Rhonda Renfro

A Reflection on “What Works” from a Veteran Consultant

March 2, 2021 by Rhonda Renfro

As I reflect on the past 25 years or so of working directly with school districts of various sizes, I debated my last topic for an E-Hint. A staff colleague asked, “In your work, what have been the most important things districts can do to change school culture through curriculum development, instructional planning, and local assessment development?” So, I created this list of actions that I feel lead to the most significant impact for districts implementing the model. I daresay that these actions would lead to positive effects within any school district. They have led to intense study of best practice through research, consistent improvement of student learning, and powerful conversations between and among teachers, administrators, the board of education, and community members.

To achieve significant results, a district must establish:

a “district” mindset for the governance of curriculum, instruction, and assessment by a representative group of teachers, administrators, board, and local stakeholders.
- This district mindset demands that members put aside their titles and their individualism to make decisions that will positively benefit the school district.
- District personnel bring their expertise to the table, but the stakeholders are free to discuss as equal participants in the decision-making steps involved.
a climate of accountability for teachers and students along with district-level and building-level leadership.
- As with many action decisions, if no one is checking, it is natural to do what is “easier” when stress and deadlines encroach on planning. Accountability structures lead to productive actions for the entire school staff and foster a sense of daily accountability for students.
a Long-Range Plan to outline timeframes for curriculum development, instructional planning, and local assessment development.
- Teachers and teacher teams will not have to wonder when changes are to be made to a curriculum, leading to instructional planning adjustments, assessment revisions, and the potential for new resources.
- Administrators can budget time and finances, for upcoming needs in advance.
district-wide parameters for grading policies that positively impact student learning.
- Stakeholders should have opportunities for research and dialogue to identify and implement best practice grading solutions regarding the why and how students are evaluated for their performance.
- Teachers’ closely held beliefs about grading are often shared while decisions are made about what scores are “fair” to include and how to incorporate the scores into a “grade” for students.
- An environment of equity and fairness results from the discussions.
a common, local curriculum aligned to standards allows teachers of the same grade level or course opportunities to have planning conversations.
- Teachers collaborate to develop instructional plans with common outcome targets, leading to using all teachers’ expertise of the same grade level in each classroom. Teachers learn from each other in pursuit of common goals.
- The common, local curriculum establishes the Tier One curriculum on which to base intervention plans.
common assessments with descriptions of defined performance levels.
- Teachers carefully align local assessments to make sure they are assessing the established curriculum.
- Subjectivity is removed from grading as much as is possible.
- Results are shared within the grade level or courses to determine best instruction practices on a specific curricular goal and identify the most effective instructional strategies.
- Teachers can implement interventions in a timely manner.
- Communication regarding student progress can be more specific and include celebrations or clear steps for improvement.
a seamless progression of content and skills in each subject area for efficient instruction.
- There is a clear “roadmap” of the students’ journey of content and skills.
- Teachers can identify where or when students may have experienced a loss of successful learning.
- Teachers can rely on the learning in previous grade levels to provide the basis for new learning expectations.

These strategies or steps to improve curriculum, instruction, and assessment alignment lead to better communication between and among all stakeholders and provide stability throughout a school district. While these actions would lead to positive effects within any school district, it is often impossible to maintain the priority without a district-mandated structure explicitly designed to require discussion.

The Role of the School Board in Ensuring Equity in Education in Various Learning Environments

January 5, 2021 by Rhonda Renfro

Teaching during COVID-19 is stressful, challenging, and confusing to even those of us who are career educators. Luckily, at least we know what is expected of us, though the environment might be varied. School board members, who don’t necessarily have experience in the classroom, are probably wondering how they can be most effective in their role. Whether an experienced educator or not, this is an excellent time for school board members to take a step back and determine what local measures are in place to ensure that all students, no matter how they attend school, receive an equitable learning experience.

In this E-Hint, we present a series of questions to serve as a starting point for open dialogue between a school board and its district superintendent, curriculum director, and the staff at large. These challenging questions would also be appropriate for an administrative team to affirm or evaluate their current curriculum processes in this environment of students “attending school” in remote, hybrid, and in-person settings.

