Central Intermediate School has been on the PLC Journey since 2007-2008.  When we began, Central was already a relatively high-performing school.  The difficult task was to move, as Jim Collins outlines, from Good to Great.   The move to developing Professional Learning Communities as a means for promoting continuous improvement prodded our staff to morph our culture from a culture of isolation to a culture of collaboration—within grade levels, Learning Areas and between schools in the district.  The changes in culture has opened channels of communication and increased the levels of trust among staff throughout the building.

 

PLC practices allow for shared leadership with the staff on a grand scale.  Teacher Leaders and their curriculum teams play a major role in the development and improvement of the curriculum, assessments, and staff development.  Teachers that spent years divided by a hallway and rarely speaking are engaging with each other in meaningful discussions about student learning and effective teaching practices. This culture was, at first, very fragile and required a great deal of support to maintain. Now it is “just the way we do business” and the staff is instrumental in passing the ideas of the culture on to the new teachers through the mentoring process. This has been crucial to Central Intermediate as we have had a large turnover of teachers in the last few years. We have become adept at collecting relevant data, analyzing the trends in the data, and implementing individualized interventions for each student in need of help.

The collaborative culture that has been created through the PLC process has played a crucial role in the development of a guaranteed, viable curriculum throughout the building. Systems in place, through the implementation of PLC’s, have allowed us to successfully ride the tide of state and local mandated, while still maintaining a high level of achievement.  In the past two years, CIS has replaced 14 full time teachers.  The PLC approach at Central has been able to educate these new teachers about our practices, monitor planning, assessment and student achievement through grade level teams and counsel teachers who need support. 

Professional Learning Communities were crucial to our being designated as a 2017 National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Education.

1. Monitoring student learning on a timely basis.

The focus of Central Intermediate School, like all PLC schools, is student learning.  To fully understand the effect our teaching is having on student learning, we focus on maintaining grades that truly reflect student learning.  We cut out extra credit and using grades as discipline by taking points off for late work.  We focused on reteaching students who did not get it the first time and allowed the students to reconnect with the material and redo assignments and retake tests.  Teachers moved away from “covering” material to monitoring student learning for mastery.  A big cog in this machine is formative assessment.  Teachers utilize questioning, white boards, technology, student conferences, peer editing, etc. to gather as much information as possible, in real time, about student understanding.  We spend more time in class assessing student learning and less time having traditional “review games.”  This allows teachers and students to give timely, specific feedback to allow students to make the changes they need in real time. Teachers give pre and post assessments for each unit and utilize that data to affect instruction and intervention.

Teachers work with others in their fundamental learning teams to develop common quarterly assessments that are developed utilizing the essential learnings (power standards) in their curriculum and given to students in each subject area at each grade level to assess growth and student learning over the course of each nine week period. The data from these assessments are analyzed to create a plan to provide interventions for students and to make effective changes in their own practice. Prior to utilizing common formative assessments, we had no way of tracking what students were retaining for the long term. Quarterly formative assessments have allowed the teachers to pinpoint areas requiring students to reconnect with the material individually or as groups. This has allowed teachers to take corrective action with students prior to the high stakes testing at the end of the year. This practice has led to a dramatic increase in the achievement by all of our students, especially our Free/Reduced population. 

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

The staff of Central Intermediate School provides a number of interventions to support learning for all students.  These include:

• Reconnecting with material—teacher and student meet for reteaching of concepts and practices with which the student is struggling.
• FLEX/Intervention Period—Students are provided with extended time for work with specific subject area teachers for improving mastery of content and skills
• RtI Period—Students of all ability levels are provided with intervention/extension activities that help move all students forward
• Daily Homework Assistance—teacher led assistance at each grade level for working on homework/missing work for one hour at the end of each school day.
• Saturday Supervised Study—students attend for four hours on Saturday with the principal to work on missing work from the week.  This is a part of the continuum of actions to assist students in work completion.
• RtI Tier III reading—students work with a reading specialist utilizing Wilson Reading, Visualization and Verbalization, as well as other strategies to improve reading fluency and comprehension.
• RtI Tier III math—students work with the RtI/and Math teachers using IXL Math, Moby Max and Ready Common Core Math to continue to work on basic math skills as well as current content topics to keep students moving forward.

