Highland Elementary School

 

School Information

School Name: Highland Elementary School
School District: Montgomery County Maryland School District
School Address: 3100 Medway St, Silver Spring, MD 20902
School Phone: 301.929.2040
School Fax: 301.929.2042
Principal: Scott R. Steffan
Principal email: scott_steffan@mcpsmd.org
Web Address: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/highlandes/

Demographics

Number of Students: 471
Number Eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch: 82.2%
Percent of Limited English Proficient: 64.5%
Percent of Special Education: 13%
Racial/Ethnic Percentages:

• White: 3.8%
• Black: 13%
• Hispanic: 74.9%
• Asian/Pacific Island: 7%
• Other: 0.8%

Percentage of students passing: School Scores/State Scores

Grade 3	2005	2006	2008	2009	2010
Reading HES/MD	47/76	78/78	95/83	92/85	81/84
Reading Adv.  Prof. HES/MD	4/18	3/15	31/17	14/22	11/21
Math HES/MD	69/77	79/79	92/83	80/84	87/86
Math Adv. Prof. HES/MD	14/26	8/25	24/27	14/29	24/34

 

Grade 4	2005	2006	2008	2009	2010
Reading HES/MD	76/81	78/82	95/88	97/87	100/87
Reading Adv. Prof. HES/MD	4/18	9/23	44/28	59/27	50/30
Math HES/MD	74/77	81/82	95/89	98/89	93/90
Math Adv. Prof. HES/MD	21/27	19/32	55/42	64/50	63/47

 

Grade 5	2005	2006	2008	2009	2010
Reading HES/MD	56/74	76/77	93/87	94/89	97/89
Reading Adv. Prof. HES/MD	7/30	16/34	80/51	94/50	86/53
Math HES/MD	57/69	80/73	92/80	98/81	91/83
Math Adv. Prof. HES/MD	1/17	9/19	20/25	35/25	33/25

Please comment on any aspect of the data that you feel is particularly significant.

As the chart demonstrates, by 2008 Highland Elementary students outperformed students throughout the state in every subject area and grade level. When compared to schools serving similar populations of ELL and high poverty students, Highland ranked first in the state in both reading in mathematics. Furthermore, a higher percentage of Highland students achieved advanced proficiency in reading and math then the state as a whole. The difference in reading was particularly striking, with 55 percent of Highlandstudents qualifying for advanced proficiency versus 36 percent of Maryland elementary students.

Within two years of beginning its school improvement initiative, Highland Elementary had been removed from the state’s program improvement list. In its fourth year it was presented the United States Department of Education Blue Ribbon Award. It serves as a model of what schools can accomplish when clarity about purpose, priorities, and processes replaces ambiguity; when interdependence replaces isolation; and when systematic and collective efforts replace rampant individual autonomy.

Please present additional information that indicates your efforts to build a professional learning community have had a positive impact on students and/or teachers.

Highland Elementary was among the first schools in the county to participate in the Professional Learning Community Project.

Former Principal, Ray Myrtle, and then Assistant Principal, Scott Steffan, readily acknowledge they were “tight” in stipulating clearly that profound changes were needed in the structure and culture of the school, that the changes would impact everyone in the school, that teachers would work together collaboratively rather than in isolation, that procedures would be put in place to monitor student learning, and that the school would intervene in a systematic and timely way when students experienced difficulty. They also demonstrated that they were perfectly willing to confront any staff member who was not contributing to this new direction. At the same time, however, Myrtle and Steffan also committed to 1) engaging staff in the decisions regarding the implementation of the school’s new direction and 2) providing staff with the training, resources, and support to help them succeed at what they were being asked to do.

The school created several different structures to ensure teachers played an active role in guiding the improvement initiative. Myrtle and Steffan met with team leaders and the two school-level union representatives twice each month to monitor any issues arising from the staff. These same leaders are joined by reading and mathematics coaches, counselors, paraprofessionals and parents every six weeks to review trends in school achievement and discipline data and to identify and address any concerns. Reading and math coaches helped grade-level teams become skillful in clarifying outcomes, gathering evidence of student learning, and addressing concerns. This widely dispersed leadership has created a greater sense of ownership among staff regarding the direction of their school.

Please elaborate upon strategies you have found to be effective in any of the following areas:

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

Reading Intervention at Highland Elementary School
Highland depicts its systems of intervention for reading in the form of a decision-making tree as shown below.



For example, if a fourth-grade student is having difficulty, the grade-level team reviews the data from running records and common assessments to determine if the student is reading at or above the K/L level on the district’s text gradient system or roughly mid-year of second grade. If the student is not proficient at that level, the team attempts to determine if the primary problem is decoding or comprehension. Students struggling with decoding are assigned to one of three options. The first is to provide the student with a double dose of guided reading instruction each day. The second option is to utilize the Wilson Reading System – a twelve-step system that provides direct, multi-sensory, structured, reading instruction aimed at providing students with skills in phonological coding.

Students who have difficulty with comprehension rather than decoding are assigned to the SOAR to Success program which provides additional small-group guided instruction in reading comprehension using level-appropriate trade books. This program is designed to increase students’ understanding of what they read by engaging them in dialogue with the teacher to help them acquire the skills of summarizing, clarifying, questioning, and predicting.

