October 2010

Would you like to know how CCE can help your school?

• Turnaround schools
• Create Pilot schools
• Transform and modify schools
• Principal coaching
• Prof. learning communities
• District/Union partnerships
• Equity training
• Math and Literacy curriculum and instruction
• School culture
• Community engagement
• District coaching

Learn more at:
www.cce.org
phone: (617) 421-0134
email: info@ccebos.org

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Collaborations is a periodic newsletter from CCE, sharing news about our work and about movements in education.

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The mission of the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) is to transform schools to ensure that all students succeed.  We believe that schools should prepare every student to achieve academically and make a positive contribution to a democratic society. CCE partners with public schools and districts to create and sustain effective and equitable schools.

Would you like to support CCE in its mission of transforming schools so all students can succeed? Please visit our Donations Page. Thank you!

How CCE Coaches Work with Schools

This issue of Collaborations looks at how four CCE staff members worked with faculties this past summer to help them bring about effective educational transformation. We hope to convey some of the flavor of the work we do. Dania Vazquez worked with the faculty of what would be the first Innovation School in Massachusetts, facilitating the transformation process and finally writing up the innovation plan. Meenakshi Khanna, Mary Anne Connery-Simmons, and Annmarie Boudreau worked with schools that had been classified Level 4 failing schools, guiding them through the process of addressing their problems, then writing their initial proposals for Federal funding.
—Dan French, Executive Director

Dania Vazquez, CCE Associate Director

CCE Associate Director and redesign coach Dania Vazquez was called by the school superintendent in Revere when the city had an opportunity to transform a K-5 school into the first Innovation School in Massachusetts, a model corresponding somewhat to Pilot schools in Boston. The superintendent wanted to show that a public school can change to meet the needs of the community: the new Innovation School initiative seemed like a good opportunity to demonstrate this.

As the existing principal was retiring, the superintendent asked the teachers to screen principal applicants, a process Dania facilitated. Then she facilitated the faculty investigation of what “innovation” would mean for them, helping them see that, for an existing school, the changes would be evolutionary, not starting from scratch. For these teachers, common planning time would be an innovation. Dania’s emphasis throughout would be to help the teachers “own” the innovations and thereby own the school.

Among the innovations developed by the teachers, as they worked with Dania, was a twice-weekly “open circle advisory” for the students to work on their emotional and social well-being. The teachers also worked out a schedule of half-day Wednesdays to provide common planning time, while working with partners to conduct programs in the school so the parents could have the children in the building on those half days. As the teachers structured their time, with Dania’s facilitation they began to own the time and the school.

A Turnaround Plan for a Failing School

While such schools have the options to close, to be taken over by a school management company, or to take designation as a “turnaround” and replace 50% of their faculty, Meenakshi’s school chose a fourth option, which is “transformation.” In a transformation, the school replaces its principal and some of its faculty while not casting out the fundamental attributes of the school. The school must develop and write up a plan that will correct what’s wrong and bring about AYP. A satisfactory plan can then be funded at more than $500,000 per year of Federal funds, for three years, a powerful incentive. Creating and presenting the plan are crucial for the school’s funding and success.

That is where her school called on Meenakshi. She started by accompanying her school to two CCE-run data institutes, where representatives from each underperforming school looked at data culled for them by CCE from state resources. Meenakshi facilitated the representatives from her school as they used a “data inquiry protocol” to look at the data, identify their challenges and come up with an action plan. As the challenges were identified, the group broke up into small groups, each addressing one challenge and coming up with a preliminary action plan. For instance, they addressed serious problems of attendance by both students and teachers. One proposed action plan called for every teacher to sign a letter of commitment that is explicit about maintaining high attendance. At the end of the institute the small groups from the school came together to share what each had come up with and to agree on the major parameters of a school action plan.

Meenakshi’s task, at that point, was to take that work and write it up as a 20-page preliminary “redesign plan” on a DESE template. This provided the big picture, with a fair amount of detail, for what will be the school’s application for the federal funds.

Mary Anne Connery-Simmons, CCE Re-design Coach

CCE coach Mary Anne Connery-Simmons met with two elementary school re-design teams. She found they were eager to start writing a plan that would be approved by the state and then funded with federal dollars. Mary Anne realized she first needed to slow the teams down and get them to look at data that CCE had provided in booklets from DESE sources and data the teams already had available. There was some initial hesitation, but eventually the teams spent three whole days looking at patterns that were contributing to poor outcomes in both schools.

As the teams began to look slowly and reflectively at the data, they found salient problems in suspension, detention and student attendance. Furthermore, they noticed that these problems occurred in grades 3-4, but not in grades K1-2. They asked why there was a difference. As they dug deeper, they found inconsistency within the schools both in the programs of instruction and in the ways to deal with discipline. From existing surveys they found problems in their communications with families. Surveys also showed inexperienced teachers who felt they were not being held accountable nor trained for behavior and family issues. The teams broke out into small groups to address these issues separately and then came together with a set of recommendations.

Among the recommendations was to bring in coaching around these issues, and to bring in more teachers who shared the principal’s vision. Coaches were to work with actual teaching situations and not just data. The schools are already implementing these steps.

A Turnaround Plan for a Comprehensive High School

After meeting the school team at a CCE institute on turnaround planning, Annmarie guided them through three intense days at a second CCE institute focused on data supplied to each school by CCE from state sources. The goal was for the school team to come up with the outline of a turnaround plan that Annmarie could turn into a 20-page proposal by August 6 and that would lead to a 50-page turnaround proposal and grant application the school would submit in December.

Annmarie determined that her role would be both to facilitate and to bring in new ideas. As the team looked at data, they saw that there was a high retention rate among ninth graders, resulting in a ninth grade class that comprised half the 9-12 school. They began to focus on the data showing high detention, suspension, and failure rates in the ninth grade, along with poor attendance. They realized that there was no time in the school schedule for teachers to get together to address these problems. Annmarie asked how one could make a large, comprehensive high school feel small and personal.

This led to a proposal from the group to divide the ninth grade into academies of 150 students with a dedicated staff. One sub-set of the team saw a need for different programs for particularly disengaged ninth graders. Another addressed the problem that students who were kicked out of other local schools were being sent to this one. The team also found there was a small International Baccalaureate program that also needed support services. Meanwhile, as Annmarie helped them focus on the data, they realized they needed time in the school year to do this and to address problems. She asked team members to focus in subsets on the parts of the evolving proposal with which they were most familiar. Then they wrote drafts about the current situation, with recommendations.

What devolved from this intense process was a proposal in which the school asked for flexibilities, a pilot-school-like approach of a relatively autonomously run school with time in the week for teachers to meet around the work of the school.