Got Reasoning? Increasing Student Achievement Through a Building-wide Goal

Outline

Introduction / Our story (10 minutes) - The presentation will start with walking participants through our school’s journey and how we decided to focus on developing students' written reasoning as a common school improvement goal.

Impact areas (40 minutes) - During this time we will discuss all the areas of the school system that were impacted through developing and implementing this goal, how we developed teacher capacity and our process, and then will provide collaborative activities and work time for participants to engage in planning for their own buildings/schools.
* Development of the goal & setting targets - Guided support to dig into their own data and go through the protocol for determining a potential school-wide goal.
* Department and grade level PLCs - How to use a data analysis tool, building common grading practices across a team, and getting educators focusing on underperforming subgroups.
* Continuous improvement of teaching practices - Creating a cohesive year-long professional development plan that includes distributed leadership opportunities and coaching

Review and Questions (10 minutes) - Open share with participants on take-aways and answering questions.

Supporting research

Throughout the presentation, and cited at the end, we will be referencing the work of John Hattie's Visible Learning, the University of Chicago 5Essentials research, Learning by Doing PLC process work by Richard DuFour et al, and Harvard's Data Wise work as a basis for much of the work we accomplished.