In order to provide this additional time for reading instruction, each grade-level team carves out thirty to forty-five minutes in its daily schedule for intervention. The schedule for the 2010-11 school year is as follows:

INTERVENTION TEAM DAILY SCHEDULE  2010-2011
	Witthaus	Hambrecht	Healy/Casey	Chapman
9:00 – 9:30am	PLANNING		PLANNING	Reading Recovery – Grade 1
9:40 – 10:20am	SOAR – Gr. 4	Gr. 4 – Double Dose Guided Read.	SOAR – Gr. 4	Reading Recovery – Grade 1
10:20 – 11:00am	Fundations – Gr. 1		Fundations – Gr. 1	Reading Recovery – Grade 1
11:15 – 12:00pm	SOAR – Gr. 3		SOAR – Gr. 3	Reading Recovery – Grade 1
12:00 – 12:30pm	Fundations - K		Fundations - K	Reading Recovery – Grade 1
12:30 – 1:00pm	LUNCH		LUNCH
1:00 – 1:40pm	Fundation s – Gr. 2		SOAR – Gr. 2
1:40 – 2:20pm	SOAR – Gr. 5		SOAR – Gr. 5
2:25 – 3:00pm	PLANNING		SOAR – Gr. 3

 

During intervention time additional personnel descend on the grade level to provide students with intensive small-group and individual support. Steffan uses funding from Title I and discretionary district funds to hire part-time intervention teachers. Most of the intervention staff are certified teachers whose family situation or life-style make part-time tutoring a particularly attractive option for them. The school’s reading coach, reading specialist, and special education and ELL teachers also participate in this effort to provide students with additional focused support.

During intervention students from all of the classrooms in a grade level are regrouped and the staff provides specific, differentiated instruction based on the needs of students. While some staff members focus on enrichment, others are implementing the intervention plan for a small group. The intervention teachers are assigned specific students, by name, and they know exactly which skills they need to address with those students. Because assessment is ongoing, student placement in groups is very fluid and they are able to move into and out of groups as their proficiency dictates.

To ensure the communication essential to a coordinated effort, intervention teachers provide grade-level teams with scores from each embedded assessment as well as brief anecdotal feedback on the progress of each of the students they are serving. For example, one intervention teacher reported: “Becky has shown much growth this marking period; now uses all strategies; participates often; high level of effort continues; uses text support in written responses; still hesitates to use her own words in retelling but if encouraged will try; if she does not know the answer will search the text; oral reading is strong.”

This coordinated effort to clarify the specific knowledge and skills students are to acquire, to monitor each student’s proficiency, to respond to students in a systematic way, and to communicate results among all stakeholders has enabled teams to become what Myrtle describes as “well-oiled machines.” Students have clearly benefitted.

2. Building the capacity of teachers to work as members of high performing collaborative teams who focus the efforts of their team on improved learning for students.

The staff began the school’s transformation by adopting a common parallel schedule as the school’s new master schedule. The school established large blocks of uninterrupted time for math and language arts instruction at every grade level each day. The new schedule also assigned all the students of a particular grade level to art, music, physical education, library, and writing classes at the same time so that the grade-level team could have common planning for fifty minutes, four days each week. Myrtle stipulated that the teams were to reserve one of those days to focus their collaborative work on reading and another to focus on mathematics. ELL and special education teachers were also assigned to particular teams and helped to co-teach in many of the classrooms.

Teams were not merely encouraged to “go collaborate,” but were provided with a weekly template to help guide their work. The template helped the teams to establish the intended essential learnings for that week in reading, writing, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and math, and to translate the learnings into specific statements regarding what students would know and be able to do as result of the unit. Each team would also discuss whole group and small group instructional strategies and establish recommended topics, activities, and strategies for each day of the week. Finally, the template asked teams to clarify action steps that needed to be taken in order to implement its plan and assigned responsibility for each step to members of the team in order to divide the work and avoid duplicated effort. For example, at the conclusion of one meeting one teacher agreed to develop writing prompts, another to create independent work that would allow students to demonstrate their ability to determine cause and effect, and a third to develop the parent conference materials that would be sent home to parents.

Principal Myrtle also supported the work of the teams by providing time for them to collaborate beyond their common planning period each week. Once each quarter he hired substitute teachers to give an entire grade-level team a full day of uninterrupted collaborative time to plan their work for the coming quarter.
Focused and job-embedded professional development was a major aspect of the improvement initiative at Highland Elementary. Staff members had access to both material and human resources to assist them in building shared knowledge about district and state learning standards, effective assessment practices, working collaboratively, and effective use of curricular programs that were available to assist them. Grade-level teachers learned how to co-teach more effectively with special education teachers, English Language Learners teachers, reading specialists, math specialists and intervention teachers.

With the benefit of this time and support, grade level teams were able to clarify essential learning standards in reading, writing, and mathematics for each unit of instruction. They were also able to create common formative assessments to monitor student learning. Most teams used a quick math assessment virtually every day and a more comprehensive assessment every few weeks. The teams typically administered reading and writing assessments every week or two.
Initially, teams would analyze the results of the assessments, and divide the students among the members of that team on the basis of student proficiency during the intervention period provided in the schedule each day. Teachers discovered that this strategy of short-term, focused intervention was effective in helping students acquire math skills, but it was not effective in helping many of their students who were struggling to read. At that point, the teams recognized they needed to have more sustained and focused intervention for reading, and they created the structures to the decision-tree support that kind of intervention.

Rewards and Recognition

- One of six schools in Maryland to receive the 2009 Blue Ribbon Award of Excellence from the United States Department of Education
- One of 12 schools in the nation to receive the 2009 Urban Schools of Excellence Award
- Featured in Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap: Whatever it Takes as a model PLC
- Principal Myrtle was one eight  principals in the nation to receive the Terrell Bell Award for outstanding school leadership from the United States Department of Education in 2009.