Alcester-Hudson Elementary School, Alcester, South Dakota

Three years ago, when the staff of Alcester-Hudson Elementary School first learned the South Dakota Department of Education and Cultural Affairs had been designated the school “in need of improvement” they experience the same mix of emotions a family might experience upon the death of one of their own — denial, anger, grief, and uncertainty about what to do next.

“Looking back, going on school improvement status was the best thing that ever happened to us,” said Elementary School coordinator Kathy Johannsen. “But at the time, we were surprised, embarrassed, and humiliated. We always thought of our school as a good school, one that met the needs of our students and community. To be publicly labeled as ‘unsatisfactory’ was just horrible.”

Three years after beginning their improvement efforts, the staff at Alcester-Hudson have solved their own problems. Student achievement has risen dramatically — with 94 percent of students testing proficient on the state math test and 100 percent of students testing proficient in reading. Today, the school that was once in “need of improvement” has received the state’s highest rating: “commendable.”

We believe there are seven key elements to Alcester’s success story:

1. Distributing leadership
2. Getting on the same page
3. Getting hooked on data
4. Staying focused (taking it one step at a time)
5. Looking to research for answers
6. Building a professional learning community
7. Recognizing that from little things, big things grow

Distributing leadership

Much like a barn raising, school improvement is too big of a job for an single person to handle. A school can only improve when there’s widespread commitment to the effort and many people involved in planning and carrying it out. With this in mind, from the outset, McREL recommended the formation of a school leadership team that would manage the steps of the improvement process, beginning with writing the improvement plan.

Cheryl Johnson, a school board representative on the team, commented on the leadership changes she observed over time. “I remember going to the first meeting and it was just helter skelter … everyone trying to do his or her own thing and no one wanting to take charge. Now we have teachers volunteering to take on leadership roles in various areas. The great majority of the teachers at Alcester Hudson Elementary are very comfortable being leaders and taking the initiative to begin new projects.”

Getting on the same page

Like many public schools, teachers at Alcester-Hudson were almost entirely autonomous in the beginning — they tended to close their classroom doors each morning and do their own thing during the day. We noticed right away that their math program was being implemented differently in each classroom and that there were differing levels of expectation in reading from room to room. So we encouraged school staff members to take a “balcony view” — to step back and look at themselves with a new eye. It takes practice to develop this perspective, whether at the individual or school level. But with coaching, the faculty began to see how the many aspects of their school culture — including the autonomy of their teachers left them with little sense that they could work together to make a difference.

As we began to take a hard look at their student achievement data to determine where they should focus their improvement efforts, they began to develop a number of “shared agreements,” including teaching mathematics for an hour and fifteen minutes per day, following timelines for completing various portions of the math curriculum, implementing a rigorous schedule of both formative and summative assessments in reading and math, and using new guided reading strategies in grades K-3.

Getting hooked on data

Early on in the improvement process, McREL presented workshop on data use to the entire faculty to help them gain a shared understanding of how students were performing and to speculate on what might contribute to these results. The entire staff learned the cycle of school improvement: study data, form hypotheses, plan and implement changes in instruction, re-allocate resources, and measure changes in student learning.

The teachers at Alcester-Hudson grew so adept at using data, that just as successful students are often able to anticipate how they’ve done on a test before seeing the results, they were able to use formative assessments to predict each student’s learning in relation to the state and district content standards. As the state tests for year two approached, the McREL facilitators asked the staff to predict scores on the upcoming tests. The teachers were in agreement that the scores would decline and they expressed an awareness that they had let up on their efforts. Their predictions materialized with a slight dip in scores and the somewhat chagrined staff quickly recommitted to keeping up the efforts that had led to their initial success.

At the same time, data also became a vehicle for noting success and celebrating the achievements of the staff. Today, everything in the school revolves around data. As school leadership team member Kathy Johannsen put it, “McREL has totally converted me into a data junkie! Now with many of our challenges or issues that come up my first thought is ‘we need to gather data.’ And I had never thought about that before — how important data can be and how many kinds of data you can collect for so many different reasons.”

