Ed Partners Perspectives
On Track for Improvement: Leveraging the power of a network to improve student results
Carnegie Summit 2022
Congratulations to the Elk Grove Unified team for their presentation last week at the Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education. EGUSD has been part of the College On Track collaboration sine 2018. Their presentation titled “On Track for Improvement: Leveraging the power of a network to improve student results” highlighted their journey using continuous improvement tools, processes and structures to “rewire” their system to achieve improved results for students. Team Lead Dianne Willson described their efforts to improve high school mathematics, and using interim and unit assessments, with a focus on improving 9th grade math results for Black, Latinx, English Learners and SED students to increase post-secondary opportunities.
Dianne and Ed Partners Program Manager Chris Rodriguez led a discussion that illustrated successes, failures and setbacks along the way, while illuminating the power of focus, determination and persistence in the quest to improve results for students. Thank you for sharing your improvement story!
District Spotlight: Reef-Sunset School District
Teachers Training Teachers
Reef-Sunset is embarking on an innovative path to build capacity and sustainability in phonics and phonemic awareness instruction. With the support of Program Manager Amy Williams, Reef-Sunset is in year one of the Pre-School to Third Grade Coherence Collaboration (P3CC) focused on Literacy. The Reef-Sunset Improvement team consists of a TK-K teacher, two elementary school teachers, three principals, Preschool Director, and the Executive Director of Learning Services. Teachers on the Reef Sunset Improvement team are taking the lead in their district to spread the instructional use of Sound Boxes to improve student learning in phonics and phonemic awareness by providing professional learning for fellow teachers. After implementing Sound Boxes during phonic and phonemic awareness classroom instruction daily for 10 minutes, the team used a system of notes and notices to begin to collect anecdotal data on students’ performance and improved efforts from engaging with Sound Boxes process. Overall, students’ pre-post classroom assessments in phonics and word recognition showed considerable student growth in performance. Finally, the team looked at student performance of the pilot group in contrast to those that were not and found significant growth in second grade students in the pilot classrooms as assessed on the STAR-Early Literacy Assessment.
Based on the positive impact in student achievement the team is now spreading this instructional practice to other classrooms. The Improvement Team considered how they might begin to share this practice with other teachers to get them started. The team considered a variety of ways to train other teachers and realized they want to build their own ability to lead the learning. The team decided having teachers training teachers would support sustainability and provide an opportunity to deepen adult collaboration across the district and grades. Congratulations to the Reef-Sunset team for all of their efforts in service of students!
