Creating a Culture of Achievement

I haven't written in a couple of weeks. I have been really engaged in the delicate balance of managing the immediate needs of where we currently are (which, by the way, is light years ahead of where we were this time last year!!) and planning for our future. We are part of a new legislation in New York that places struggling or persistently struggling schools in a status called "Receivership." To summarize receivership, it is the last chance that the lowest 5% of achieving schools in New York have to improve before someone else (an "independent receiver") steps in to take over. Although we have not made the kind of growth that we wanted or expected in terms of state assessments, we have plenty of evidence to support that we are really on the right track (for example, we are light years ahead of where we were at this time last year!!), so we have embraced receivership as a great opportunity to add more details to our plan and really think through what we envision from our school in 2-3 years. This kind of backwards planning is critical to the process of turnaround. If you can clearly see where you want to be at the end, and then you can articulate exactly what you need to do in order to get there, and you can allow for assessment and adjustments along the way, then how can you fail? Vision + planning + follow through = success.

But I digress. The real topic today is about achievement. The kind of achievement that permeates the entire of a school and of a community. The kind of achievement that hast parents invested and asking questions; the kind of achievement that makes it more cool for kids to be spending their time talking about reading or writing than it is for them to goof off; the kind of achievement that has teachers talking about best practices and ways to reach and teach kids - even over lunch or in the copy room. How does that shift happen? We worked so hard in year one to develop data protocols, make goal setting and achievement a living part of our culture, and shared data with our parents and families. Our students made progress - the growth was evident - but we really didn't achieve mastery. As we got deep into our data over the summer we knew exactly what we were missing. Our students were progressing and we were so proud of that growth, but they were not achieving the standards because we did not invest in sharing the standards with our students - we did not show them enough exemplar work, have them assess their own work against the standards using student friendly rubrics, and we did not inform parents and families about what grade level work is supposed to look like. In other words, we created a strong culture of learning, but we did not go far enough to fully develop as a culture of achievement.

 So, we are getting smarter. Our data meetings include more exemplars of grade level writing. Our discussions surround how we can align our expectations to standards, rather than letting our students define our expectations. That brings a real issue to the table - our students have been performing below level, and that has been a part of the culture at my school for many years (hence, the receivership status). So, making sure that we have the right strategies in place to move our students toward the standards becomes the work. In this video, a teacher prepares her students to dig deep into the work around theme in a novel and shares with her students the different levels of proficiency that they may be at in terms of this concept. There is real power in helping students to understand their own level of proficiency and be able to identify levels of proficiency in their peers. This is how we become more of a culture of achievement.

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With all of this talk about standards, achievement, and classroom culture, it is so important to remember that creating a culture of achievement in classrooms is purposefully built. Teachers who are able to move their students toward this do not have a magic wand and they are not simply "better teachers." The same kind of backwards planning that I am using to move our school forward as a school in turnaround is the same kind of purposeful and backwards planning that teachers must utilize in creating a culture of achievement in their classrooms. Debbie Miller (in her book Teaching with Intention) talks about the importance of purposeful planning to achieve what you believe that students can achieve. If you believe that students can, and should, be engaged in discourse around standards, exemplars, and levels of quality work (and I certainly believe this!), then you must implement structures that build the capacity of students to do this. It will not happen overnight. And it is so important to persevere and make sure that you don't give up and let the student's performance define your expectations. If it isn't working, reflect on what skill students are missing and back track to teach that skill. Involve students in assessing their own progress. Allow them to reflect on how they can do it better. But do not give up and lower your expectations. Our students must have the same high expectations in their classrooms that we expect from our own children. This is the work - and it is so important.