Staying focused (taking it one step at a time)

Too often, data — far from empowering schools, can leave them feeling overwhelmed — knowing that they have much need for improvement, but unsure where to begin. As result, they often try to make many improvements at once — drafting sweeping, comprehensive improvement plans that call for changing instructional programs, altering scheduling schemes, revamping organizational and support structures — in essence, throwing “everything but the kitchen sink” at the problem. In trying to do everything at once, they often do nothing well, and as a result, see little or no gains in student achievement.

At Alcester-Hudson, the leadership team staff learned the importance of using the data to focus on one problem at a time. For example, they initially identified specific numerical achievement targets in reading and mathematics. After a year of consistent focus on instructional goals and discussions around student achievement, the teachers were gratified (but not surprised) to see test scores rise significantly on the yearly summative assessments given by the state. In fact, all students (including special education students) met the school’s goals. With these “quick wins” under their belts, they consulted the data again and identified a new, research-based focus for their improvement efforts.

Looking to research for answers

Once the staff knew what direction to take, they turned to rigorous research to learn effective strategies that would help them achieve their shared goals. The teachers drew from a variety of sources for this information — including McREL research that identifies school and classroom variables strongly linked to student achievement, their local Special Education Co-op, as well as professional wisdom and lessons learned from peers in neighboring schools .

Building a professional learning community

During initial discussions about reallocating resources to support their improvement goals, the teachers developed a scheduling strategy that allowed them to meet monthly in instructional teams (K-3 and 4-6) on what they called “Working Wednesdays.” During this two hour uninterrupted block of time, classroom, special education, and Title I teachers met together to discuss instructional strategies and the needs of individual children who were not meeting the standards. They drew up lists of students, posted them, and saved them from week to week.

Working Wednesdays played a significant role in making teachers aware of their own attitudes about student learning. As teachers became aware of the strategies used by others, they gained an increased awareness of the learning potential of all students. As teachers shared strategies and proposed new ideas to get students “off the list,” conversations began focusing on the changes teachers could make in their instruction. Staff members also celebrated together when formative assessment data allowed them to remove a student from the list.

Recognizing that from little things, big things grow

The Alcester-Hudson staff’s original perception of the improvement process as a “way to get off improvement” quickly evolved to something very different as they began to experience success. Bobette Anderson, a fourth grade teacher and an original member of the leadership team said, “When we started working on school improvement it was because our test scores were not up-to-par for two years. When we started the process, we were trying to fix things in a hurry. As we got to working, we realized there was more to improvement than just fixing your immediate problems and it was going to take some work.”

Kathy Johannsen added that, “I knew that we were a school marked for improvement by the state and that we needed to improve our standardized test scores. But it’s much, much more than that. The school improvement process is just what it says it is — it improves a lot more than just your test scores. It improves literally every aspect of the school – how we interact with each other as staff members, how we work with kids, what we’re teaching those kids, and what the climate of our school is.”

In sum, although Alcester-Hudson kept its initial efforts focused and geared toward getting some quick gains in test scores, the improvement process became a comprehensive, systemic effort. We have concluded that in order to be effective and sustainable, school improvement efforts need to, in the end, be broad and systemic, but in the beginning, be focused and targeted on specific problems.

Final thoughts: Improvement never ends

Another member of Alcester Elementary’s leadership team, Mary Beth Lundberg, noted that after three years of involvement in the Success in Sight program, the school staff now realize that despite a dramatic increase in student test scores, their work is far from over. “Once the job of improving your scores is over the work continues. Before this whole process started I looked at where we had to go with our scores and thought, okay, we’ll get there and then we’ll be done. Now my full belief is that we should never be done. We need to constantly look to improve and even if we increase achievement every single year, we should pat ourselves on the back but then get back down to pulling apart the scores and looking for ways to improve."

«Success in Sight Home