Schools for Rigor Underway at DMPS
Gwen Bryant of Learning Sciences International leads teachers at Weeks Middle School in a workshop on the district’s new Schools for Rigor initiative.
When Weeks Middle School teachers gathered first thing Monday morning in the library there were bagels and donuts and water and coffee for them. But mostly there was rigor. They will be on a steady diet of rigor during the new school year that begins on Wednesday.
Weeks is one of six pilot schools in the district that will become demonstrators for all of the others in the adoption of the Schools for Rigor teaching and learning model. These initial six were selected based on the central administration’s perception of their readiness for change as indicated by positive changes already underway. By 2018-19 the model will be the norm districtwide.
Learning Sciences International is coordinating the instructional overhaul and they assigned Gwen Bryant as the lead “staff developer” at Weeks. Bryant is a former teacher herself with broad experience at both elementary and secondary levels and can speak the staff’s language while she coaches them in the new vocabulary and concepts driving the conversion to a 21st century curriculum core.
The key word in Monday’s session, the first of four that LSI will conduct during the 2016-17 year at each of the six pilot sites (the others are North High and Findley, Howe, Lovejoy and Perkins elementary schools), was monitoring. Related ones were evidence, learning targets, feedback and a familiar one being presented in a new context: data.
Anyone accustomed to thinking of monitoring student progress in terms of periodic quizzes and exams and report cards is in for a sea change. Monitoring is going to be as daily as the Pledge of Allegiance and taking attendance. Data won’t just be demographics and standardized test scores anymore. Besides those raw measures data will consist of teacher observations of classroom dynamics, discussions, projects and more. Data will include all of the evidence that teachers accumulate from day to day. Some of it will be measured but much of it will be simply observed. They are going to become more investigative and nimble, adapting lesson plans and paces on the fly in response to what they see and hear happening in their classrooms.
Many of the Weeks staff wore t-shirts that read Weeks = Success on the front with a design on the back that portrayed the “8 Keys of Excellence.” According to principal Audrey Rieken they are fired up to be part of phase one of the Schools for Rigor transition in the district.
“We are excited to be one of the demonstrator schools,” she said during a break in the morning training. “Our teachers will practice constant monitoring of their students’ learning and will adapt based on what is happening each day.”
Next year the six pilots will be utilized as demos for 27 more schools during phase two. Phase three will complete the makeover the following year.
One of the fundamentals that Bryant stressed to her trainees is that lesson plans must feature built-in opportunities for students to exhibit understanding. She practiced what she was preaching throughout her presentation by breaking the staff into smaller groups for exercises and polling them for feedback.
They caught on quickly and Bryant was all smiles.
“Willingness on the staff’s part is so important and I see that here,” she said. “With this system we don’t wait for tests to gauge progress.”
Instead, she talked in terms of “short-cycle normative assessment,” LSI jargon for keeping close tabs on who’s getting it and who’s not and adjusting accordingly in real-time. Cracks in lesson plans are discovered before they widen enough for students to fall through them. Summative assessment often reveals student misunderstanding only after the fact, maybe at the end of a unit or semester, when it can be too late to address. A cornerstone of the new paradigm is daily learning targets that are clearly articulated by teachers to students. Then they take aim at them together.
By the time the Weeks staff broke for lunch they were hungry after a focused morning of collaboration and rethinking. But not for more donuts. Give them rigor! They’ve acquired the taste.