The first question the school board and administration should answer is, “Is there consistency in what is taught and what is expected of all students within the same grade-level or course regardless of the teacher, learning environment, and time of day?” Skills, topics, and level of rigor should remain the same no matter the variables associated with teaching. Therefore, is this articulated K-12 for each content area? In other words, do we have a locally written, results-based curriculum to which all teachers have access?

Additional questions to help ensure equity in education through COVID-19 include:

Do we have a model or system of processes that we follow, as a district, to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment?
Do we have a district-wide, board-approved policy for how curriculum, instruction, assessment, and student learning decisions are made? Does it ensure stability when there are multiple learning environments for students and when immediate changes occur to those environments?
Do we have locally written, approved, common assessments by which student learning is measured?
How do the building principals and other administrators function as instructional leaders within the district and monitor student progress in various learning environments?
How are staff members prepared to follow the local curriculum and assessment protocols as they meet the challenges of the current reality in various learning environments?
Do we have a method of determining student placement in courses at the beginning of the next school year?

Although not exhaustive, these are some examples of questions that the CLI Model for School Improvement provides support in answering. The media presents the message that education is in a state of disarray. At the Curriculum Leadership Institute, we believe that teachers and districts are currently doing their best to meet student needs, even as difficult as that might be. As long as dialogue continues to ensure equity and alignment, we can successfully navigate this challenge in education as we have met challenges in the past.

Maintain Learning Expectations No Matter the Setting

October 6, 2020 by Rhonda Renfro

African-American mother supervises her teenaged son as he studies on his computer

The “start of school” has come and gone, and school district officials have made some of the hardest decisions they have ever made. Decisions that require re-evaluation nearly every day. The building preparation, bus preparation, and schedule concerns have all been addressed to the degree that gets the school year going. Now, it’s time to focus on teaching and learning. Ensuring that all students, whether entirely on-site, fully online, in a hybrid setting, or even homeschooled, reach a level of learning such that they are prepared for their future, as unsure as that may be.

Districts have long had curriculum, instruction, and assessment conversations. They have made decisions as a district regarding their local curriculum and expectations for student performance. Those conversations and decisions are critical within a district to ensure equal opportunity for students and smooth transitions from grade-level-to-grade-level and course-to-course. The professional staff has, in turn, had detailed conversations about the importance of those decisions and any ramifications for instruction and assessment. Those decisions, though, have probably only been communicated generally to parents.

In a typical school year or school environment, as a district, you are covered! Let’s get started! However, there is NOTHING normal about this school year. Students are attending school in a myriad of ways. For the decisions made by professional staff to be implemented for all the varieties of ways that students “attend” school, communication must be carefully planned and executed. Without good communication, unintended results might occur. Those unintended results might include:

inequity issues among students,
missed building blocks within the learning process,
an unclear vision of what is “good enough” for student success,
and students may work very hard but misunderstand expectations. Therefore, when they re-enter the in-person setting, they may feel their hard work was wasted.

For the most part, parents are engaged with helping their children succeed as students; investing in their children’s success is a high priority. However, parents have jobs, multiple children, past experiences with school, and rarely do they have professional training or experience as educators. Some of the decisions that the district made will make complete sense to their staff, but not necessarily to the people charged with monitoring and implementing the remote portion of a student’s instruction.

Often, it isn’t the “what” that non-educators can’t understand, it’s “why?” Having not been present for discussions among professional staff, decisions are communicated as, “Here’s what we are going to do,” not as, “Here’s what we are going to do, this is why we are doing it, and these are the expectations for your child because of what we’re doing.” In other words, the expectation has been to communicate decisions to stakeholders and parents without necessarily explaining “why” that decision was made.

This school year, with so many variables for how students are being educated, why is just as important to parents as what. Knowing why a particular decision was made could go a long way toward alleviating unintended consequences. It may also help parents determine appropriate steps to help a struggling student without losing sight of the expectation. The time spent designing this communication might pay big dividends when students come back together in a more “normal” setting.

