Episode Details

Happy Friday!

Thank you for a successful Week 12! We are on day number 55 with 115 remaining. Our performance targets have been updated for the week and show that we are staying on track in attendance, but our discipline referrals were up again by 11 percent.

In this week’s Wrap-up, I want to focus on all of us being reflective practitioners who use data to guide instruction by comparing what we do to other professions.

Technicians and Engineers

To begin this week a team of K through 5 teachers and administrators met with a representative from Bailey Education Group. The DeQueen-Mena Coop got a grant for coop schools to partner with Bailey for professional development and coaching related to High-Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM). Our goal is to make sure we are getting the most out of the curriculum we are using and how to be both an engineer and technician of learning.

When Arkansas adopted the Common Core State Standards in 2010 I was in the middle of my career working for the DeQueen-Mena Coop. During that time, just as Secretary Oliva points out when speaking to educators, there was no solid curriculum for delivering the standards. So, many educators and administrators started creating their own curricula. In other words, engineering the learning. It was my philosophy then that teachers had to be the engineers of learning, not technicians. I have changed that stance somewhat since then.

As we progressed through Common Core we learned a lot and one of the lessons was about Structured Literacy being the most effective way to teach kids to read and write. (If you have not seen The Right to Read documentary yet, please watch it to understand what I mean.) With this knowledge, our legislature passed The Right To Read Act in 2017 which centers around educators learning the Science of Reading. A part of the act also requires schools to adopt High-Quality Instructional Materials for use in teaching. 

HQIMs are research-based and proven ways of delivering Structured Literacy to students. It has already been engineered in the best possible way to ensure kids learn to read from it. In fact, researchers now estimate that 95 percent of all children can be taught to read by the end of first grade, with future achievement constrained only by students’ reasoning and listening comprehension abilities. This means that we must also be dedicated technicians of those HQIMs to reach our performance targets and make sure our students can read. 

Now, everyone agrees that there is no perfect curriculum and that supplemental materials are required. But those materials must also be high quality and used with fidelity both vertically and horizontally. We have to be both engineers and technicians and understand when we may be unbalancing the two. 

To quote Louisa C. Moats from the American Federation of Teachers,

“Teaching reading is rocket science. But it is also established science, with clear, specific, practical instructional strategies that all teachers should be taught and supported in using”.

There is great teaching going on at Mena Public Schools. We are all doing very hard work to help our students grow. We will use data to determine how well we are doing and to discover ways to improve.

Assessments

I know it seems that there is a lot of assessment going on and there has been. However, it should begin to reduce and settle into a routine. Much of the impression came from our baseline data gathering and the amount of time each of those assessments took for every student. Closely following all of that was th