7 Keys for College and Career Readiness Transform a District’s Approach to Learning

7 Keys for College and Career Readiness Transform a District’s Approach to Learning
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Maury County School District

By Chris Marczak, Ed.D.

When I started as superintendent at the Maury County School District (TN) in August 2015, my goal was not just to improve academic performance, but to inspire the enthusiasm of our students, teachers, and principals. And things are improving. Dr. Tim Webb, the Principal of E.A. Cox Middle School, has changed his academically and socially challenged school into a place where 33% of students are in honors English and in-school suspensions have decreased 30% since last year. With these improvements, we have seen the entire community become excited about being involved with their children’s education. Here’s how we made it happen.

From the start, I knew we had to focus our attention on dedicating personalized time to work with the unique needs and teaching methods of all the Maury County schools. But in a district of 12,000 students, there were no systemic solutions. I wanted to get away from the traditional school-improvement model where people in the central office pick a software, provide professional development, push it down to the teachers, and see what happens while hoping for the best.

Over 10 weeks I met with students, parents, educators, and community groups and asked the simple question, “What should students know before leaving elementary, middle, and high school?” From these conversations, Maury County’s “7 Keys for College and Career Readiness” were created.

Our 7 Keys are:

1) All students’ reading proficiency at or above grade level by the end of 3rd grade

2) All students’ math proficiency at or above grade level by the end of the 4th grade

3) All students’ math and English proficiency at or above grade level by the end of 6th grade

4) All students proficient in Algebra 1 by the end of 8th grade

5) All students scoring at or above ACT college readiness benchmarks by graduation

6) All students financially literate by graduation

7) All students participating in advanced placement, dual-enrollment, industry certification, work-based learning, or military prep by graduation

To achieve Keys 1 and 3, I knew we needed a literacy platform that doesn’t just offer assessments to measure progress, but instead measures reading by reading. One of the tools we used was myON, a digital literacy environment that provides more than 10,000 digital books to match students’ interest and ability level.

Simple Yet Powerful

We measure student progress through RTII and by their vocabulary, silent reading fluency, and comprehension growth through the Aimsweb+ assessment. Because we track both of these, we can compare growth against time spent reading to truly determine that students are progressing.

The traditional summative assessments Maury County used weren’t working, only telling our teachers whether a student reached the correct answer—not how they got there or if they struggled to do so. Standardized tests and quizzes provide only snippets of information after the fact, leaving educators, parents, and students with an incomplete—and at times inaccurate—picture of reading and literacy skills. Other methods, such as self-reported reading logs and surveys, can be laborious and unreliable.

myON helped captured student data in real time, which helped our educators accelerate towards the goal of having every student reading on grade level.

But the testing method wasn’t the only thing that needed to change. We had to alter the school structure as well. My staff and I wanted to ensure that our students were getting hands-on work experience, making them ready for college and their future careers.

Based on our conversations with the principals and teachers throughout our district, we knew we had to switch our focus to project-based learning, offer more PD, and use data to help drive instruction and measure benchmarks. One of the ways we accomplished this was through a model that enable 96, currently practicing, teachers to become school-based coaches (at least three at each school) to help in these specific areas.

Enthusiasm Is Infectious

The 7 Keys allowed our team to focus on the fundamental pieces of learning. We changed our class schedule to include at least 85 minutes of reading and language arts in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon. This way we were able to re-energize our students’ love and enthusiasm for reading.

From spring 2016 through September 2016, Maury County students completed 82,276 books and spent more than 15,254 hours reading. The district has seen clear Lexile growth for grades one through eight. Enthusiasm is particularly high among third- and fourth-graders; these grade levels account for 40 percent of our total hours read.

The 7 Keys not only support our teachers in delivering individualized instruction and guidance, but they help our students reflect on their reading, see their growth, and become motivated to improve.

As our students’ performance and interest in reading has increased, we have been thrilled to observe a massive rise in family participation as well. For example, before implementing these programs, Dr. Webb recalled, the school had no PTA. “We used the 7 Keys to fix some major social and behavioral issues first,” Webb said. “Because of these fixes, we saw a huge, positive change in our school. Now we have a booster club and a very active PTA. We got 400 parents there with their kids on the first day of school. That’s unheard of.”

Chris Marczak, Ed.D., is the Superintendent of the Maury County School District in Tennessee. He started his career as a classroom teacher, and accepted his first administrative role in 2009. Follow Dr. Marczak on Twitter at @cjmarczak or email him at cmarczak@mauryk12.org.

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