The End of the School Year is in Sight

May 5, 2020 by Rhonda Renfro

High School Pupils Celebrating End Of Term

Yes, the end of the school year is in sight. Teachers are worried about finishing the curriculum, checking in books, taking posters off the walls, entering grades, and all of their other year-end tasks. Administrators are ticking items off of their unique building goal lists and sending out reminders and final instructions for the last days of school, all the while contemplating their summer worklists. In anticipation of the end of the year, we experience a seemingly abrupt conclusion followed by a collective sigh. Afterward, the thoughts of “Oh, no, we forgot… “ settle into our minds.

Let’s start now to check off the tasks and items that are complete or need follow-up.

We can then take time to reflect and celebrate the positive accomplishments that we might otherwise overlook in a rush to the end. The provided checklists are republished to serve as a guide to districtwide and classroom reflection and to remind us of all the tasks that require completion or monitoring to start the next year.

Do Standards Improve Learning?

February 4, 2020 by Rhonda Renfro

Eight years later, did the Common Core Standards help or hurt? This might be the million-dollar question with equal numbers of supporters on each side of the debate. While this question can be posed regarding any set of state or national standards followed by a district in the past or present, one important distinction to remember is that not all districts providing scores started the implementation of the Common Core Standards at the same time. The debate rages based on measures of learning and implementation of instruction, which both might be valid or invalid to varying degrees. A look at some factors could lend skepticism in the use of data collected at this point, both positive and negative. No matter on which side of the debate one finds themselves, some common arguments cannot be easily dismissed. However, the cause of the success or lack of success is harder to pinpoint without taking a closer look.

In an article published by Matt Barnum in Chalkbeat, April 2019, there is a list of pros and cons of the Common Core and a summary of the reasons that student learning data is or is not as strong as expected. The descriptions of positive statements about the Common Core Standards mostly refer to the standards themselves. However, the negative statements about the Common Core Standards mostly refer to the implementation of the standards within the classroom or the district. Researcher Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research summarizes the results of the Common Core Standards in much the same way, as Meador reported in an article for ThoughtCo in September 2019. Song also cites the lack of consistent data collection techniques and the fact that the research is lacking in reports on success.

We at the Curriculum Leadership Institute (CLI) have been working with districts for more than 25 years in finding solutions for districts to overcome the shortcomings in student success. Our hands-on research has led to conclusions supported by district and state data across the country. CLI finds that the solution is often not limited to the existence or non-existence of standards. Our use of a specific model to establish a systemic process of determining curriculum, implementing curriculum, and developing and implementing measures of success within the district affect positive gains in student learning regardless of the standards in place.

Standards are essential and can lead to comparisons across various districts and currently across states. However, standards are not curriculum, and it requires collaboration among district teachers and stakeholders to define standards as curriculum.

Curriculum without thoughtful implementation produces less success in improving student learning than expected. Collaboration among classroom teachers for best practice and in seeking professional development for improving instruction produces positive results across the district.

Developing valid student assessments to measure success also requires the collaboration of classroom teachers and other professionals within the district. Following the administration of the assessments, analysis of the data is critical to critiquing and improving instruction.

Structured, consistent collaboration among district stakeholders, classroom professionals, and local specialists produce positive results as long as there is a systematic approach to making and monitoring systemic efforts for improved student learning.

All of these pieces have been critical parts of the CLI Model and the evolution of the model is in reaction to current research and current mandates at the state and federal levels. Need help to get it going? Contact us and we will get you started!

References:

Barnum, Matt. “Nearly a decade later, did the Common Core work? New research offers clues” Chalkbeat, April 29, 2019. https://chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2019/04/29/common-core-work-research/

Meador, Derrick. “What Are Some Pros and Cons of the Common Core State Standards?” ThoughtCo, Sep. 3, 2019, https://thoughtco.com/common-core-state-standards-3194603.

Rhonda Renfro

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