Week 12: Engineers and Technicians of Learning

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 the ATLAS system being released for use to create CFAs and having our students become familiar with that format and the tools within it. While the classroom assessment tool in ATLAS will be a place where our CFAs can be maintained eventually, right now our focus with ATLAS can be on allowing our students the opportunity and time to learn to use the system. Creating short assessments is sufficient. A goal for summer professional development will be to provide time for moving our classroom formative assessments into the ATLAS portal. Hopefully, this will help alleviate that added stress.

Thank you for being so cooperative in getting these early numbers together. We have reached a point where we are progress monitoring our students with the greatest needs but we will have mid-year assessments including DIBELS, ORF, NWEA, and STAR tests for all students to determine our growth in reading. For all of our assessments it is crucial that we remember their purpose: how much are students learning, how well are they learning it, and what learning comes next. If our assessment is not informing our instruction, we do need to reevaluate. This is the value and purpose of our Professional Learning Communities. Work with your team to review the current processes and bring ideas together that can support our student learning and classroom instruction.

Closing

It is Senior Night tonight for Bearcat Football, Band, and Cheer students. Please come out tonight to recognize the careers of these students who have made Friday nights so memorable for themselves and us. The ceremony begins at 6:30 followed by our rivalry game with Waldron.

Our Cross Country season ended yesterday with the state meet at Oaklawn. Congratulations to Samara Jaynes for representing us at the state meet and congratulations to all the runners for a successful season.

Some of you may want to express your thoughts about the waivers for early mathematics and science assessment options. In Spring 2024, Arkansas will transition from an end-of-grade to an end-of-course assessment when the Arkansas Teaching and Learning Assessment System (ATLAS) launches. The idea is that the waiver would mean students who are in an accelerated pathway would only take one state summative assessment instead of double-testing. You may read more details here and find the link for public comments.

At Mena Public Schools our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident.

Have a nice weekend!!

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