The district has hired a Curriculum Director for the 2017-2018 school year.  He has been working on building consistency and effectiveness of our RtI intervention programs to build a true three tier process that allows students to close the achievement gap.

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 is crucial to changing to a collaborative culture in which teachers are able to make important decisions regarding teaching and learning.  In order to build capacity, our teachers participated in the following activities:

• Fundamental Learning Area team meetings with written agendas
• Book studies as a staff and in small groups
• Grade level meetings with the principal to analyze data and make strategic decisions regarding student learning
• Working with Curriculum Director to develop effective Tier 2 and 3 interventions.
• Working together with learning areas to create curriculum and common assessments
• Sharing lesson and activity ideas and results
• Cross curricular planning of activities that promote reading and writing in all content areas
• Grade level shared planning time
• Teacher led presentations on effective instructional strategies
• Faculty meetings are centered on job embedded staff development
• Development of Lighthouse Team to concentrate on building culture
• Evaluation—walkthroughs and formal evaluations

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Additional Achievement Data

Achievement Data

Achievement trends for Central Intermediate School look good with more students Meeting and Exceeding on the state PARCC Assessment.  With only two years of data the trend is already looking very good for our students.

 

Composite PARCC Scores 2015-2017

Composite PARCC Data 2014-15

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	2%	12%	28%	48%	10%
State	14%	24%	28%	29%	4%

 

Composite PARCC Data 2015-16

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	2%	9%	25%	49%	16%
State	16%	23%	28%	29%	5%

 

Composite PARCC Data 2016-17

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	3%	8%	20%	47%	22%
State	16%	22%	28%	29%	5%

 

ELA Scores 2015-2017

Composite ELA PARCC Data 2014-2015

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	2%	9%	26%	49%	15%
State	14%	20%	28%	32%	6%

 

Composite ELA PARCC Data 2015-2016

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	1.1%	6.4%	21.4%	49.5%	21.6%
State	16%	21%	28%	31%	5%

 

Composite ELA PARCC Data 2016-17

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	3%	8%	20%	47%	22%
State	16%	21%	27%	32%	5%

 

Math Scores 2015-2017

Composite Math PARCC Data 2014-2015

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	3%	15%	31%	48%	4%
State	15%	28%	29%	25%	3%

Composite Math PARCC Data 2015-2016

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	2.5%	10.8%	29.1%	47.8%	9.8%
State	16%	26%	28%	27%	4%

 

Composite Math PARCC Data 2016-17

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	3%	13%	28%	47%	9%
State	16%	24%	29%	27%	5%

ELA Scores Low Income 2015-2017

Composite ELA PARCC Data Low-Income 2014-2015

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	4%	17%	32%	37%	10%

Composite ELA PARCC Data Low-Income 2015-2016

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	4.5%	13.6%	28.8%	48.5%	4.5%

 

Composite PARCC Data Low-Income 2016-2017

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	8%	22%	33%	32%	5

 Math Scores Low Income 2015-2017

Composite Math PARCC Data Low-Income 2014-2015

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	3%	29%	32%	35%	2%

 

Composite Math PARCC Data Low-Income 2015-2016

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	5.1%	19.7%	33.3%	37.9%	3.0%

 

Composite Math PARCC Data Low-Income 2016-2017

	Did Not Meet	Partially Met	Approached	Met	Exceeded
School	8%	26%	39%	25%	1%

• 2017 National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence
• National Model of Professional Learning Communities at Work
• 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Excellence Award for Exemplary Academic Performance on the Illinois Learning Standards
• Sun Times Ranking: 374 among 2202 ranked elementary schools. 46 among 1,304 ranked middle schools.
• SchoolSearch Bright Star Award
• Illinois State Board of Education Certificate of Financial Recognition

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