When North Lawndale College Preparatory Charter High School opened its doors for its third year in fall 2000, teachers had already been on the job for two weeks in intensive professional development workshops. As a public charter school, North Lawndale had the flexibility when it was founded to specify in its charter that teachers would be paid on an 11-month salary schedule even though students attend for only 10 months. But in 2000, the school tried a new way of organizing this time. The entire faculty of 18 teachers jointly attended a series of workshops targeted at two specific areas of improvement: team building and student assessment.
In previous years, teachers spent the extra month planning their own lessons, organizing their classrooms, and pursuing their own professional development goals. According to principal Robert Durrah, this fragmented approach was not working. "My goal was to ensure that faculty expertise in their content areas was high, and to do this we needed to work together effectively as a team, and we needed to figure out where our students were through effective assessment."
In deciding the content of this year's workshops, Durrah felt the need to respond to high faculty turnover by emphasizing team building. He explains that because the school is located in a high poverty neighborhood, "High expectations can sometimes fall by the wayside. Teachers can lose the sense of commitment they had when they first arrived. The resulting disillusionment can be debilitating, and it can spread to other staff and ultimately to students."
The hopelessness around school and life for many of these kids is a challenge for teachers, especially if they come in with high expectations that they will be able to quickly raise the bar just by teaching challenging content."
For that reason, he hired a consultant with long-standing ties to Chicago school improvement efforts, Ellie Kierson, to train the faculty in team building. Her week-long workshop assisted the faculty with effective communication skills and helped them recognize the need to make the leap from thought to action. "So often," Durrah comments, "in a situation of hopelessness, people become mired in thought and cannot move into a domain of action." To ensure that the team building work takes hold, he scheduled a follow-up retreat for all faculty led by Kierson in September. But without the intensive summer work, the faculty would not have been able to lay the groundwork for these ongoing efforts.
Durrah, a former associate with the Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago, believes that ongoing assessment is the most effective tool for designing curriculum. "Test scores," he explains, "often come in too late to help teachers decide what kids need to learn." By using fine grained assessment data, teachers can get reliable information about students' skill levels and can then design instruction to match individual needs.
Because it is nearly impossible for teachers to revamp their assessment practices in the midst of the school year, the summer provides a much-needed opportunity. With the help of Northwestern University professor Carol Lee, the faculty spent four summer days on recognizing the indicators that they currently use to determine student achievement, and on evaluating the skills needed to accomplish complex tasks. When Lee returns at intervals throughout the year, teachers will refine their ability to design assessments that target specific skills such as fluency and decoding in reading.
During the year, when Durrah evaluates teachers, he will expect to see instruction that reflects this summer's work. Next summer, he will target the two weeks after students leave as a time for teachers to analyze multiple assessments, including those required by the state. With this information and the successes and failures of the year fresh in their minds, he expects that teachers will spend these two weeks revising curricula and setting the calendar for the following year. As for the additional two weeks before school begins for students, Durrah will continue to target assessment and curriculum development. "Anything that you can do during the summer has added value," he says. "When teachers are not distracted by what they need to do in the classroom, they can enjoy being together and focus on the objectives of the workshop."
In the short time the school has been in existence, faculty commitment to student achievement has already begun to show results. Scores on the Test of Achievement and Proficiency (TAP) have increased. Nineteen percent of the students tested in 2000 were at or above national norms in reading comprehension, and 33 percent were at or above national norms in math concepts. This compares with 16 percent in reading comprehension the previous year, and 25 percent in math concepts. While Durrah is pleased that students have shown improvement, he is not satisfied that this is all they can do. "I know the students can achieve at a higher level, and I look forward to working with this faculty to get them there."
