Dr. Jan's Blog

My Take on Year Round Education

Last night I received the following email:

-----Original Message-----

From: Hoel Stephen [

mailto:Hoel_Stephen@stvrain.k12.co.us

]

Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2008 7:17 PM

To: janborelli@gmail.com

Subject: Information

Greetings from Colorado!

Jan I wondered if you would give me your feeling on how your calendar impacts achievement at your school. I work in a building that has many of the same strengths and needs as Westwood. My district is looking at alternative calendar configurations as a possible way to get more of our kids where they need to be. I suppose the bottom line question is do you feel like you could be as successful as you are on a traditional calendar?

Thanks for your time

Stephen Hoel

Principal

Rocky Mountain Elementary

I had begun thinking about what I would post for Leadertalk.org for my next due date (the 7th of each month); and Stephen (who gave me permission to include him in this post) inspired me to provide my ruminations on Year Round Education.  What follows is my response to him:

I was not actually the principal who started the year round schedule at Westwood. They began the schedule about two or three years before I came; and the lion's share of the faculty and staff have changed since the original decision. However, I have had the faculty vote again (on more than one occasion) over the years since my tenure to determine the level of their commitment-- it's always 100% unanimous. I am writing this information to provide the backdrop for the number one foundation that must exist before implementing the schedule; your teachers must believe in it and be willing to support its full implementation.

The schedule had been in place for two or three years before I arrived (I am now in my fifth year); and the school was performing horribly and was on the state low performing index for five consecutive years. So, year round education is not some silver bullet that solves all the problems. My teachers love the schedule (each teacher has a different reason--- some need a rest after the hectic and intensive go-go-go environment of teaching urban, high poverty, high ELL students). But, it's not about the teachers; and I always tell them that if it's not about and for the kids then whatever other reason there is... that reason just isn't enough.

For instance, everyone wanted to do the schedule when I got there but no one wanted to work intersessions (the time off between quarters... we originally started off with 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off but went to 9 weeks on and 2 weeks off last year and no longer take advantage of intersessions--- except before state testing if we have some teachers who feel panicky without it). After a unanimous vote of support for continuation of agreement for year round with the stipulation that our own teachers (and I) would work at least 1 week for each intersession then we continued. We are paid stipends to work this extra time through our Title One Plan. If your folks want the schedule and aren't willing to commit to taking advantage of the schedule (ergo more intensive small group instruction to help the struggling children) then don't even go there (my opinion).

In my own district with 88 schools and only 3 of us on the year round calendar (or continuous learning calendar as it is dubbed); it can be real frustrating to me that all the big reports and principal meetings always seem to occur when I am on vacation... I am not that crazy about that because a lot of my vacations turn out to be working holidays.

It doesn't sound very much like I am supportive of year round schooling, and actually I am. But, I wouldn't do it unless I had visited schools that were doing it (with my own faculty) and then saw what it could do to help us be even better.

Could we be this successful without year round? Yes. We have so many levels of interventions at my school that it's dang near impossible to be left behind because we just don't accept failure with even one kid (sounds impossibly optimistic--- and we have to fight wanting to give up on a child or two that is currently driving us bonkers--- but it's true). Would we be as up up up and rested and thrilled to start each quarter with the enthusiasm that we have with the beginning of each school year without our year round calendar? Nope. That fact alone makes the calendar very worth it to me as the principal of the school because there is nothing better than rested, well prepared (most of them spend some professional development and classroom development time during our intersessions now) teachers.

By the way, I have now decided to turn this into a post for my blog (lol).

What part of your email, name, and email address could I use (if any of it) in my blog post?

Jan

The Turnaround School: The Reachable English Language Learner

Five years ago, I started my tenure as a principal at a chronically low performing low socio-economic, high ELL population elementary school in urban Oklahoma City Public Schools.  The faculty and staff had tried just about every new and innovative product and program that came along to help reach the students who just couldn’t seem to learn to read despite far reaching interventions.

I had never been a principal of an ELL school (or even an elementary school).  I wasn’t even sure what to expect.  I didn’t know Spanish and most of the parents didn’t know English; it was going to be difficult to employ parental support in any kind of traditional format.  The children came to school not knowing how to speak English; and by the time they learned English, they were already behind in content information and particularly in depth of knowledge in anything related to vocabulary (just about everything). 

The first thing I did was to build a collaborative leadership model at the school.  There would be no success and no problem that we all didn’t own.  Two groups of teachers would lead the school.  One, the Faculty Advisory Committee, developed processes and procedures for everything related to organizational management.  The other, Campus Improvement Team, studied research supported best practices and then presented to the whole faculty their findings and got support or orders to go back and find something else.  Everything we did (and do) depends upon full faculty support; or we just don’t do it.

We know that our first big challenge was to teach the children how to decode.  We studied the best phonics programs and finally narrowed it down to a multi-sensory, sequential process that would require us all to have 40 hours of training after school on Tuesdays to develop our expertise and practice.   And, by the end of that first year, almost all of our students could decode words because we spent the majority of our teaching time and focus on insuring all students learned how to do this.  We beamed with pride that there was just about no printed word that our students couldn’t sound out; but it was not nearly enough.  It didn’t matter how well the kids could decode the words if they didn’t know what the words meant.

We knew we had to find ways to boost phonemic awareness and phonic analysis while developing vocabulary comprehension.  It was about this time that our Campus Improvement Team and I attended an Oklahoma Reading Association Conference.  We happened to see a presentation on A+ Anywhere; and the presenters told us about a computer program that would be individualized and give students early success with phonemic awareness.  Our CIT and I excitedly discussed the program, since we had an opportunity to serve as a pilot site for the program in

Oklahoma

.  We knew that our children were stimulated and excited about technology, and we had the technology so that students could access the program for 20 minutes a day with their class.  We made arrangements to pilot the program at our site.

The training for the program was fairly straight forward.  Our faculty went to a meeting over just a couple of hours on how to input their students’ names and how to get the students started with a diagnostic test that would place them in the program.  The students needed headphones for the computers, and we got some really sturdy ones that are still in operation today.  Nothing is quite as adorable as watching the Kindergarteners and first graders excitedly going to the library (where our classroom set of computers are located), putting on their headphones and talking back to the computer, pressing buttons, and summoning the teacher for assistance when needed.  We felt we were on to something, but the whole program not only got our students knowing their letters and sounds; but some interesting collateral bonuses happened.

Our teachers began to see how easy it was to use data to guide their decisions on classroom materials and presentations.  If all the children knew how B sounded at the beginning, middle, and end of the word, then B would be more of a review; and if all the children didn’t know a particular letter and/or sound then many more presentations in many more learning styles were presented.  Also, we found that all those pictures with those words that were presented seemed to really exponentially improve the students’ basic capture of words.  And, of course, our measures of achievement began to show great growths for all our students.

Throughout the coming years, we have added on to our understanding of how English Language Learners develop complex literacy skills and have enriched our curriculum with Academic Vocabulary in a six step approach, guided reading, literacy centers, cross-age tutoring.  Though our phonics program has changed over the years with our development of more intensive interventions, and though we continue to expand our knowledge with the best way to teach so that all students learn; one thing we have stuck with and teachers demand is the students early entrance into phonemic awareness and vocabulary development through A+ Anywhere; and our longitudinal data (see trend data below) seems to confirm that we are on the right track, and our early literacy training seems to have set the stage for our further development!