collaboratively articulate what all students should demonstrate they know and are able to do by the end of the unit. In addition to ensuring our unit planning is aligned to these unpacked standards and skills, an important shift teams have made is placing student learning central to the planning process. This means that teams use pre-assessments as well as previous-unit assessment data to inform planning. 

Using prioritized standards and skills as a guide, teams collaboratively design and pace learning targets and high quality academic tasks that all students across every class level will learn from throughout a unit. Team members also share teaching strategies and scaffolds that in the past have yielded the greatest results. 

Teams use a common unit planner to document standards and skills, common assessments, learning targets and academic tasks. This common unit planner serves as the overall guide for each member of the team (see Resources for example). Regularly documenting our planning in a shared unit planner also allows teams to reflect on and refine our instructional planning.

Monitoring and Responding to Student Learning 

How will we know if they’ve learned it? 
Teams develop a variety of common assessments, both summative and formative, to ensure  students can demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways, like exit tickets, sticky notes, quick writes, performance-based, warm-ups, and multiple choice, as well as longer assessments. Team members agree on when they will give these common assessments and also when they will bring the evidence and data to team meetings in order to determine what students know and need next. Most teams use some form of common assessment every one to two weeks, which ensures we can monitor and respond to student learning in a timely manner. In addition to team-developed unit assessments, teams also use a beginning-of-year, mid-year, and end-of-year assessment that allows them to monitor students’ progress on essential skills throughout the year. 

What will we do if they don’t learn, and what will we do if they already learned it?
Teams regularly examine student work and make adjustments as a result of what students demonstrate they are learning, which has been critical to our mission of being a good school for all students. Evidence of student learning is brought to collaborative team meetings nearly every two weeks so that team members can collectively examine it, share high impact teaching practices, and determine and commit to next steps. 

To support how teams look at and make decisions around data, our teams use a variety of protocols. One powerful protocol many teams use is a “Strategy Ladder” (see Resources for example). During the “Strategy Ladder,” team members examine a random selection of student work on a common assessment and record what students demonstrate they know and are able to do. Team members then tier those skills like a ladder and collaboratively determine what students need next in order to demonstrate increasingly complex skills. Finally, teams make an action plan to respond to students’ needs through reteaching and extension during the regular class period and during our intervention period. Teams also determine when and how they will track students’ progress to ensure they are monitoring students’ growth. 

 

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

Creating Systems of Intervention and Extension to Provide Students with Additional Time and Support for Learning
At Annandale, we do not leave intervention up to chance, nor do we save intervention and extension solely for our intervention period or after school. This means that during Tier 1 instructional time, teachers regularly use evidence of student learning to target students’ intervention or extension needs. Collaborative teams work to identify students they will pull into small groups and collectively determine what instruction best matches their needs. 

Beyond what we offer during Tier 1 instruction, many of our students have significant needs. To support students who need additional intervention, we have developed a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) for academics, behavior, and wellness (see Resources for our MTSS Overview Chart.) We use an extensive data wall that includes everything from students’ state assessment scores to WiDA levels to coursework data to guide us in making decisions about increased levels of support. 

Tier 1 
We define Tier 1 as a high quality school experience that offers responsive support to all students around skill development, academic content, and social emotional learning within the regular school day. Characteristics of the core program include: 

 

  • High quality classroom instruction 

  • Small group reteaching and extension based on common formative assessments

  • Team-taught classes

  • W4 Advisory: School-wide embedded advisory lessons for all students that focuses on social emotional learning

  • Atoms Agreements: School-wide common language around our values and expectations

  • After-school programming accessible to all students

  • Peer Tutors & Tutoring

  • W4 Activities Day: Monthly opportunities for students to participate in clubs and activities during the school day

Tier 2 
We define Tier 2 as supplemental, targeted interventions that are systematically assigned to students based on data and monitored for progress and responsiveness. Our Tier 2 intervention includes an embedded every-other-day 50-minute intervention period, called PRIDE Time, to support remediation, intervention, and enrichment. Students are identified for targeted intervention 4-5 times per year utilizing an extensive data wall as well as teacher and collaborative team recommendations. Students are moved in and out of these supports based on assessment data, graduation requirements, and student need.

Our Tier 2 supports include: 

  • Core area interventions 

  • Team-taught classes

  • Support for newly-arrived English-learners 

  • Enrichment opportunities

  • Peer Tutors & Tutoring

  • Leadership development 

  • AVID 

  • Behavior, attendance and social-emotional support groups 

  • MTSS student support teams that are assigned to students demonstrating Tier 2 & Tier 3 academic, behavior & wellness needs; teams include administrator, counselor, student support coordinator, attendance support, parent liaison, and additional student services staff

Tier 3 
We define Tier 3 as intensive interventions, designed to support our most struggling students: 

  • Double-blocked core English and Math classes 

  • Targeted reading and math intervention courses 

  • Strategies for Success (executive functioning) courses

  • MTSS student support teams that are assigned to students demonstrating Tier 2 & Tier 3 academic, behavior & wellness needs; teams include administrator, counselor, student support coordinator, attendance support, parent liaison, and additional student services staff

  • Mentor program pairing school-based and community mentors with struggling students

  • Alternative pathways to graduation including online credit recovery and alternative learning settings, and flexible scheduling

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

Building Teacher Capacity to work as members of high-performing collaborative teams that focus efforts on improved learning for all students
Teams that move through the collaborative team cycle with the greatest frequency and depth have the biggest impact on student learning. At Annandale, we build our master schedule to guarantee teachers have common planning time in addition to personal planning time. Our master schedule also ensures our ESOL and Special Education teachers are aligned with one content team, to the greatest extent possible. Each team is led by a collaborative team lead, whose role is to ensure the time is used purposefully. The lead and the coach meet weekly to review past agendas and determine next steps based on where the teams are currently working within the collaborative team cycle.

Each year, teams spend time collaboratively developing, revisiting, and reflecting on working agreements to norm their collaboration. Before we aligned as a school in our vision, purpose, and commitments, working agreements usually reflected logistics like starting and ending on time. Now, teams’ working agreements reflect our beliefs about collaboration, and it is common to see agreements such as, “Presume positive intent,” or “We believe that all students can learn at the highest levels.”

Building Teams’ Capacity to Collaborate
We are intentional about using whole-school professional development days to build teachers’ and teams’ capacity to lead and collaborate around our areas of focus. Since the 2019-2020 school year, our schoolwide professional development has focused on building common language around the essential elements of high quality instruction: learning target, academic task, scaffolds, and evidence of student learning. This school-wide instructional focus has allowed our teams to dive into the four essential questions to ensure that all students have access to our agreed upon essential knowledge and skills, and that we are responding to students’ needs.

We also support our collaborative team leads’ professional growth in leading their teams. Each month our Collaborative Team Lead Cohort, which consists of our CT Leads, instructional coaches, and administrators, meets for an hour after school to work with and learn from each other. The typical meeting structure is to ground first in professional literature about building a collaborative culture. We then often hear from leads about how their teams approach different parts of the PLC cycle, and reflect on what our teams are trying and how we will continue to support our teams’ growth (see Resources for example). Our CT Leads have the biggest impact on our school culture and on student learning because the work of our teams reflects the beliefs of our building.

Working at Annandale can be challenging. Many would expect a school with our demographics and the challenges within our community, to be a failing school. Instead, our students are thriving. Our entire school operating as a professional learning community with common beliefs, structures, and focus has changed everything about the way we serve our students. We believe strongly that our responsibility is to keep getting better together to ensure we are a good school, a great school, for all students.

Fairfax County Public Schools MTSS Team Excellence Award

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