NYKids Engages Arongen and Montgomery C. Smith Elementary Schools in Year-long Continuous Improvement
In the 2018-19 school year, NYKids worked with Arongen and Montgomery C. Smith Elementary Schools on identifying and addressing improvement goals. COMPASS Institutes harness NYKids research on odds-beating schools in service of supporting improvement in other schools.
This week NYKids held “check the pulse” meetings with both schools to track progress on goals for the year. Based on these check ins, teams from each school will continue to carry out their school improvement work throughout the summer and next school year.
Arongen Elementary School
Using self-assessments provided by NYKids, and priorities identified by educators at the school, Arongen identified two goals.
- #1 Goal: Close student performance gaps as measured by individual ELA and literacy.
- #2 Goal: Increase attendance of parents and families who have English language learners and free and reduced-price lunch children.
Two COMPASS teams from Arongen discussed each goal including their key learnings and next steps. To achieve the first goal, the team is working toward scheduling changes that allow for longer literacy blocks. They identified this requiring more support to colleagues in how to maximize the effectiveness of their instruction in these blocks.
Additionally, the team working on the parent engagement goal, identified the need for better data and different ideas. This entails learning from parents what they would like to see and generating more discussion among staff to generate “out of the box” ideas.
Teams reported the session was helpful with bringing focus to their work and identifying better measures for tracking progress.
Montgomery C. Smith Elementary School
At Montgomery C. Smith, COMPASS teams met to refine goals they had established in the summer of 2018. With assistance from COMPASS facilitators, participants refined their priority goals:
- #1 Goal: Increase parent involvement through positive contacts with the school.
- #2 Goal: Increase instructional and curricular coherence.
- #3 Goal: Improve efficiency of intervention system.
Facilitators assisted teams in creating driver diagrams for each goal showing the relationships between drivers and measures of impact. Teams identified the need to collect more data in order to come up with change ideas that will be most effective.
To increase parent involvement, for example, teams decided that they would need to conduct parent/guardian focus groups or surveys to find out what types of changes would be most appropriate and effective from their perspectives.
Team members also reflected on ways to articulate their progress with colleagues and set benchmarks to ensure that changes would be implemented on a timeline.
Overall, participants reported satisfaction with the meeting though recognized that there was still much work to be done.
2019 Summer Institute
In July, NYKids is partnering with CASDA and the Capital Region BOCES to offer a two-day institute to school teams in using NYKids odds-beating research and improvement science tools to set the course for their 2019-2020 continuous improvement journey. This institute will be driven by the latest research from NYKids on college and career readiness. Read more information, here, including how to register.
